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).
ping
The article is correct. What they didn't mention though is that if you move New Orleans, you also have to move the suburbs unless you were to move it just over the other side of Metairie and the other large suburbs, but I don't know if there's enough undeveloped land with owners willing to sell it to do it unless they moved it some 30 miles west.
The enormity of the task of moving the city and suburbs is mind-boggling.
Although, as you state, the article is right, it would be incorrect to compare the New Orleans flood with Ground Zero without at least this reservation:
After Ground Zero occurred, everyone stood together as one nation against a threat from outside. Have a look now: looting, robbery, rape, murder, neighbors turning against each other over trivialities, armed thugs shooting at rescue workers (it doesn't get much sicker, does it?), and what else is happening....
If this is the way things are going in the years to come, may God be on our side!
God did it with one storm.
Only God knows how much needless death and suffering could have been avoided if that mayor had used them.
If justice exists...
backhoe,words fail me
The controvery over Lake Nagin is just beginning and it will be a scandal for years to come. Thousands of school buses in N.O. just parked there. This is Mayor Nagin's incompetence above all.
But the left will blame Bush: "Why didn't Bush ordered those school buses to evacuate people before storm hit. Bush hates black people..." blah blah blah
You know I agree with you-- and what is horrid, "The Mare," and his cohort, the blank-minded Governor, will not only get off Scott-free ( they belong to favored minorities the Tired Old Media would never dare question closely ) they will probably stay in office.
The billions of dollars aimed at LA and NO will assure that their supporters have a keen and vested interest in keeping their partners in graft, corruption, bribes, & kickbacks in place, eager to dole out favors.
Nahh, they wouldn't need to find willing sellers-- the government will just emiment domain everything they need.
Especially if the same people are in office in New Orleans and the governor's seat.
After the water is pumped out 99% of the homes will be OK with a little work and Gov't money so why does everyone keep saying it's destroyed?
Mayor "I am not a drug addict" Nagin.
You're kidding, right?
If you're not kidding, you need to click backhoe's links and spend 100 hours reading the way many of us have.
I've done construction work all my life-- after months of being submerged in brackish ( salt ) water, everything below the waterline will be mostly ruined.
Wiring- power & signal- will have to be removed and replaced.
Anything that can corrode, will. Think pipes, valves, steel, aluminum.
Most of a city's utilities are undergound-- pumps for water and sewage, as an example. All ruined.
Once you soak a pourous material ( wood, sheetrock, fabric ) in salty water, how do you get the salt out? If you don't, it continues to attract moisture from the air itself.
In my opinion, NO is largely insalvagable.
For a non-doper, he sure knew a lot of the lingo, didn't he? The word "projection" comes to mind...
99%?! Where in the world did you get your contractors license? Did you loot it?
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