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9 Weeks to Pump Out New Orleans?
Cr0w T. Trollbot asks: "It looks like New Orleans is going through something very close to the worst case scenario right now. This somewhat prescient study, written well before the hurricane, describes some of the challenges (engineering and otherwise) facing New Orleans. 'In this hypothetical storm scenario, it is estimated that it would take nine weeks to pump the water out of the city, and only then could assessments begin to determine what buildings were habitable or salvageable. Sewer, water, and the extensive forced drainage pumping systems would be damaged. National authorities would be scrambling to build tent cities to house the hundreds of thousands of refugees unable to return to their homes and without other relocation options.' The hypothetical is looking awful close to reality right now. What can be done about draining and rebuilding New Orleans in light of the massive flooding, and what can be done to prevent and/or lessen such disasters in the future?"
Only way to really prevent something like this is to not build densely in high-risk areas in the first place.
Of course, the very features that makes for high risk - river deltas, earthquake areas, active volcanism - tend to produce really desireable areas to live in.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
At the very least, stop taxing everyone else to subsidize flood insurance for people who insist on building in flood-prone areas.
If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves.
Of course, we'd probably have to transition such a system into place by instead of banning existing structures from getting the current subsidized insurance, simply telling everyone who got flooded out that if they insist on rebuilding in their flood-susceptible location, they're going to have to do it without flood insurance. Otherwise, they can turn their property over for parkland and take it's pre-flood value to go rebuild somewhere else.
I know that a lot of not as wealthy people also live in flood-prone areas, but can't the taxpayers stop paying for rebuilding millionaires beach and river-front property over and over again in the same locations?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Blaming it on Bush is a joke. The levees haven't been properly funded for decades.
Maybe they should seriously consider moving the whole city to someplace more stable (not below sea-level and not sinking).
Yeah, that'll be very expensive, but if they don't do seriously consider the moving option now, they'll probably have to consider it some time in the next 50 years anyway. Given the location and parameters (below sea-level and below Mississippi level much of the time) it's amazing that NL has lasted this long. Perhaps we should consider NL to be the first victim of Global Warming (which produces stronger hurricanes and higher ocean levels).
Gee no practical value. I guess the whole port thing is useless now that we no longer use ships. Oh and the oil and gas terminal is also useless now that we have Zero Point Modules at every WalMat
There are some real practical reasons for New Orleans to exist.
There are some things that can be done to reduce the impact of hurricanes like this. The biggest one is to restore the delta and the wet lands. The messing with the Mississippi caused a lot of this damage.
Building codes can also make a big difference. My home got hit by TWO hurricanes last year. I had no damage. Lots of older homes near me get a lot of damage.
BTW if we are going to condemn cities that are could be damaged by natural disasters lets start the list with most of California and let's face it New York is just a giant target for terrorists. How many Billions did 9/11 cost the US? Oh and Seattle is next to a chain of volcanoes.
Cities tend to be where they are for a reason. Lots of cities tend to be on rivers and the Ocean because water transportation is so useful. New Orleans would have done just fine with a CAT 2 or CAT 3 Getting hit by a CAT 4+ is a very rare event for anyone location.
Saying that these people should "just" move on is uncaring, mean, and stupid
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Scientists will tell you that the leevees caused the problem in the first place. The Mississippi is supposed to flood naturally which builds up the marshes that protect the city from the ocean. Settlers have been building leevees to stop the flooding for hundreds of years, this is just what happens when you do that. It's the cost of doing business when you mess with nature.
I do agree that most people who flock toward the coastal areas now do so for reasons other than that they make their living from the sea, but expecting people to suddenly see the light and move to Oklahoma is not realistic (besides tornados suck too).
cheers, ben
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
Congress cut the fiscal year 2006 budget to the US Army Corps of Engineers in the New Orleans district by $71 Million, the largest single year cut ever.
Ironically, a study to determine the effects of a Cat 5 hurricane was also shelved.
Moreover, the New Orleans district imposed a hiring freeze back in June, the first time in 10 years.
Congress may be partially to blame for the failed pumps and the long clean-up time.
Think about the fact that a major U.S. city that many people love is slowly being destroyed almost completely. Think about how when all is said and done probably thousands of people will be dead from this. Think about how a husband feels knowing his wife is dead, or a wife feels seeing her husband die, or a parent who sees a child sicken and die.
Think I'm being overly dramatic? Think again. This is going to wind up being the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, and what I'm seeing on /. are jokes? I know the usual flippant response is 'hey dude, this is a valid response to tragedy.' Yeah, I understand that, but man, people are actively dying right now. How about just a tad more respect at this very moment, and then make your jokes? Why not wait to see the full impact of this disaster before you reflexively respond with sarcasm and wit? Please.
These storms are part of a natural Hurricane cycle. These cycles have been seen going back centuries. Not really a case of Karma. If so wouldn't it have been more far for a massive hurricane to have hit California and New York where lots if this oil and gas is burned?
These poor people need help just a bunch of morons judging them and making stupid comments.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Louisiana has 65% of their national guard troops at home. Only half of those will be activated for the relief effort (~3,500). The fact is, we're set up to handle two simulataneous wars at the same time and a natural disaster. No states national guard troop level is below 60% even witht he war in Iraq (and it's not just Iraq, troops are in 40 countries).
But bitch away anyhow, it's surely helping the situation.
(and Alabama has 70% available, Mississippi has 65% available. Far more than will ever be called upon).
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Get real. There is a differnece between donating your money to those in need and having your money taken from you. If I stick a gun in your face, take your wallet, but give 25% of it to a charity, I'm I not guilty of theft? That's the point the of the original post. I have no problem giving to charitys that will help the people of New Orleans get back on their feet. What I, and many others, have a problem with is that money is taken from us without our permission by the goverment and given to these people when their is a 100% chance that a similar event will happen in the future because of the location these people choose to live in and do business in. Theft is theft, no matter how good you believe the cause to be. Let those who wish to give, give. Let those who do not, keep their money. Nobody is entitled to anyone elses hard earned property or earnings under any circumstances, period.
I realize that's hard for you to wrap your liberal head around but I don't work 8 hours a day , 5 days a week so other people can decide how to spend my hard earned dollars. I work so that I can.
Besides,
since when is Venezuela a communist country?
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Some reports are saying that the govenor wants the entire city evac'ed. I am *guessing* that they may have to let the bowl fill up before they can get decent repairs on the levee. The only event I can even imagine of this scale is for the San Andreas to let loose right under LA (and I reallly hope that does not happpen in my lifetime). This is way beyond a catastrophe. This is functionally (if not literally) the destruction of a major US city. Other than the act of god bit, it would take a nuke to equal what just happened. How would you like to flee your home, then get told that it may be months before you are allowed back, and then to see what all that water did to the carpets, drywall, etc.
Folks, it doesn't get much worse than this.. except for death... and some folks bought that ticket.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
Chavez is mainly pissed off by the way the US condoned the coup attempt in 2002. His policies inside Venezuela may be socialist but why don't you wait and see if they actually help people first before screaming communist all over the place?
Venezuela has a huge amount of poverty and he is actively doing something with state money to change that. If it works, good for him. If it doesn't then you can unfurl your anti-communist slogans and cry for war or something.
Ever seen one with 165 MPH sustained winds, gusts over 200 MPH, and a 20-ft storm surge? New Orleans has sustained many storms of the intensity of a North Sea gale. This storm was very different.
The difference is that this disaster has been widely expected. When I lived in Louisiana everyone talked about this in matter of fact terms. In fact most expected things to be far worse. Just be grateful it wasn't a cat 4 or cat 5 storm that hit a bit further west. I remember talking to the guy in charge of disaster planning for the state back in the 1980's. I asked what happens if a hurricane goes over Lake Pontchartrain. He said almost everyone dies because there is no way out of the city and no time to evacuate a few million people.
This was in the 1980's.
Everyone has known this would happen eventually but pretended it wouldn't.
I understand that for the people there this is of no comfort and we have to turn our hearts to them. I agree we should. But it was like 9/11 when many people had been trying to warn the public for years and everyone turned a deaf ear. Typically these sorts of things are well known about in advance years earlier. What's tragic isn't just the people killed and displaced. What's tragic is that this could have been prevented by not building up an area in which we knew this would happen.
We should be grateful that most of the predictions didn't happen. Because it easily could have been much, much worse.
my girlfriend and i used all our savings to get here to where the cost of living was cheaper. we are from los angeles, my girlfriend has a four year degree in telivision and film which has been outsourced and people are doing it on a volunteer basis while working at mcdonalds. i am a tech worker who's job has been outsourced. we moved from los angeles looking for more opportunity because of the hellish conditions of paying 1175 for a 650 square foot apartment.
i used to be just like you. its only when everything falls apart do you open your eyes and see how very fragile your lifestyle is.
there are many people like me discovering this right now. working hard will get you nowhere these days, only backstabbing will which is something i refuse to do because of my morals.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
In a pure free market, we wouldn't have FEMA, we'd have entreprenuers demanding families' life savings in exchange for life preservers and clean water.
As difficult as it is to think about abandoning New Orleans, the grim reality is this:
1. Almost the entire city is inundated. Except for some tall and modern downtown buildings, most of the residential areas are going to be not worth salvaging,they will have to be rebuilt from scratch, even if the city is pumped dry. These buildings will be soaking the the fetid stew of stagnant polluted water for weeks, if not months. Anything made of wood will be turned to mulch.
2. Most of the major highways that serve the city are heavily damaged. It will take many months, if not years to reconnect the city properly to the rest of the world, and cost billions of dollars.
3. Same can be said for the other infrastructure, such as water, sewer, electrical, and communications infrastructure.
4. Even if the downtown high-rises are relatively unscathed (and most have pretty serious glass breakage) who will stay in the area to work in them or occupy them.
5. The levee system needs extensive repairs to hold back even another tropical storm or category one hurricane. It is not unreasonable to expect another tropical cyclone to form in the gulf and affect that part of the coast before repairs can be completed.
6. Even if the levees are reinforced against another Category 4/5 hurricane, New Orleans faces other threats to its viability as a city. Upriver, the Mississippii River is held back by huge dikes to prevent it from finding a new route to the sea. Someday, these defenses will be overwhelmed, and Old Man River will take a shortcut to the west, abandoning its current channel, cutting off New Orleans and the water flow that keeps its shipping channels clear.
To abandon New Orleans would mean abandoning over 400 years of tradition, history, and a unique and quirky culture unlike anywhere else in the country. Without a vision to keep the survivors in the region, most likely they would disperse throughout the rest of the country, as the article noted. The geography of the area provides no easy answers, there is not a whole lot of good buildable land that can be used to build a new city nearby, but there are better locations to build than the current location.
Perhaps it is the Sim City enthusiast in me, but perhaps the destruction of New Orleans would give us a chance to rebuild a city from scratch, and avoid some of the mistakes that were made in the original town. It would be a mistake as well though, to rebuild New Orleans in the same sterile and souless style as many modern suburbs are, as it would be to try to rebuild an exact replica of it upriver somewhere.
Oh fucking well. People need to move on. If the changing climate is any indication we should expect more hurricanes. What's gonna happen when NO gets a major hurricane next year? The year after? When does it fucking end and when do we keep wasting our federal taxes on rebuilding something just to be destroyed again? So the tourism is a boon to the economy? So fucking what? Maybe they need some new industry that pays the damned taxes. What would have happened if a nuclear bomb went off? The land surely wouldn't be inhabitable then and they really shouldn't view it as reinhabitable now. Earthquakes can be mitigated (for the most part), so can a great deal of other natural disasters. A hurricane is pretty all encompassing. Same thing goes for florida. There are still many, many houses there that are not recovered from last year, with no real roofing, etc. What's to happen when the next Katrina rolls through Florida? How many times do you keep rebuilding before you say enough is enough? I say make it all into a natural habitat. Let the evergreens and the gulf coastline become a huge national refuge. Christ knows that very few national parklands exist in the east and this would be a great place to start one.
All those coastal towns that were wiped out, do you think that they will all be rebuilt? What would be the fucking point? So they can all be destroyed again? It is not like the problem is going to suddenly disappear. Give up on New Orleans. It is going to cost far more money to rebuild it than it would to relocate all of those people.
zosxavius photography
I find it amazing that a sincere plea for someone else's safety was modded down.
I think that this is global warming begining to show its ugly face. On-top of that, Several key oil refineries are down right now, this could mean higher gas and heating bills down the road this year.
I think that we need sustainable energy now. So that we might curb this problems like this in the future with, renewable energies and more decentralization of energy.
Do you not have any empathy? Can you imagine bringing home less than $200 dollars a week in the city you were born in and having a car that won't make it more than a few miles without fixing it yourself? Can you imagine being told to pack everything in your POS car (if you're lucky enough to have it)and get away from the only thing you've ever known? Not everyone is fortunate enough to be born and raised in privelege. Even in your own country. I know a little about it. Born and raised in rural Arkansas.
The people in the White House, Bush & company, backe the coup that deposed Chavez for 2 days a few years ago, despite his large majority election victory, overseen as fair by many foreign representatives, including American. After he was returned, showing his actual control of the government as recognized by its members, including the armed forces, he was reelected, by an even larger margin. Chavez is the popularly elected leader of Venezeula, without a doubt. And the White House you'd have "call his bluff" has actually persecuted him, and thereby Venezuela. Not to mention the comparative differences in legitimacy of their respective elections. These are among the many reasons that Chavez' credibility is only increasing, while Bush's credibility is plummeting.
Remarks like Robertson's, who represents a sizeable fraction of Bush's base, are among the other reasons. It's hardly a persecution complex when popular American leaders demand that our government assassinate. If anyone's bluff has been called, it's America's, and now the whole world can see the Ace of Spades up our sleeve, even if it's not in the hand of the dealer sitting in the White House.
--
make install -not war
Considering he is the democratically elected leader of a souvereign, peaceful and poor country i find it highly disturbing that some American politicians want him dead, only because he has a socialist policy. So much for spreading democracy. :-/
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
Because the FEDERAL government collects a lot of tax on gasoline that comes out of Louisiana refineries. A lot of gasoline and other petrochemical products come out of the region and Louisiana historically doesn't see very much of the tax money collected on it.
If you think Louisiana should pay for it all itself, then give them back their money, stop taxing their oil, and let the state with the most offshore oil operations in the gulf excise the heck out of oil sales inside and out of the state.
Where the heck else are you gonna get your oil fix, Florida? For better or for worse, Louisiana is the only state that has consented to allow things to be built in "their backyard," and the nation as a whole has benefitted from it. If you don't think federal money should be involved in upkeeping the state, realize that sword cuts both ways.
Excuse me, but why should I have to pay tax dollars to a state who put a city 17 feet below sea level? This was an inevitability, and why should the FEDERAL government have to suck it up? Sure, you could 'fill in the blank' with all sorts of pork projects, but seriously, more socialism isn't the answer here.
You cavalier attitude shows you don't seem to understand the situation, and your incorrect use of the word "socialism," shows that you don't know what you're talking about.
Here's why the federal government must, should, and will pay:
1. New Orleans is a major sea port. It is pretty much THE agricultural export port for the entire United States east of the Rockies. The loss of the port is a major hinderence to not only the national economy, but the world's, since the United States is the world's number one agricultural exporter. The federal government has a duty to maintain the health of the national economy.
2. All the states, except for about 5 (I know, Vermont and Delaware, but I don't remember the others. They were all small states though.), don't have any money. In fact, they're bankrupt. Even if they did have budget surplus, they wouldn't have nearly enough (early estimates place the amount of damage at 1 trillion dollars). With the complete loss of the major city and several of the major industries (tourism, agriculture and trade, oil and gas, and tourism), Louisiana doesn't have tax base anymore, so even if they had to come up with their own funds, they have no way of doing so.
3. This is a humanitarian disaster the scale of which is unseen in the history of the United States. The devastation is vast. Litterally millions are homeless. With high, stagnent water, in what is effectively swamp land, could lead to wide spread outbreak of disease. This means that the longer it takes to clean up, the worse the situation is going to get.
4. One of the roles of government is doing what others can't do for themselves. The people in Louisiana, Mississippi, and all those along the Gulf Coast, can't clean help themselves. They are our countrymen, and they're in dire need. If you were a civilized individual with any ounce of decency, you'd recognize that.
What we need to do is flood it up to sea level. Construct some levies and whatnot there to control waves and stuff, but don't try to control the level.
The parts that are underwater? Build another Venice. Correctly this time.
Make sure there's a flow through the city so you don't get nasty stagent water. And make sure that people understand the base of the city will continue to sink, so they need to either have buildings that can raise up, or buildings where they can just throw away the bottom floor every once in a while.
Build pipe systems to carry a water around, and a system of bridges to drive on. Make the pipe segments more intelligent, where if pressure drops they'll immediately turn that section off, so nasty water doesn't backtrack into the system.
Aternately, we can just require everyone to build water-proof houses, and attach boats to their roofs. When bad weather is coming we can just preemptively slowly open the levies and turn off the pumps so that they don't break.
Because, seriously. We 'protect' New Orleans as long as possible, but we can't design a 'break-proof' system. We either need a system that can't break, or a system we're willing to turn off when horrible weather hits. Either way require New Orleans delibrately being underwater some of the time.
What we must not do it build the damn city back the way it was. Yes, it will probably be cheaper right now. It won't be cheaper in the long run.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Sure, natural disasters happen everywhere, but their impact can be lessened by, say, not building your city on a sinking landmass that's under sea-level to begin with.
Unlike the Dutch, those in New Orleans have a choice to not live under sea-level. Also, unlike the Dutch, those in New Orleans live in a regular "hurricane alley". Allright, so Florida took that trophy over the last two years. I'm sure they'd be more than happy to pass it on, it still doesn't change the fact that the gulf coast gets hit regularly with hurricanes.
As for helping the victims, sure, but only once, with a generic yellow truck, ie move out to a new safer place. I don't want to help them rebuild so this can happen again, perhaps as early as next year. (I'm guessing it's going to take at least past this hurricane season before anything meaningful will happen.)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Then I spen two summers in Ecuador. The first summer I was in the tourist section of Quito in a Spanish immersion class. I saw families -- families -- mom, dad, and kids -- living homeless on the street. On the street. The little girls would lift up their skirts, squat, and pee, right on the sidewalk. That's something you don't see very often in the US.
The next summer I spent with an indigenous family, living in thatch-roof huts, playing cards by candle-light at night. These people had absolutely nothing. Their huts were built of wood they had cut down themselves. They carried babies around in shoulder sacks made of sheets. Their children were malnourished -- a 5 year old kid looked like a 3 year old.
I'll bet you're one of those Americans who have never been in a 3rd world country, witnessing actual poverty -- people literally living in dirt. Americans are incredibly, incredibly wealthy. Even the 'poor' ones.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
"If they want insurance, let them pay the real cost of it. If they don't, let them take the risk themselves."
You're assuming that people have the option of moving elsewhere.
Louisiana ain't exactly the richest state in the Union and New Orleans is among the worst of it (as the bumper sticker says, "New Orleans--third world and proud of it!"). A lot of the families living there have been living there since they were emancipated, and were the unfortunate ones that couldn't afford to move north or west during the Nineteenth or Twentieth Centuries. They don't live in houses, they live in shacks (or, in the city, "blighted housing") for which moving into a trailer would be an improvement. They sure as heck wouldn't see any money from selling their homes in an effort to move inland (even less if we follow through with your motion to eliminate subsidized flood insurance), and if they could afford to move out, they would have done so in the past hundred years or so.
And even away from New Orleans, the parts of rural Louisiana ravaged by the storm are those parts where the primary language isn't English; Cajun and Creole country. And, again, these people don't exactly have luxury houses on prime real estate. They never had any money because there's been a history of language-based discrimination longer than and almost as violent as Louisiana's history of race discrimination. And while there's been a bit of reconcilliation in recent decades, there's still a whole mess of Indians and Pakistanis that speak better English than they do.
Their job options consist of shrimping, welding, or getting shot in Iraq (ever wonder why the Deep South has such large military and National Guard enlistment rates?). They couldn't afford to move even before their shack was knocked down by a tropical cyclone. The government's options are either to help them rebuild their "houses," or allow them to wander homeless, possibly scraping together enough money for bus fare so they can wander the streets of your town, since they have little else keeping them in Louisiana.
Or I suppose we could also throw them all in jail...
Telling them to simply move somewhere else is like saying "Let them eat cake." Yes, there are fools who have second homes on Grand Isle, but Grand Isle is not indicitive of that part of the state.
- It's 8 miles (give or take) from the Causeway Bridge to Chef Menteur Highway. Hardly a walkable city. The tourists walk the French Quarter and think they've seen the city. I call bullshit.
- A great majority of the people in New Orleans has feet and the ability to use them. Even getting to La Place, 25 miles west on either I-10 or Airline Highway, is better than sitting in New Orleans. At least La Place isn't under water last I checked. At a decent walking speed of 2 miles per hour, that makes it a 12.5 hour walk.
- Those tourists tend to also have feet, rental cars, or other means of transport. For that matter, they can catch a ride with a local - most of the people I've known down there would at least give up a spot in the back of the truck or something. If I still lived down there, you can bet your ass I'd be willing to give somebody a ride if they wanted to go.
- See number 3.
- Causeway Bridge to Covington, then I-12 West. I-10 West to Baton Rouge, or catch I-55 North just outside La Place and take it to Hammond, or to Jackson, MS. Airline Highway West, also to Baton Rouge (or just to La Place or Lutcher). I-59 North to Meridian, MS or follow it all the way to I-24 in the northwest corner of GA. Highway 90 West to Hahnville, then 3127 West goes halfway to Baton Rouge. River Road as far as Memphis if you like. There's 7 escape routes right off the top of my head. Any able-bodied person on foot could have made it to La Place or Hahnville within 12 hours or so, depending on what side of the river they started out from. Both of those places have high schools which are used as shelters in hurricanes, and both are above sea level (and here's to hoping the East Saint John Wildcats kick the crap out of the Hahnville Tigers and the overprivileged Destrehan Wildcats this year, assuming they get to play. Yes, I know, that's 2 high school football teams in the same division with the same team name...go figure.)
- There are, of course, those who could not walk/bike/drive to safety, and it is for them that I reserve my pity and my disaster relief donation dollars. If the idiots had gotten out when they were told to, the emergency services currently being used to airlift Boudreaux, Scioneaux and Arceneaux (yes, those are real names) off the roofs of their houses could instead be used to evacuate the few elderly, handicapped, and infirm.
My "haughty presumption of superior intellect" is based upon the fact that about 80-90% of the people down there did leave, meaning the ones left behind are the dumbest 10-20% and those who physically couldn't leave. I'd bet my next paycheck that the former outnumber the latter 10 to 1."Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Actually, this is not global warming showing its face. We've gone through several decades of below normal hurricane seasons (in terms of strength and quantity) and now we've had a few seasons above normal - for the gulf region. Worldwide, although ocean temperatures have risen, the overall number and strength of cyclones have not. There are plenty of other reasons for a more active hurricane season, but, at least at this point, global warming is not one of them.
There's been quite a bit of discussion on this subject in the news outlets. On the one hand, it seems like the global warming hand wringing is being done by, to put it nicely, non-scientists, while the oceanographers, geographers and meteorologists have pointed to the fairly meticulous statistics that don't show a causal link to hurricanes and global warming - yet.
Also, the whole oil refinery issue could have been avoided if not for the NIMBY problem. Don't want an oil refinery in your area? Suffer the consequences.
-h-
"I don't think anyone would take issue with it as long as he kept up the anti-American rhetoric."
:-(
Frankly, this should concern us. How is it that someone can gain popularity by saying they hate America?
Sigh... I remember when they used to cheer for our President when he went on trips to foreign nations. Sad that was only 5 years ago now.
You build a port where you can land an ocean-going vessel, ideally, at the mouth of a navigable river that provides deep penetration inland.
Geography defines what is possible, not what is safe.
The natural flow of trade in the central United States is defined by the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi, with the terminus in New Orleans.
The Europeans posting here with comparisons to the Netherlands fail to understand the problem. New Orleans *is* built like the Netherlands. But a really bad North Sea storm surge (like the 1953 surge which killed 2000 people) raises sea level by 3 meters. New Orleans has had *two* storm surges *twice* that high in the last 50 years.
The people saying "it's their own damn fault for building below sea level" don't understand how cities grow over centuries. When New Orleans was founded, it *was* well above sea level -- the original settlers found it a bit risky, but acceptable. The city is sinking, and the people living in lowlying neighborhoods have always been among the poorest -- for them, it's a choice between a home which might flood, or no home at all. Tight city planning restrictions might have prevented this, but the decisions were made 50-150 years ago, in a climate of intense racism and class division. It's specious to say "it's their own fault", since those at fault aren't the same "they" as those who suffer.
People who suggest jacking up the city like Chicago are on the right track, but fail to understand the magnitude of the problem. Chicago did this in the 1850s, when its population was 30-60,000. Something like half a square mile of downtown Chicago is now raised above the river. Here, we're talking about half a million people, and 50 square miles of city. And even then, remember that Chicago's basement level totally flooded due to a tunnel rupture in 1992.
New Orleans is an engineering and planning failure, but probably not one which could have been prevented. People have no choice but to make the best of existing situations, and what seems wise at one point in a city's long history may only be proven foolish years or centuries down the road. Long-term plans also conflict with short-term needs, and short-term needs usually win.
There is no silver lining to this tragedy, except that it gives us a chance to start over, essentially completely from scratch, and do things right this time. New Orleans is now more or less a horribly blank slate: almost all the buildings in the city will need to be torn down after soaking in water for weeks. As I see it, there are three long-term ways to solve the problem of New Orleans.
1) Abandon the city. This is almost inconceivable. In addition to the massive impact on Mississippi River and Gulf Coast commerce, what do you do with the million people displaced? Even if they scatter across the country, a million poor homeless refugees will be catastrophic to the already-struggling state and national poverty programs. If they all move only to neighboring states, state governments will collapse under the load. Nevertheless, this might actually be the cheapest long-term solution.
2) Stilt houses. No, don't laugh. In Hawaii where I grew up, many coastal houses are built on 10-foot timber or concrete stilts to keep them above the height of storm surges and tidal waves. We could rebuild every single house in New Orleans as a stilt house. It would make the houses more costly to rebuild, but not by much. The next flood would still destroy roads and utilities, but the houses and their residents could be saved.
3) Jack and fill. Like Chicago, but more so. Demolish all the flooded houses. Grab every dredge, barge, and dump truck you can, and start on one end of the city, dumping Missisippi Delta mud onto the ground ten feet deep. On the other end of the city, start building houses with sturdy frames on concrete pier foundations. When the landfill reaches a rebuild neighborhood, jack up the houses ten feet, dump in ten feet of landfill, and continue on to the next neighborhood. As the city keeps sinking over the next centuries, keep jacking up houses and dumping more dirt. It's probably a $100-$200 billion project (it'd be more, but most of New Orleans' houses are very cheap), but it's a solid long-term solution for keeping New Orleans above water forever.
The one thing we can't afford to do is the one thing that will almost certainly happen. The levees will be plugged, the pumps repaired, and the city rebuilt as it stood a week ago. And forty years from now, this will happen again.
Don't want an oil refinery in your area? Suffer the consequences.
Yeah, bright, clear skies can be a real hazard. We don't need more refineries. We need more alternatives. I shouldn't have to put up with dangerous machinery in my back yard just so you* can enjoy a three hour commute every day in your* monster truck. There are many here that are telling content producers to find another way of doing business. The same goes for the rest of us. It's time to find another method of transporting our bodies from here to there. The present method is obsolete, just like their business model. Why we continue to cling to and fight wars over this, is disturbing at least.
*editorial
What?