I suppose the easiest way to handle this is to get all national guard, cops, etc. and get everyone, EVERYONE, out of that city.
There's a way, somehow, some way. Get everyone out and start from scratch.
What still confuses me is all the dire predictions about NO, then I heard they dodged the bullet, yet what I see this morning looks EXACTLY like the dire predictions.
Wishful thinking?
It just didn't happen as they expected. The lake did not overwash the levees...the levees failed after the storm.
I was thinking the same thing. Get every living soul out of that city, find housing for for them in neighborhoods in other cities and towns across the US, and let them live with friends and family in relatively safe conditions until NO is cleaned up. Then let them decide whether they want to move back.
Perhaps they will decide to rebuild their lives in safer areas...
Looks like the dire predictions were right on...it's just that the levee breaches occurred 12-18 hours after the peak of the storm, instead of during the storm.
Folks tend to focus on the immediate threat which, Sunday night, was the eye of a Cat 5 storm. Once that missed NO, a lot of folks breathed a big sigh of relief -- and that is why they thought they'd dodged the bullet.
But the folks on the ground in NO, and many folks on the live threads (Dog, dirtboy, and several others) were very clear on the fact that today would be the bad part, and they were right.
I'm so tired of hearing that people dodged a bullet down there. Tell that to the people that lost everything, including family members. Maybe they dodged a bullet to the heart, but it definitely lodged in a major organ.
When it hit category 5 with its immense size, everyone was predicting the worse case scenario for this beast. Its projected path was also the worse case scenario for New Orleans. As the northern part of the storm got significantly over land with its eye still off shore, it slowed a little as energy was transferred to land. In a basic sense when over warm water energy transfers from the water to the Hurricane. When over land the opposite typically occurs. Many people apparently mistook the slowdown due to first contact with land as a general sign that the storm weakened. Then its path wobbled slightly to the east of New Orleans. Unfortunately that slight wobble did not make much of a difference to New Orleans because the storm was so large. Greater New Orleans was caught between the strongest Cat 4 Hurricane to hit the US and the Mississippi Delta.
I think people were assuming that if the doomsday scenario happened, we'd see a half-mile of levees crashing down in the midst of 150-mph winds, and Lake Pontchartrain slamming into the Superdome like some CGI special effect out of "The Day After Tomorrow." But floods are slow-motion disasters, and they develop over days, not hours (even weeks, in the case of the massive upper Mississippi flooding several years back).
I'll admit it, I thought New Orleans hadn't quite dodged a bullet, but at least not gotten hit by the entire full-auto burst, yesterday. I thought they'd gotten off easily compared to what might have been, and the worst was pretty much over. I was wrong.
}:-)4