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This article starts out reading exactly like a description of Katrina .... but National Geographic printed it in April 2001. The article makes the telling point that even without development eating away at its barrier wetlands, New Orleans' days were numbered: it loses approximately two acres of protective wetlands and barrier islands per hour to the Gulf of Mexico, 25 square miles a year, 1,900 square miles since the 1930s. That's like the entire state of Delaware washing away in seventy years. Part of the problem is the oil development in the Gulf and southern Louisiana -- guess what? You pump oil and gas out of the ground, the ground sinks.
You know what we really need to do about New Orleans? We need to get the remaining people out, maybe cofferdam the French Quarter to preserve it as a historic area ... then dynamite the Mississippi and Pontchartrain levees and stop trying to fight nature there. Because whether the levees hold or not, it's a fight we're losing.
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-Ogre
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Anything capable of doing this to an Interstate bridge....
Ouch (http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/katrina/i-10bridge_aug31_2005_dg.jpg)
We need to be better prepared for things, but I really wouldn't suggest not rebuilding, and it pisses me off to watch congresscritters do so.
They can't be serious, unless they intend never to rebuild anything in New York after a terrorist attack, and never rebuild Anchorage/Seattle/San Francisco/San Jose/LA and St. Louis after earthquakes, never rebuild DC for any reason at all, etc.
Sure, there are definitely smarter ways to build things, but ports breed cities, and that location pretty much has to have a port. Between oil coming in from overseas, and oil offshore, and that whole access to the rest of the country via the Mississippi thing.
Re: Anything capable of doing this to an Interstate bridge....
I'm not saying, "Don't reconstruct the port facilities." Just that rebuilding the below-sea-level parts of New Orleans (which is to say, about 80% of it) isn't a very smart idea, especially when the levees required to prevent it from flooding are making the situation worse year by year. New Orleans has been living on borrowed time. The loan just came due, and I think taking out a bigger loan at higher interest to pay it off is a really bad idea.
There's dry land in the area. We don't HAVE to rebuild in the below-sea-level areas. It's not as though the entire population of New Orleans was required to operate the Port of Southern Louisiana anyway. House the people needed for the port above-ground, relocate the rest elsewhere, demolish the levees, and let the Mississippi start building the land back up again instead of dumping all that silt out into the Gulf to create the marine dead zone.
Frankly, if a major earthquake levelled San Francisco or Hayward, I wouldn't recommend rebuilding it on top of the fault again either. Rebuilding or replacing a structure in New York destroyed by a terrorist attack is one thing -- even rebuilding the entire city after a terrorist attack. Terrorists will go where the target is anyway, and you can't make a target safe from future attack just by moving it. But you CAN make it a lot safer from a repeat natural disaster by not rebuilding it someplace where you already know it's only a matter of time before it happens again.
Re: Anything capable of doing this to an Interstate bridge....
As big of a deal as the media is making of wetland loss...
The pumping stations were by and large not nearly high enough themselves, with generators at ground level in some cases (!)
The US has always excelled at building infrastructure -- when we actually dedicate the resources to it. It strikes me that we did a lot more serious engineering projects in the 30s than anyone has been willing to do since.
If we could build a couple of big bridges going into San Francisco, and the Hoover Dam, and a ton of other similar projects 70 years ago, I'd think we can still find enough smart people in this country to do the right thing.
This doesn't mean rebuild it as it is, but I bet we can mitigate a lot of this with good engineering work.
At a minimum, they probably need to seize those homes and backyards that
directly abut floodwalls and convert those into actual levees. The levees held; the floodwalls didn't, and if you look at the aerials the walls were even pushed into those homes by the water. They are probably required to
channel the water, but should be backed by proper levees.
Here's a good example. (http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/katrina/new_orleans_bellaire_levee_aug31_2005_dg.jpg)
Why they have let people remain living that close to the walls after they were constructed is beyond me. Seizing private property is pretty heinous, but this is precisely what eminent domain is for[1]
And while we're on the subject, it appears the oaths that the Guard and various LEOs have sworn don't mean much -- I assume you've heard about the firearm confiscations by now.
I'm not sure what part "I...do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution and the laws of the United States and the constitution and laws of this state and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me as $TITLE according to the best of my ability and understanding, so help me God." the officials of the state don't understand.
Text of the LA state constitution is
here (http://www.harbornet.com/rights/louisana.txt).
They obviously need to reread Article I a few times, particularly the first section.
[1] And someone please explain the concept to the Supremes....
Re: As big of a deal as the media is making of wetland loss...
Yup. The NOLA levees were good up to the estimated surge of a Cat 3. Katrina hit as a 4, not a 5, but that was still enough to overflow them. There's a lot of talk about how this is Bush's fault for taking money away from the levee project, but the harsh truth there is that even if he had not done so, (a) there was an estimated 10 years left to completion, and (b) even if the project had been completed, Katrina's surge would still have overtopped the levees anyway. (Of course, if there were no actual breaches, the flooding would have been much reduced because water would not have continued to pour into the city after the surge had passed.)
Why they have let people remain living that close to the walls after they were constructed is beyond me.
Well, [*sigh*] that's an old story. It's like Reid-Hillview airport in San Jose: Reid-Hillview was in the middle of empty agricultural land when it was built. Then developers built right up to the frelling boundary fence, even built a shopping mall under the final approach fer crissakes. Then after a few spamcans lose power on final and bounce off the roof of the mall, people wake up and say, "Uh, like, you know, there's like an AIRFIELD right across the fence from my house!!!"
....No shit? Hey, here's a clue: It was there when you bought the house. It was there before your house, and your entire NEIGHBORHOOD, was built.
I suspect the same syndrome applies to the levees. The land was there, it was available cheaply, so some developer bought it and slapped up twenty thousand tract houses in two years.
And while we're on the subject, it appears the oaths that the Guard and various LEOs have sworn don't mean much -- I assume you've heard about the firearm confiscations by now.
Oh, yup, indeed, I've been following it. Direct violation of the Second and the Fourth. But frankly, I think Congress has been demonstrating for at least thirty years that even if they do understand their oath of office, they recite it as opaque ritual without the slightest intention of actually following it. Congress regards the Constitution as an inconvenient obstacle to their intentions, and many of the States don't even make a show of honoring it. California officially "does not consider the Second Amendment to be incorporated into the State Constitution."
It may be just me, but it seems to me that adopting and honoring the Constitution of the Unites States, in its entirety, should be a mandatory condition of Statehood. Otherwise, what the heck is the point of claiming to be a state of the USA?
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1) You can't fill in NOLA and build on top of the in-fill. The soil underneath the in-fill isn't stable/solid enough. The in-fill would just sink right back into a bowl, and we'd be right back where we are now. And that doesn't even being to address how expensive it would be to tear down the city, fill it in, and then rebuild it. Much more expensive than keeping what stayed dry, cleaning what can be cleaned of what got wet, and only tearing down the stuff that got so nasty or soggy that it can't be saved.
This leads me to question whether or not we could "build a port at sea level" right near the mouth of the Mississippi. I think that, instead, we should just have a navy patrol base there to defend the Miss. and then maybe have the port be further up river (which may mean doing a lot of maintenance and engineering to keep the river deep enough up to the port).
That, or have the port be someplace like Mobile Bay or something, and then just realize that you have to transfer cargo between deep draft and shallow draft craft at that point. That would be expensive though. Partially because it's an extra stop where you have to pay to have cargo transfered, and partially because it eliminates barges as a cargo transport for the part of the trip from the last port on the river to the port at Mobile Bay.
But, it'd be expensive to engineer and dredge the lower river, too (but I suspect they already do that between the lowest river point and the port of NOLA).
2) The dutch don't build single layered levees. They build multi-layered levees. So, if you get some over-spill on the outer levee, it just floods in between the first and second layer. Then you have pumps running in each layer (I think the dutch build 2 layers, but someone was suggesting that NOLA should have 3 layers).
It also means that if your outer levee actually fails, you have a 2nd (and maybe 3rd) levee that haven't been taking all of the yearly weather abuse that your outer levee takes. Thus, the 2nd levee is likely to take more punishment and get you through the large storm.
Oh, and, as long as you aren't dumping toxic sludge into the gaps between the layers, you don't have the current ecological disaster happening when you pump the water back out. That's a big plus right there.
and, last:
3) I'm not sure I'm even culturally in favor of rebuilding NOLA. Not because I don't value NOLA's culture, but because there's a lot of good reason to believe that it's simply dead and gone and that's it. Why? Because what we may have after rebuilding isn't going to be "seedy and swanky and jazzy NOLA", it will be like a Disneyland version of NOLA, where the culture is a veneer over modern buildings, and architecture designed with tourists in mind instead of having evolved over the years of the city's life. Parts of it will look like the "better" parts of NOLA, which means that it will absolutely kill off the parts that gave NOLA character.
And part of what gave it character is the very cross-bread ethnicity of NOLA. How many of those who had to flee, esp. after the horrors happened, do you think will come back? (some even speculate that they wont be able to come back, based upon how things are managed during the reconstruction ... starting right up with Bush lowering the standard wages for the reconstruction contracts) Will it be a black and grey and white NOLA, like it was? Or will it be a mostly white NOLA?
Sure, you'll be able to walk the streets at night and not feel like you're in a seedy town. But, if you can't walk the seedy streets of NOLA, why would you bother to walk the streets of NOLA? And if you don't have that mix, and that seedy side, where will the jazz come from?
NOLA may rise from the depths, but will it be a NOLA worth having?
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2) Is pretty much what I was thinking. Floodwalls aren't suitable long term high water defenses, but they would work nicely to keep the levee behind them from eroding.
3) I think we should give the locals a little more credit here. Quite a few will stick, more than I think anyone expects right now.
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The biggest problem is that the Mississippi itself is constantly reinventing itself. Before the levee system went in, it would do the mature river thing periodically, and find a new bed for itself, cut off loops, create some new ones, etc. This is one of the reasons there were so many shipping disasters in the earlier days of the river. You never knew what the river was doing. Getting rid of the levees isn't the solution, either. The River is like an eel you're trying to hold in check, and there are trade-offs that have to be made if you want to use it as a navigatable waterway for shipping. It needs a solution somewhere in between.