Posted on 09/09/2005 6:34:57 PM PDT by ex-Texan
What lies ahead for an irreplaceable city?
THE question is awful, but will not go away. How much damage can a big American city suffer without going the way of Babylon? Or, for that matter, of Galveston, a boom town that never recovered from a hurricane in 1900?
The deputy police chief says that New Orleans has “completely been destroyed”. He exaggerates, but not greatly: around 140,000-160,000 houses have been submerged or ruined. The 10,000 or so people who, at mid-week, were still clinging on in their homes were ordered to leave, not least for their health; three people in the region had already died from drinking water seething with viruses and bacteria. If force did not work, money might: at the shelters in Texas and elsewhere, FEMA agents were handing out $2,000 debit cards.
If the city is abandoned, how quickly can it recover? It all depends on how quickly the city's drainage system takes water out, how efficiently the 60m-90m tons of raw sewage are cleaned up, and how soon the power comes back on. And on other, longer-term, calculations.
New Orleans was already losing people before Katrina; its population peaked, at almost 630,000, in 1960. At the last census count, in 2000, 485,000 people lived there. Officials now fear that as many as 250,000 will leave for good, and that dull-but-prosperous Baton Rouge will soon become Louisiana's economic centre.
New Orleanians have long disdained their state's capital. But it stands on the first high ground along the Mississippi, and its population of about 230,000 has supposedly doubled in past days. Evacuees are already buying houses in its suburbs.
New Orleans officials are busy discussing how they might lure people back. They intend to set up centres in every area where the refugees have gone, telling them how the clean-up is progressing. They might pay the poor to go back, and offer incentives to the rich. Urgently, they are hunting round for “creative legislation and ideas”.
Until last week, New Orleans's usually sluggish economy was showing signs of life. Developers were turning decrepit commercial buildings into yuppie condominiums, film-makers were flocking in to profit from generous tax credits, and the city's two medical schools were hopeful of attracting researchers. They still might. Though Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House of Representatives, has said spending federal money to restore New Orleans “doesn't make sense to me”, there could yet be a massive effort to strengthen the city's levees, to restore the coastal marshes that once protected it and to rebuild.
But tourism had been New Orleans's main growth industry. And while the French Quarter is largely intact, the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Centre, two key hubs for that industry, have become notorious the world over as monuments to misery.
Worse, the hurricane could well exacerbate the tensions that lurk in the city. Most of the richer white neighbourhoods neighbourhoods lie on natural levees created over centuries. On lower ground are the poorest districts, whose residents are overwhelmingly black and, now, deeply resentful. Some rattled New Orleanians may never again feel safe after watching their city fall into anarchy.
Long before Katrina struck, the New Orleans Police Department was already having trouble keeping crime under control. Then around one-third of its officers disappeared from the force (perhaps quitting, perhaps drowned) in the days after the hurricane. Those that remain are to be sent on morale-raising trips to places that speak volumes about the city's woes. Some officers will get free tickets to Las Vegas, which in recent years has come to dominate the convention business that New Orleans craves. Others will go to Atlanta, the corporate hub that so many ex-New Orleanians now call home.
Who? Name one. This figure is as made up as Nancy Pelosi's face. There ain't a snowball's chance in Yuma that that many people will leave New Orleans. When all is said and done, the figure will be less than a tenth of that.
This is overheated claptrap.
Cafe du Monde was too crowded for my taste. But there was another little bakery just off the Square that was a wonderful place for breakfast or a light lunch. And there was a bar called "Patout's" in the Quarter that had a freaked-out Zydeco band that made the banjo-picker from Deliverance look like Glen Campbell.
There are 10's of thousands in Houston who have said they will never go back!
Take that to the bank!
There are already numerous examples of smaller cities further up the Mississippi that had to be relocated ~ Valmeyer, Illinois comes to mind, and then there's Times Beach ~ it disappeared due to toxic pollution.
What's so special about the residential areas of New Orleans that they should command an effort other, smaller towns never saw.
When some of these folks find out how nice things are in the places they have been evacuated to, they will stay. Why go back to the misery.
Well a big question is how much of the housing stock remains? I expect all that got any water in the living quarters will be bulldozed. Maybe the high rises will remain but they will take major renovations. How will this be paid for? How many of these people have flood insurance? Will they ever get insurance to get a construction loan/mortgage? What will the new building codes be? Building codes changed big-time in Florida after Andrew. I find it hard to believe that even in Louisiana the insurance industry and the bankers will take a chance.
One other thing about this story is a bit wacky. Restoring the wet lands would not have saved the 17th street canal. It was breached by high water in the Lake which is not a lake actually but a bay of the Gulf of Mexico. If they had filled in the Lake the City would not have been flooded.
People also talk about the land in the City “subsiding”. The only remediation for that is flooding.
I've been saying for over five hundred years that New Orleans is the legendary Alantis of the future.
You can bet on that - with Federal money. They will also pay them not to work, to reproduce, and to vote Democrat. ;)
Me neither ... Others come to mind ... Las Vegas, San Francisco, ...
That's easy:
ALL of the Westbank, is OK;
ALL of the "old" neighborhoods are high and dry - the original settlers built on DRY ground...
There're lots of houses still there, and lots of places to build new ones.
New Orleans' problem is political corruption, not bad weather.
Me too. Just like NYC *(pre-9-11). Great place to visit. But no way I'd want to live there.
There is no deep loyalty to New Orleans that will convince all of the low-classed population rebuild their nothing lives there.
I expect a huge number of them will find they are actually doing better elsewhere.
Why the hell is there a canal through a city built below sea level and inside the levees that protect it?
Boston, New York....
Are you suggesting that the flooded areas will be bulldozed and left that way? I've been very interested to know if people in those areas had flood insurance and if there were new codes similar to Dade County. That would dramatically change the look of the rebuilt areas.
I did some research on the basic topograph. It is not how the MSM describes it. In fact for several stories the FNC guy Trace kept saying, "the ENTIRE City is between 12 and 20 feet below sea level" That was dopey. I had been to NO several times for conventions. I walked to the River and in the French Quarter. Until the storm I never understood the lay of the land. As the water came in and stopped before it got to the French Quarter I just had to figure out why. Also it never made sense that the orginal settlers could or would build below sea level which I came to find out they did not. I wrote up a few hundred words to describe it. I think its too long for this forum.
But I'm just having a lot of trouble believing that an American city can vanish overnight. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will move in to take the place of the dispossessed.
Funny - you don't look a day over 450!
I've told you a million times to never exagerate,
All of the city is not below sea level. That is an MSM myth. Some of the canals are for drainage. Some bring barges to industrial areas. I suppose some of the other canals serve other purposes.
The whole thing is very interesting and somewhat complex. The basic problem is that the low lying areas are reclaimed wetlands or in some cases where the lake used to be. Actually Ponch is not a lake but a bay off the Gulf of Mexico. That is part of the problem.
People talk about the Dutch but that is a system of layers of canals and farmland that can flood (defense in depth). NO has no place for the water to go except back to the lake. If the lake is higher than the levees you get what we got. I think the odd thing is that it took until this time for it to flood. A single layer of dykes holding back that bay (AKA Lake Ponch) seems like a heck of risky proposition.
Where I live now was once a mangrove swamp - land below sea level. Back in the sixties the place was dredged and filled. Everybody lives on a canal that opens out to the Harbor. Go to google maps an look at Punta Gorda. It is an better way from an engineering prespective to develop on land below sea level. We got terrible wind damage from Charley but very little flooding.
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