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).
Lake Nagin.... gotta ring to it... a little too short for La. though.... How about Lake Blanco Nagin???
Kill A Commie For Mommie
Seven Dead Monkeys Page O Tunes
Maybe a very high levee could be put around the French quarter and some of the hotels, but the bowl should be totally abandoned and let to return to is natural state.
Did they have the east bound lanes reversed? Did that help?
Somehow I do not think any one who was smart enough to evacuate would be Dumb enough to Evacuate on I-10 East to Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
I've been thinking about this all week. A rational person looking at the weather maps on Friday afternoon would have known that something was coming. At this poing most people should be following the weather continuously and getting ready for whatever needed to be done.
It's pretty obvious that the city's real plan was to do nothing and hope it would go away. Apparently the ACLU had threatened to sue the city if they ordered an evacuation and did not provide transportation and shelter for poor people. So the city decided not to order an evacuation.
If so... if this isn't speculation or a joke... I can't think of a more deserving group to get socked into next week.
So good.
That's BS
I have seen situations where a stream maybe 3 feet wide and a couple of feet deep that developers tried to divert become engineering disasters of unthinkable proportion. I'm just saying what nature took millions of years to design is perfect. Let it be. Manage it but don't try to take it and make it ours.
That's a pile of baloney. Here in Chicago, the coarse of the Chicago River was reversed, and has stayed that way for years. It indeed can be successfully done, and has been in a variety of places (one is in Russia). You're selling human ingenuity short.
Didn't the water come from the lake and not the Missisippi?
The levee on the west bank would be the Mississippi river.
coarse = course (it's late).
"My speciality/forte/field of expertise is underground utility construction and engineering. You can't divert the natural flow of water. Sooner or later it will come back to haunt you. I don't know how many years ago the levees in New Orleans were built on one of the largest rivers (natural flow of water) in the world, the Mississippi. The levees were put there to divert the Mississippi. She was going to claim back her territory sooner or later and Katrina allowed her the opportunity. They can build the most modern, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, or whatever they want to call it, levee system and it too, sooner or later, will fail. Cut your losses, give back to the Mississippi the land she wants, and will have, and start from that point. It's cliche' but "You can't fool Mother Nature", she will only tolerate it for so long."
This can be translated into so many of today's dilemmas and issues. Your statement is extremely wise and I wish our nation would pay attention.
Rebuild NO if you want just don't do it on my dime.
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