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).
Insurance companies are not going to unerwrite a single building in NO until a Netherlands grade dike system is built.
A preview of what will happen on the West Coast when The Big One hits. There will be one difference – as San Francisco has declared itself a “Military Free Zone” we won’t have to worry about sending in our military to help there.
Advocates for the poor were indignant. "If the government asks people to evacuate, the government has some responsibility to provide an option for those people who can't evacuate and are at the whim of Mother Nature," said Joe Cook of the New Orleans ACLU.
If I am wrong, why was the mayor consulting with lawyers 12 hours after he should have ordered the evacuation?
mayor coke-head.
Provide the Evidence.
His antics?
Which would those be?
After Ground Zero occurred, everyone stood together as one nation against a threat from outside.
No, the city will be rebuilt with higher and stronger levees.
I've seen a lot of manditory evacuations in my area, and I've never seen anyone threatened with guns.
Cities have all kinds of powers in emergencies -- curfews being one.
My main point on these threads is that this event has been predicted for decades. As for the quality of the levees, a slight jog tothe west, and even Cat 5 levees would have been in trouble.
Where I live it is only necessary to evacuate a few blocks from the beaches, and this can actually be delayed until a few hours before landfall. Shelters only need to be structurally sound, not floodproof.
NOLA has alway required much more in the way of planning. It's pretty obvious that a shelter plan at the state and regional level was needed, along with the means to get it ready within 24 hours. And yes, school busses could have been offered for a voluntary evacuation.
With resonable leadership, you don't have to force people to evacuate. You just have to give them good information.
None of this is hindsight. I've been watching previews of this disaster for years on the Discovery Channel.
…and I-10 was packed starting Saturday afternoon.
Didn't say that, did I?
Don't put words in my mouth.
Check the news reports.
I don't know about Nagin. He let the tourists who stayed at the Hyatt (his headquarters) get first dibs on the buses to evacuate from the Superdome yesterday ahead of the residents of New Orleans who had waited for days and days. Tourists are white, residents are black. His actions fit into the conspiratist mindset, especially in the case of the light-skinned Nagin. Expect Nagin to be attacked as "acting white" or some such, and he will be opposed by someone "blacker than thou" (think Marion Barry type). Of course, Nagin can claim "the b*tch set me up" ...
I bet few people would have gone on the buses. Remember, these people didn't follow the mandatory order to evacuate and I don't think they would have gone on buses anyway. Where would the buses have taken them? Nagin/Blanco would have had to do a lot of prep work (setting up shelters with cots, food, water, medical supplies, setting up a LE presence -- ha!) and both have proven themselves incapable of thinking ahead (both have proven themselves incapable of thinking. Period).
I just don't think a whole lot of people would have gone on buses to nowhere. Of course, had the local/state government prepared facilities for tens of thousands of people (among them rapists, looters, shooters and gangbangers, not to menion the sick and old and babies) and taken them there on buses we would be in exactly the same situation we are in now! Except the murder and rape victims might not have been at risk of also dying of dehydration and starvation.
After one week in water, sheet rock dissolves.
After one week in water, timber in houses is bowed and unsafe.
Those homes are all destroyed.
It might be less costly to bulldoze them all, and then landfill in the hole, and build it up to 10-12 feet above sea level before rebuilding. This is what Congress is currently discussing doing.
Or it might be better just to resettle everyone somewhere else, broken up and scattered throughout the country.
The lights in New Orleans have already been turned out.
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