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).
When it was suggested to Mayor Nagin that he use the school buses to evacuate to Houston the people stuck in the SuperDome, he said, "Absolutely not! They don't have bathrooms! You have to send Greyhounds."
An 18 year old kid managed to get a school bus of refugees to Houston, but the Mayor couldn't figure out how to.
Close the highway to all incoming traffic and put the buses in the incoming lanes.
Mark my words. Fourteen months from now the Democrats are going to demand that a way be found for all those people who have been scattered to the wind be allowed to vote in Louisiana elections regardless of their current location.
Exactly.
To compare this to the 9/11 attacks is ludicrous.
However, if Giuliani had been in charge of New Orleans, he'd have carried everyone out on his back if need be before the hurricane hit. Or at least thrown a bucket on the school buses and said "Hit the road!"
And he probably wouldn't have had so many welfare dependents and criminals in any city he ran.
All Lanes were outbound at 4:00 on Saturday.
The enormity of the task of moving the city and suburbs is mind-boggling.
In the first place, individuals have a responsibility to look after themselves. In the second, this kid, pictured above, doesn't look like he's up to much of anything except drawing attention to himself.
If that means they can't vote in Texas, that idea is aces with me.
Bush was pleading with Blanco on Friday to evacuate.
All those democrat votes would get swallowed up in Texas but New Orleans is the Democrat stronghold in Louisiana. The two Democrat congressmen in Louisiana are from the 2nd and 3rd Districts, greater New Orleans. It's safe to say that Louisiana has a Democrat governor and a Democrat senator because of New Orleans. If New Orleans is still unihabitable next year what happens to those congressmen? You think that the Democrats are going to give those seats up without a fight?
You think I don't know that cornered rats steadily losing power don't fight?
They've joined with the forces of darkness in order to cling to their remaining power and to try to claw their way back to the cozy old days of unchecked graft and Swiss bank accounts.
Every day it seems that another Democrat is caught with his hand in the public till.
In the old days it would have been ignored; now they're going to the slammer.
CFO of Ben and Jerry's was appropriating the charity money for his own toys and mansion.
Husband of congresswoman kiting checks and not paying in the payroll tax.
Soros is robbing Peter to pay Paul at Southwest. Soon as they have their golden parachutes ready, they'll park the birds and go 7, never stopping at 11.
Not to forget Air America robbing the afterschool children's fund to pay the bloated salaries of "The Talent" and repay the investment of the dedicated liberals who gave them the seed money.
Just think how many of these hurricanes could have been prevented if we only had enough foresight to reduce our CO2 emissions.
1. Galveston, Texas 1900
2. Florida 1928
3. Florida and Texas 1919
4. New England 1938
5. Florida Keys 1935
6. Hurricane Audrey 1957
7. Northeastern U.S. 1944
8. Louisiana 1909
9. Louisiana 1915
10. Galveston, Texas 1915
From what I saw on TV, the east bound lanes were NOT reversed.
I couldn't believe my eyes.
3 lanes of bumper to bumper cars getting out of town, and 6 empty lanes headed towards NO
How many days can the trees and shrubs stand to have their roots covered by water before the die?
My guess is that they won't be able to pump the water out before most of the plants die, but I'm not sure.
While watching this catastrophe happen while on vacation with my wife out west, my better half came up with a solution. Rebuild NO but first pile millions of tons of rock and dirt on top of the place. Apparently they're going to have to raze everything anyway. Out in the mountains it is obvious that there are billions of tons of rock that can be used to cover old NO. That rock can be covered with the needed amount of dirt and whatever for underground pipes and communication wires. The level of all this would obviously have to be higher than the surrounding water level. That is the ONLY solution I like for rebuilding NO. Simply strengthening the levees will not do. Of course I'm no engineer and someone of this forum will point out that my wife's and my idea is impossible. But it sounds better than rebuilding in the same spot and still below sea level.
However, the State did save thousands of lives by establishing Counterflow lanes on I-10 and 12.
NO isn't the only city with this problem. In my town, we have a natural flood plain for the river. For years the Army Corps of Engineers maintained it as a wetland and didn't allow any development. Well, about 10 years ago something happened and now you'll find houses, stores, businesses on that flood plain.
I was working at a business on the periphery of the flood plain and was talking to a co-worker that had just moved into town and was looking for a place to live. I told him that this was a bad place to locate because of the "100 year floods" that seemed to happen every 10 years. Long story short, he bought a house next to the flood plain and it flooded that year. The water came right up to his doorstep and he had to boat home for about a week. The city's answer to flooding? Build more homes, stores and businesses.
There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of cities built partially or wholly on unsustainable land. Cities along the Mississippi, in hurricane alleys, along earthquake faults. In the past disaster was not so bad because you'd take out a few farms or cow towns, but now that farmland is being replaced with suburbia, the disasters are increased orders of magnitude.
Nagin is the antithesis of Giuliani.
The absentee ballot covers the evacuees.Proving the right to vote will be the battle for the Dems.
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