Posted on 09/01/2005 2:24:21 PM PDT by Gondring
[..]America pays people to think thoughts that defy imagination, though it then often ignores their recommendations. In early 2001, experts with [FEMA] set out to rank the likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing America. According to the Houston Chronicle, they were a terrorist attack in New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a major hurricane in New Orleans.
In this case, two out of three is bad.
[..]"...A major earthquake or Category 5 hurricane in an urban area would stretch our current response and recovery capabilities to the breaking point."
The date of this conference: Sept. 10, 2001.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington the following day, [...a] national emergency plan was devised to manage recovery from catastrophic disasters. [..]
No disaster plan could mitigate what has happened in New Orleans - an entire city under water - its citizens with no homes or jobs to return to, facing months without electricity and years of rebuilding. [..]
But thinkers of the unthinkable have thought for years that New Orleans' levee system was inadequate. In 2001, the Corps of Engineers New Orleans District spent $147 million on various construction and repair projects. This year, the Corps spent $82 million in the district, 44 percent less than four years ago.
Also underfunded at $40 million a year: The $14 billion Coast 2050 project that aims to restore the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta. The marshes and swamps buffer New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. With the levees forcing Mississippi River sediment into the Gulf instead of spreading it across the marshes, the Delta is disappearing at the rate of one football field every 15 minutes.
Without its buffer, the next time a hurricane hits, rebuilt New Orleans could become Atlantis. And there will be a next time. Plan on it.
(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...
If New Orleans is rebuilt in the same place with the same reliance on levees and pumps, then it's as foolish as ignoring the warnings that they had, while continuing to rely on levees, pumps, and disaster plans.
It's like shooting oneself, and then saying "next time I'll do it closer to a hospital," instead of pointing the gun away before pulling the trigger!
Although much of the city will survive, efforts should be made to "rebuild" elsewhere, by limiting funding support for foolish efforts to redevelop in the current area.
Nothing like some good old positive thinking ............. but, it's true.
Heard someone on Dennis Prager today. Apparently you just need to raise the structures, rebuild them on sand bags or stilts.
The idea that building expensive marshlands is a substitute for a higher and stronger levee is typical enviro nonsense. Unfortunately, even the Corps of Engineers is now so infested with the enviros that funds are steered to eco-"restoration" instead of things that might actually protect human lives and property.
"they were a terrorist attack in New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a major hurricane in New Orleans."
Well, let's not go for the trifecta, OK?
My money's still on a humdinger of a quake along the New Madrid fault. G'bye, Memphis. Okay, so I was wrong this time...but mark my words.
Yeah, just leave the place flooded and we can have a modern day Venice.
"My money's still on a humdinger of a quake along the New Madrid fault"
Wasn't extensive flooding thought to have played a role, in the last big quake along the New Madrid? Seems like I've read that somewhere. Flood waters exerted pressure upon the fault?
No. The quake series was during the middle of the winter.
The last major quake felt along the New Madrid, was in the 1800s. Someone told me once it actually reversed the course of the Big Muddy..
So they trained for this, and it's still turning out like it is? Our tax dollars at work...
Can you possibly be that dense?
Math is your friend, put it to some use. In the last 4 years, 160 million $ out of $14 billion comes out to barely a reduction of 1%. Anyone who thinks that 1% is the difference between the destruction of New Orleans and a safe dry city is nuts.
Small wonder the NEA wants to keep us all stupid.
Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee wasn't there prior to the quake.
Oh, yeah. lol.
"So far, so good," said the man as he passed the 40th floor on the way down.
Nature will continue to make the fight more and more difficult as time goes on. When we look at the loss of life here, consider how floods on the Yellow River kill a half-million or more people at a time! The Yellow River is 20+ feet above the surrounding countryside in places...do you want THAT above New Orleans? http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wolf1016/yellow_river_flooding.htm
Consider this... a single Yellow River flood in 1938 (to try to stop the Japanese invasion) killed as many people as would be lost if we had 9/11 happen EVERY DAY for SEVEN YEARS!
Or how about this... if we assume about 3 deaths per day, about 5500 years of the Iraq War death rate!!!
I couldn't agree more with Not rebuilding New Orleans in it's existing location. For anyone to respond with simply saying that the levy system need to be fixed and or made higher, I say that you could rebuild that entire levy system several feet higher, but it's still at the mercy of mother nature. There's no garuntee that during any other hurricane that large debris being pushed into the levy walls won't breach it again.
Now lets factor in the enviros claim of global warming and sea levels rising. Actually the real fact of what is causing global warming is not greenhouse gas emissions, it is the fact that the sun itself is getting hotter, melting icecaps, that are making sea levels rise. Hurricanes will also continue to increase in frequency and intensity as this is natures way of maintaining temperature balance across the globe.
Why rebuild an already vulnerable city that is sure to be even more and more vulnerable by not only more frequent deadly storms but also gradually becoming even farther below sea level?
It's the USACOE that has been the problem all along, and we've seen that their approach doesn't work. Look at the shoreline work all up the East Coast...50 years of beach replenishment projects without a single one lasting even HALF the promised lifetime. It's the laws of physics...until you have the antigravity machine developed, you're arguing against reality.
Not only that, but it rang churchbells in Boston and woke up Thomas Jefferson. There's a chapter on this in a book called "Big Muddy," that came out 10-15 years ago. It was a hellish situation. Fortunately, there were not a lot of people in the area at the time. About 10 years ago, a scientist predicted that a quake would occur on the Monday after Thanksgiving. I was visting the St. Louis area at the time, and a lot of the folks around there expected it to happen. Some kept their kids home from school.
That earthquake created Reelfoot Lake.
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