[george wythe]

A poster on another thread wrote about Galveston suffering a similar tragedy with a hurricane in 1900. The city of Galveston brought in dirt and raised the city ground level to 15 feet about the sea level.

Perhaps New Orleans can consider filling out the bowl where it is located and rebuilding at a higher elevation.

[kinghorse]

I'm pretty sure the storm that just passed would have overflowed the Galveston seawall. It wouldn't breach it (Granite is good stuff) but it would have gone over the top and flooded the city.

Floods are a pain but nothing compared to a wall of wind driven water and debris stacked like a giant moving dike. That's what did it Galveston the first time.

[johnb838]

The poster above is right though -- Galveston was THE PORT west of NO before the storm of 1900, after that the Houston Ship Channel was dredged (I bet some of the mud was used to raise the island) and Galveston never regained its former prominence. It's a party island now... that's more or less all, and as every one knows, the beach ain't that nice, but they've done as well as they could with it. Very poor population, not altogether dissimilar to what we see in NO.

[yooper]

"Perhaps New Orleans can consider filling out the bowl where it is located and rebuilding at a higher elevation."

So we're talking about the mother of all landfills?

There's good money in landfills.....

Also, it was at about the same stage in the game during the tsunami that every lib crackpot, UN official, and general communist were screaming for US dollars for the relief of Indonesia. Where are those voices now? Are US flood victims less worthy of support from the international community?