Hurricane Katrina
Mary Madigan
There may be more than 55 dead in Mississippi.
New Orleans survived the immediate effects of the hurricane, but the city is now being flooded by a levee breach:
The effect of the breach was instantly devastating to residents who had survived the fiercest of Katrina's winds and storm surge intact, only to be taken by surprise by the sudden deluge. And it added a vast swath of central New Orleans to those already flooded in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.According to Brendan Loy, the cable news networks missed the news about the levee breach, but local papers like the Times-Picayune are making heroic efforts to cover the story.Beginning at midday, Lakeview residents watched in horror as the water began to rise, pushed through the levee breach by still-strong residual winds from Katrina. They struggled to elevate furniture and eventually found themselves forced to the refuge of second floors just when most in the neighborhood thought they had been spared.
"It would have been fine," refugee Pat O.Brien said. "The eye passed over." But his relief was short-lived. "It's like what you see on TV and never thought would happen to us. We lost everything: cars, art, furniture, everything."
Scott Radish, his wife Kyle and neighbor Brandon Gioe stood forlornly on their Mound Street porch, where they had ridden out Katrina, only to face a second, more insidious threat. "The hurricane was scary," Scott said. "All the tree branches fell, but the building stood. I thought I was doing good. Then I noticed my Jeep was under water."
CNN and the Washington Post do have a list of aid agencies, though.
I love New Orleans - it's my favorite place to visit. I hope they'll be able to recover from this, and I hope they might move some of their treasured landmarks inland.
I used to live in a hurricane prone area (Cape May, NJ). There used to be a South Cape May, but that's underwater now. It has been underwater for decades. Friends of ours had a seaside home, but they sold it because they were tired of cleaning up after flood damage. I don't know if it's global warming or something else, but the ocean seems to be moving inland. Even if we all stopped driving cars tomorrow, lived in harmony with nature and dressed ourselves in bannana leaves, this trend would not reverse itself. We're probably going to have to learn to live with things as they are, and give large bodies of water some breathing room.
You know, I'm a journalist. I teach journalism students, but I would NEVER call the effort to chase the gruesome imagery of disaster "heroic." Rescuing people off of rooftops, risking your own life to make sure there are not people being whisked away by rushing waters, working slavishly to try to stem the rising tide of waters from Lake Ponchartrain ... Those are heroic efforts.
Covering a story is not a heroic effort.
I'm as happy to bash journalists as the next guy. But when you put yourself at risk to get an important story out, to me that's still heroic. It's not on the same level as the rescuers, but it's important. People outside the area have friends and relatives in there, and they want to get information. Plus if people see the devastation, they're more moved to provide aid.
There are journalists who I think are less heroic than they believe themselves to be, such as those hanging out in hotels deep in the Green Zone. But when a reporter goes out into the thick of danger to give me a deeper story, I call that a kind of heroism.
On the other hand: if you let "the story" or "objectivity" stop you from pitching in and helping when you get a chance, you're scum.
Parts of New Orleans are now 10ft below sea level. But the sea, including Lake Ponchartrain, which is an extension of the Gulf of Mexico, is all around New Orleans and the Mississippi river delta.
There is no sense whatsoever in extracting huge sums from an already overburdened federal treasury for purposes of annually bailing out, drying out and refurbishing drowned cities that ought never to have been built were they are in the first place.
The story therefore is not the journalists and how they are covering these events. The story really is the folly of continually setting up these coastal populations for more annual destruction, loss of their lives or of members of their families, loss of homes, loss of jobs, loss of hope, loss of everything.
Can't you all bring yourselves to admit fact when it is revealed to you? Unless someone can find a way to implement some gigantic engineering solution to reverse the otherwise irreversible, New Orleans is nothing now except an american Atlantis, sinking inexorably into the waters of the gulf of Mexico.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I predict New Orleans is toast. If not as a result of this storm, than as a result of the next. Arnold Harris is absolutely correct: time to move on, people.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but do you have a link?
The Earth is continuously being re-shaped. It has been re-shaped during ice ages and during warm periods alike.
I like the idea from Fallen Angels by Niven et al. We're in an ice age and global warming is keeping it at bay. The greens get in charge and the glaciers start marching.
Very funny premise and very good writing. Niven and Pournelle writing together have put out some of the finest science fiction I've read.
Fallen Angels is probably my second-favorite Niven/Pournelle book. First on the list would be Oath of Fealty.
Todos Santos wouldn't have had a problem with Katrina or any other similar natural event.
They do have an option of either raising part of the city up and out of the basin they sit in. Or, they could bow to the inevitiable and, in place of evacuating, turn it into another Venice.
In other words, instead of fighting the floods, or going to all the trouble of pumping out the big bowl every time water gets in, why not accommodate New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico the same way the original builders of Venice in the 6th century accommodated themselves to the Adriatic sea?
This means that selected parts of the city would be rebuilt on piers, supported perhaps directly from bedrock so as to defeat ongoing soil subsidence, and the rest of the place would be an intricate pattern of interlocking canals. Of course, as in Venice, all traffic would be by boat.
This would not necessarily be an inexpensive solution, but it probably be infinitely less expensive than relocated an entire metropolitan area population of the 480,000 residents of New Orleans, plus whatever number reside in the sub-sea level suburbs. Moreover, it is a solution that could be planned and built over an extended period of time.
No, it would not answer the problem of the annual hurricanes, but it seems that the inevitability of the universal deep flooding of the city probably is a greater problem than that of the high winds. Moroever, a 'venice' solution would enable the new developments in the city to be built up high enough to ride out the hurricane-borne storm surges that are the main reason the city had to be evacuated in toto over the weekend.
Moreover, with the new city built around a large number of street-wide canals, the levees along the Mississippi, which have caused the river to carry its silt all the way to the gulf of Mexico rather than annually depositing it in the delta to create more land, would be reversed, and in itself would help alleviate the almost continual soil subsidence.
The more I think about this compound idea, the more I like it. Having once studied and practiced urban planning.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
No, I'm sorry. I'm not buying it. Courageous? Brave? Maybe those are better words. But heroic is not one that comes to my mind.
Why? Haven't the foggiest.
You're sick of hearing people say "I told you so", but whose responsibility is it to pay over and over again for the fecklessness of persons and communities who live on sealevel or below-sealevel settings within blow-your-city-down distance of 30-35ft ocean storm surges and storm-absorbing wetlands that they have purposefully shrunk by building levees along the main river, causing land-building silts to be deposited in the ocean instead of the neighboring land areas?
I took exactly the same attitude about the tsunami victims. I feel the same way about the tens of thousands of fools who build their vacation homes on oceanic sandbars such as the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Fools who are compelled to race their cars to the nearest causeway back to the mainland every time a hurricane blows into our side of the Atlantic.
What do you imagine you are dealing with? About 7/8 of the earth's surface is open water, which generates not only our day to day weather patterns but all the great storms that regularly and frequently smash the livelihoods, lives and homes of anybody who lives along these dreadfully unprotected coastlines.
There is no cure for this but to learn to live with the limits imposed by the physical facts of this planet. Either that, or those facts will freqently come together and snuff out the lives of anyone who ignores the rules of nature. And yes, I damned well love it that way.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Sometimes, there are some that think you are just a bit off kilter on occasion.
We have war in Iraq that will end up costing US citizens---plus one trillion dollars US. That's if things go 51% better than expected.
Now some are bemoaning the fact that New Orleans is somewhat below sea level, dikes and levees have burst etc... It must be their fault.
Somewhere in your consideration: think wind, think hurricane. On tsunami, think earthquake.
Now, you are telling us the tsunami people are at fault for their catastrophic disaster ?
And as well the entire State of Louisiana ?
I've always thought that the purpose of the news was to inform, not to entertain. When there is a disaster, natural or otherwise, the people involved need to know what has happened, what is being done about it and what they should do about it. When the lines of communications are open, lives can be saved. Making an effort to keep people informed is pretty heroic (I think).
If there's one thing I'm already really, really sick of hearing about, it's various criticisms by various people for New Orleans being there in the first place
New Orleans and Cape May are where they belong, but it is a fact that oceans are rising (slowly) and we all have to adjust to it, somehow. Whenever there's a disaster, we usually try to figure out how to keep it from happening again.
I'm as happy to bash journalists as the next guy. But when you put yourself at risk to get an important story out, to me that's still heroic.
That is BS. Sure covering the story is necessary. We need to know what is going on and the media performs an important service in that respect. Their information can, and I'm sure does, save many lives; but it can be done without the theatrics.
Is it really necessary for the reporter to be standing in the middle of a parking lot leaning, at a 45 or greater angle, trying to move forward to keep his current spot—all the while being blown back by hurricane winds—coming off looking like the idiot he is doing a poor imitation of the "moonwalk?"
Is it necessary for a reporter to be standing in flood water past his knees hanging onto a sign to keep from being swept away (as he should have been for being such a fool)?
Is it necessary for the reporter to stand with hands cupped around the mic to reduce windblast, and still shouting to be heard over it instead of giving us the same information from a sane shelter?
Is it necessary for another reporter to stand out in the hurricane winds—falling down and scrambling back up, just in time to barely get out of the way of a huge section of roof that landed three feet from him? What an ignorant fool.
Yes, give us the news on the hurricane. Give us video feeds, but from a safe shelter, and without the "wow look at me" theatrics. Heroic my ass, it's foolishness.
Other than that Arnold Harris said it quite eloquently.
Cordially, Sandi
I'm not assigning blame. Just advising that in place of rebuilding New Orleans exactly as it was a few days ago, to consider two alternatives.
The first first alternative would be to rebuild the city on higher ground, which lies to the north of Lake Ponchartrain near the community of Mandeville, Louisiana. The north shore of Ponchartrain, by the way, is the true coastline and Ponchartrain itself is actually a pinched-in arm of the gulf of Mexico.
The second alternative would be to rebuild the city in the form of piers high enough to withstand hurricane-borne oceanic wave surges of the type that largely destroyed everything along the coast immediately east of New Orleans. The piers would be anchored in bedrock, not just in the perpetually water-logged geologic mush that overlays the bedrock. In between would be canals of the same type as form the means of arterial transit in Venice. Their would be no flooding, because water both from the Mississippi river, lake Ponchartrain, and the Gulf of Mexico would freely flow through them.
The second alternative, in my judgement, offers the following additional benefits.
1) The piers and canals could be constructed incrementally, amortizing costs over a 50-100 year time span.
2) The Mississippi river levees could be removed, so that floodwaters and their silts would annually help rebuild the delta which is now disappearing because the replenishing silts are washed into the gulf of Mexico.
3) The unique setting of an american Venice would itself become at least as much of a tourist attraction as New Orleans' sometimes dubious entertainments.
4) It is easier to rebuild a city so as not to be damaged by almost certain periodic high-water flooding, than to relocate a large population.
My comments on the myriads of victims parked on their low-lying coastlines is merely a reflection on my early training in geology and my later readings on earth plate tectonics and their capability of generating killer waves that cross entire oceans and wipe out anything within their reach.
If you are some sort of humanitarian, why would you counsel anyone to rebuild their lives in such as hazardous location?
And if you cannot provide serious answers to questions such as that, I would have to consider both your comments and thought processes a lot more off the wall than my own.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Perhaps my comments on your thought processes were harsh. But think on something...
Do you remember the film "The Unforgiven", in which William Munny is slowly reloading a rifle and preparing to finish off Little Bill Daggett, and Daggett, the vicious sheriff of Big Whiskey, Wyoming is laying on the floor wounded, and says:
"I don't deserve this. I was building a house."
And Munny replies:
"'Deserve' ain't got anything to do with it."
In the case of the New Orleans flood and the tsunamis of east Asia, "fault" has nothing to do with it, either. The only question that counts is how mankind will use its collective brains to reason why so many people were killed and so much property was destroyed, and then make sure this particular problem can't ruin them all over again. Otherwise, what are brains for?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Raising New Orleans is akin to what Galveston did in 1900, although much more expensive and complicated. The island was basically 2-3 feet above sea level, and they raised the front of the island by 17 feet.
Source
As Robert West suggests, they are probably the ones who can least afford the means of getting out of town when it floods over. But you can bet that a lot of the military personnel who are even now helping restore order are african-Americans, and they will be helping many a white American man, woman and child to safety.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
You notice that I did not identify which particular group was doing the looting, only that they all came from one group. But others, including yourself, successfully identified that group.
As for myself, I am married to a Mexican woman, my brother is married to a black African from Zambia, and my sister's ex is a Black man currently serving in Iraq. But the fact that EVERYONE knew just who I was talking about suggests that some racial stereotypes have a basis in fact.
The question then becomes who is responsible for reversing those stereotypes? When was the last time you saw Korean Americans looting? Or Vietnamese Americans, or Irish Americans, or Anglo Americans, or just about any other group other than the one engaging in looting now?
Just what is it about their culture that causes the response to catastrophe to be engaging in crime? And spare me the "poor disadvantaged" argument. I grew up poor. I had to quit sports and work to help support my family of 7 in High School. But we never stole anything. And if we, as young children, attempted to do so, my parents took us back to the store, made us apologize, and threatened to turn us over to the police. Being poor is no excuse for a lack of character.
My concerns with which I took exception were those mentioned in the comment directly above mine.
Obviously, your explanations regarding planning are thoughtful, as well as this comment:
"If you are some sort of humanitarian, why would you counsel anyone to rebuild their lives in such as hazardous location?"
As you are well aware, the human species on this planet is the gambler rather than the wise man. And that is not likely to change.
I once lived a year of my life 800 miles north of the Arctic circle and met numerous 'Inuit'. Their native wisdom acquired in living among the harsh arctic conditions has been developed over centuries. They know how to survive and have largely chosen to live in their environment.
Unfortunately, contemporary American life is far too artificial and wisdom knowledge of nature unfortunately no longer comes with the passing of years.
We rely on the wisdom of our civil engineers and hope they guess right. FEMA and the federal gov't will of course be our salvation should that fail.
You're right it not a blame game. Maybe one of stupidity, no ?
And the footage I saw was Black looters being chased by Black police. So yes, I know not all blacks are looters. But why does it seem like all looters are black?
*****
As to the destruction itself, my neighbor's cousin lives in Jefferson Parish, just east of New Orleans and just blocks north of the New Orleans airport. He isn't being allowed back into the city until next week, and has no idea whether his house survived. It backs up on the St. Charles Canal. My neighbor's wife is trying to reach her friends who own an apartment building in Biloxi, MS. A few years back, I considered relocating to Biloxi. I'm glad I didn't. And my wife's coworker has parents who own an apartment in the French Quarter. My sympathy goes out to these people. It is why the looters angered me so.
I don't stereotype on a racial basis, although I will freely admit that I do so on a cultural basis. And so I can tell you for a fact there was a time in this country in some of the main northern cities when the pimps, gamblers and professional assassins were mainly Jews and Poles; when the big-time liquor bootleggers were mainly Irish; when the Germans and Italians vied with each other to control criminal general organized criminal activities; when the illegal whiskey distillers were mainly Scots-Irish. And today, the world's champion insurance scammers are said to be Nigerian; and word on the street is that the nastiest, toughest criminals of all are very white vodka-drinking Russians.
So maybe an ordinary black American guy doesn't really stand a chance in crime, stacked up against that kind of competition.
McK,
You are right in your observations about human conduct and the role that gambling with the fates plays in ruining people's lives. But New Orleans and the goldfish bowl is such an obvious no-brainer, that I have wondered for years why some combination of the federal, state and local governments and the business communities involved there don't come up with a better answer than putting a half-million people through this mess every few years.
And one thing for sure. In the US Army that I served in 50 years ago, about one-third of the personnel were African-Americans. And my buddies were neither thieves, pimps, welfare cheats, looters or anything other than some of the best soldiers I ever could have kept company with.
Be well, the both of you.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
It'd be more telling if both were from the same presswire, but given both were found in the same place, I don't know that the captions weren't written by the same folks.
Regardless, a good example of subtle press shaping of perceptions.
This isn't quite true. Others on this thread have already pointed out that New Orleans and Cape May are constantly moving lower. They are no longer where they were before.
I'm not sure what you mean by lower, but in any case, it's just a fact that sea levels are rising. They've risen by more than 1 inch in the past decade:
Melting ice and warming waters have raised average sea levels worldwide by more than an inch since 1995, new data from space satellites and robotic submarines have revealed.
That's twice as fast as the rate the oceans rose during the previous 50 years, ocean experts said Thursday. If the current rate continues or accelerates, as they say is likely, the world's seas will rise at least a foot by the end of this century, causing widespread flooding and erosion of islands and low-lying coastal areas...
..Glaciers in Alaska and South America "are shrinking faster now than 10 years ago, and two to three times faster than they did over the last century," Rignot said. Mountain glaciers in Europe, Asia and Africa also are contracting rapidly.
This study, unlike many others, does not blame the problem on Hummers, SUVs, and American Republicans:
Faster ice melting and the rise in ocean temperatures are natural consequences of global warming, the experts said. Most scientists agree that the Earth's water and atmosphere are heating up, although there are disagreements about the cause and what can be done about it.
It just reports the fact that the seas are rising. Which they are.
If New Orleans is below sea level, why isn't it underwater? Because it's protected by natural and artificial barriers. The city sits on the banks of the Mississippi, where sediment from the river had created areas of elevated land called "natural levees." New Orleans' earliest buildings sat on top of these levees, but as the population grew, houses were built farther inland at lower elevations. To create usable land, water had to be pumped out of the area, which in turn caused the ground to sink even lower. It's possible for part of New Orleans to exist below sea level because the levees that surround the city protect it (most of the time) from floods.
I can report I saw this episode twice on cable TV. Of course the second time the sound was turned off so as not to be politically insensitive. Such is our news.
Apparently all the Walmart's and Walgreen's have been cleaned out.