Posted on 08/31/2005 12:49:47 PM PDT by Brilliant
Put a sock in it. First of all, New Orleans was not the only city or place affected by one of the most powerful hurricanes in history. The entire Gulf Coast was affected including Mobile, Gulfport, Biloxi, etc. The storm wreaked destruction way inland. 80 percent of Mississippi is without power.
New Orleans is a great American city, and has been for over 200 years. It will survive this diaster and be rebuilt bigger and better. The levee system will be upgraded, pumping stations improved, land rezoned, building codes revised, etc.
The fact that NO is below sea level is not really the issue. So is most of the Netherlands. We have the technology and engineering to make NO safer and more secure from hurricanes, but it will never be risk free. San Francisco is built on the San Andreas fault, there are countless coastal cities in Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, etc. that are vulnerable to hurricanes, there are cities up and down the Mississippi that are affected by periodic flooding (remember the Great Midwestern flood of 1993), and major parts of the US have frequent tornados.
San Francisco, Charleston, Miami, Mobile, Galveston, the Quad cities, etc. are not going to be relocated. Nor will New Orleans. Its location makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of commerce and trade.
From 1803 until 1861, New Orleans' population increased from 8,000 to nearly 170,000. The 1810 census revealed a population of 10,000 making New Orleans the United States' fifth largest city, after New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore and the largest city west of the Appalachians. From 1810 until 1840, New Orleans grew at a faster rate than any other large American city. By 1830, New Orleans was America's third largest city, behind New York and Baltimore; and in 1860, it was still the nation's fifth largest city.
Pierce Lewis, perhaps its most knowledgeable scholar, describes New Orleans as the "inevitable city on an impossible site." It is a tribute to the ingenuity and greatness of Americans that a great city could be built and then flourish.
bttt
Keep a canoe handy. I think floating dead bodies, thousands of evacuees, months of displacement, and billions in repair is definitely a monument to something, but I don't think it's ingenuity. But hey that's me. When the big one cracks San Fran into a million pieces, folks will be walking around shocked about that too, I guess.
The city wasn't below sea level when it was built. It subsided afterwards. Channelization of the river kept it from being annually flooded and thus kept it from the supply of silt that would have maintained it's height. And the wells sunk by the inhabitants for water drew down the aquifer underneath it, causing the silt bed it was built on to contract.
That's interesting. It's wild seeing the articles from 2001 basically telling everyone exactly the disaster that would happen. I personally wouldn't live in an area like that. Sure, everywhere has risk, but some risks are just dumb.
okie01 was just explaining that. I remember seeing a show about all the lengths they've gone to to force the river on the path they want it to take or something. Best laid plans...
Still, these folks don't get it.
The last I heard, N.O. received 7 - 9 inches of rain from the storm. No picnic, but not tragic, either.
All that water did NOT come from the rain.
It came from the STORM SURGE.
A Hurricane pushes a vast amount of water ahead of it.
Mercifully drowning men, women, and children. What a pal.
Coming from the LA times, the paper for a city on a fault line, and in a desert.
In addition the man made levees have the effect of channeling silt into the gulf instead of across the natural flood plain. All contributing to the loss of wet lands, further losing protection for the city
It's called a natural disaster. Even Man cannot control Mother Nature. History is replete with natural disasters, which make even Katrina look small.
For example, just 29 years ago, the planet's deadliest earthquake of the 20th century, by far, was a magnitude 8.0 that struck Tianjin , China, on July 27, 1976. The official casualty figure issued by the Chinese government was 255,000, but unofficial estimates of the death toll were as high as 655,000.
China and Bangladesh have been devastated repeatedly by floods - Bangladesh lost 300,000 people in November 1970 and more than 130,000 in April 1991, from cyclone-induced flooding, and the massive flooding of the Yangtze River in China in 1931 caused more than 3 million deaths from flooding and starvation. On average, floods cause more deaths each year than any other natural disaster.
The deadliest volcanic eruption of the 20th century was at Mont Pelée in Martinique, Lesser Antilles, in 1902. The coastal town of St. Pierre, about 4 miles downslope to the south, was demolished, and nearly 30,000 inhabitants were killed by an incandescent, high-velocity ash flow and associated hot gases and volcanic dust. And a small eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in Colombia on November 13, 1985, melted about 10 percent of the volcano's ice cover, leading to a massive mudflow that inundated the city of Armero and killed more than 23,000 people.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, was an undersea earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC (07:58:53 local time) on December 26, 2004. The earthquake generated a tsunami that killed more than 150,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.
So what am I to conclude from that observation? NO deserved what it got? It's a good thing that the city was battered and flooded?
yeah, Bangladesh and their friggin monsoon season. Happens all the time, and yet I'm supposed to feel bad. Like I say, there's risk everywhere, but then there's stupid risk. The 2001 articles predicting exactly what just happened prove this was expected. Sitting ducks. Sure, disaster can strike anywhere, but getting caught in an earthquake in San Fran shouldn't be a surprise. Nor should this.
Sorta like the merciful rapist who decides not to murder the victim. There's nothing merciful in destroying people's lives. It's cruel and brutal.
LOL.
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