[spectre]

I was reading up on potential a New Orleans disaster Hurricane results..just a snippet:

Maestri says imagine what happens if a huge storm hits just to the east of the city.

"The hurricane is spinning counter-clockwise, it's now got a wall of water in front of it some 30 to 40 feet high, as it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees," describes Maestri.

"The water comes over the top - and first the communities on the west side of the Mississippi river go under. Now Lake Ponchetrain— which is on the eastern side of the community—now that water from Lake Ponchetrain is now pushed on the population that is fleeing from the western side, and everybody's caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills and we've got the entire community under water, some 20 to 30 feet under water."

Remember all those levees that the U.S. Army built around New Orleans, to hold smaller floods out of the bowl? Maestri says now those levees would doom the city, because they'll trap the water in.

"It's going to look like a massive shipwreck," says Maestri. "Everything that the water has carried in is going to be there. It's going to have to be cleaned out— alligators, moccasins and god knows what that lives in the surrounding swamps, has now been flushed -literally—into the metropolitan area. And they can't get out, because they're inside the bowl now.

No water to drink, no water to use for sanitation purposes. All of the sanitation plants are under water and of course, the material is floating free in the community.

The petrochemicals that are produced up and down the Mississippi river—much of that has floated into this bowl... The biggest toxic waste dump in the world now is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened."

(It's worse than I could have ever imagined)..sw

[janetjanet998]

lets say mid cat 4 at landfall which would you rather have...
A. if it hits just east of the city they will be in the weaker side so lets say 120 winds..but get the massive surge flooding
B. if it goes just west the areas south(or the west bank) of the MS river will get the surge/ tidal flooding...and the city will be in the east part of the eye with CAT 4 winds
and in both cases you have flooding from rain

[Crawdad]

That's exactly what happened to my home town of Elba, AL back in 1990. Flooding from heavy rains broke the levee, which surrounds the entire town, on the north side of town and the place filled up like a bowl of cereal.

[Dog Gone]

I've messed with a bunch of computer simulations for New Orleans based on storm angles and intensity. Horrifying is too mild a word, but I don't have another one handy.

Here's what NOAA thinks will be the situation at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans after a Category 4 storm.

You can watch the Quicktime movie of it here

Some of the models suggest far worse than that.