January 4, 2007
WHY NOT JUST BURN THE MONEY?:
New Orleans Repeats Mistakes as It Rebuilds: Many Houses Built in Areas Katrina Flooded Are Not on Raised Foundations (Peter Whoriskey, 1/04/07, Washington Post)
[E]xperts involved in the rebuilding believe that the helter-skelter return of residents to this low-lying metropolis may represent another potential disaster.After Katrina, teams of planners recommended that broad swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods be abandoned. Yet all areas of the city have at least some residents beginning to rebuild. With billions of dollars in federal relief for homeowners trickling in, more people are expected to follow.
Moreover, while new federal guidelines call for raising houses to reduce the damage of future floods, most returning homeowners do not have to comply or are finding ways around the costly requirement, according to city officials.
"It's terrifying: We're doing the same things we have in the past but expecting different results," said Robert G. Bea, a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and a former New Orleans resident who served as a member of the National Science Foundation panel that studied the city's levees.
"There are areas where it doesn't make any sense to rebuild -- they got 20 feet of water in Katrina," said Tom Murphy, a former Pittsburgh mayor who served on an Urban Land Institute panel for post-Katrina planning. "In those places, nature is talking to us, and we ought to be listening. I don't think we are."
Building a city on a coast below sea level is an experiment that failed--tax dollars ought not be used to repeat the experiment. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 4, 2007 9:17 AM
I went through Big Thompson Canyon a year or so after the flood that wiped it clean. You could see the high water mark way up on the canyon wall. And you could see why the flood was so bad -- the canyon is shaped like a funnel. Get a big thunderstorm stalled over the wide part of the funnel, and the narrow part gets scrubbed.
And you could see the new houses being built on what was left of the old houses's foundations. The problem ain't New Orleans, it's _homo sap_.
Well, there's at least part of a mistake that New Orleans can't repeat: Most of those folk who lived on welfare and menial jobs in that ditch have no real economic means to get back to New Orleans. So while the old mistakes continue apace, those mistakes will at least involve fewer actual residents.
Though I'm sure some aren't too happy with the thought that Houston is stuck with most of those poor folks.
Posted by: Brad S at January 4, 2007 12:38 PMThere is no New Orleans.
Posted by: RobM at January 4, 2007 1:10 PMNew Orleans Repeats Mistakes as It Rebuilds: Many
Like say, re-electing William Jefferson to Congress. The place is grossly mismanaged by thieves and idiots on the federal, state and local level.