Posted on 09/02/2005 11:42:20 PM PDT by smoothsailing
New Orleans is now a ghost city
September 03, 2005
IT has become America's new Ground Zero – surrounded by rotting corpses and with their own lives in ruins, thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina yesterday pleaded to be evacuated, or even just fed.
The historic jazz city, which has been pillaged by armed looters, now more resembles Haiti or another Third World trouble spot than one of America's most popular holiday centres.
Disaster declarations cover 234,000sq km along the US Gulf Coast, an area roughly the size of the state of Victoria.
As many as 400,000 people had been forced to leave their homes.
Violence broke out in pockets of New Orleans among wandering crowds desperate to escape the flooded city amid nightmarish 32-degree temperatures.
As authorities appealed for calm, environmental experts said yesterday the city had been a disaster waiting to happen.
"We have always used New Orleans as the perfect example of the unsustainable city. It is a hopeless case," Klaus Jacob, senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at New York's Columbia University, said.
"The city started in the French Quarter, on high ground, which is the logical place to be when you build a village.
"What happened is that, as settlement progressed, people didn't want to be periodically flooded. So a complicated system of levees was erected, with pumps and so on, and this allowed the city to develop.
"At the same time, the delta subsided as a result of natural action and the city got lower as the water around it built up."
The US Geological Survey warned in vain about preserving the delta wetlands, describing them as a "natural buffer."
Warming water expands, thus boosting sea levels, and also increases the source of energy that feeds hurricanes, making them potentially more vicious.
Hurricane scientists, experts and officials are now raising the question of whether the city should be rebuilt at all.
President George W. Bush has promised to help the city "get back on its feet", and the US Senate, meeting in an extraordinary late night session, voted unanimously yesterday to authorise $13.8 billion in special funding for Hurricane Katrina victims.
But in the long term, others say the idea of rebuilding a below-sea-level city next to a large lake in a hurricane-prone area makes little sense, especially with the prospect of taxpayers having to foot repeated bills for aid and reconstruction.
"Can the country afford to rebuild in this high-risk area, where there is no means of mitigating the losses?" Eric Tolbert, a former disaster response chief with the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, said.
"We could finish rebuilding, put the levee back where it was and five years from now we could be facing the identical scenario."
Federal officials have relocated disaster-prone towns before, but never on the scale of New Orleans, one of the country's oldest urban areas, home to a half-million people, a major transportation hub and a tourist mecca. After a killer 1993 flood on the Mississippi River devastated the Illinois town of Valmeyer, 35 miles south of St. Louis, the town was moved 3km to land that was 130m higher and out of the flood plain.
Valmeyer had a population of 900 people, nearly all of whom agreed to the move. The town has thrived in its new location.
Relocating a city the size of New Orleans has never been attempted and would be not only expensive – estimated at well over $50 billion – but would also have a high political cost.
The Daily Telegraph
This report was published at dailytelegraph.news.com.au
Copyright 2004 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT+10).
Which raises other interesting questions. What constitutes legal residency? How will the evacuees be able to claim New Orleans addresses when those addresses don't exist anymore? This should be an interesting election in 2006, no doubt about it.
Big Sleazy is now a Superfund Site/Toxic Waste Dump.
How far did the counterflow lanes extend?
Well, They could just re-build the whole city on stilts, then just let it flood. They'd never have to pave a road again. No yards with old appliances in them, Just a dock and a mud boat.
If you don't mind living in a rotting, moldy house.
I hope you are being sarcastic and really don't believe what you said.
That's not what I was talking about. Were the east bound lanes converted into west bound lanes, and if so, how far did that go?
Flooding is far more damaging than fires, twisters, and bombing. Once all the water is pumped out, the foundations of the buildings are still weak and are prone to collapse.
They might have stopped at a rest area on the way, for all we know. There is more than one way to send a cat to the litter box.
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