OJ,

The flipside of the Hubris you mention (and I tend agree with) is lack of imagination in ameliorating or preventing such disasters.

Some data points...

1. A few years ago, Sebastian Junger, the author of "The Perfect Storm," wrote an editorial in the WSJ about the devastation that would occur if a "big one" hit New Orleans.

2. My dad, a civil engineer, was always dreaming up some huge project that would solve some big problem. I was trained from an early age to think "big," hence my view that a few hundred millions dollars of dry ice dropped in the path of a hurricane could drop its intensity.

3. We reversed the flow of the Chicago river in the 1900s.

4. We built the Panama canal (after the French gave up) in the same time frame.

5. Sitting with Congressman Mark Kirk a few weeks ago, I was informed that the "Boyd Loop" (the interval of time between we ID a target to when we hit it) has shrunk from one week in WW2 to 90 seconds in Iraq. 90 seconds!

___

The fact is that as bad as it is in the Gulf right now, much of it could have been dealt with in advance. It isn't as if we can't imagine problems in advance.

I saw the break in the Ponchatrain levy. A series of barges loaded with concrete ready for deployment could shut that flow off in a matter of hours, if not sooner.

A few billion invested in pumps, dry ice, or Nuclear powered refrigeration ships could cool enough water to weaken a storm. Particularly if we get to them in mid-Atlantic.

A nation that could put a man on the moon in 1969 can do more than we have currently done to prevent this disasters. I'm sure the insurance & Re-insurance industries would pony up some investment money to assist.

The fact is that we've lost the drive and verve to address these types of problems. We are too worried about our free cholesterol and priaprism prescriptions.

Were is Teddy Roosevelt when you need him?

There's nothing wrong with the natural world that a good civil engineer can't fix. The Corps of Engineers is near the apex of rationalistic hubris.

We'll rebuild the whole place just the way it was and marvel next time it floods--it's our nature. And LA is built on a fault line...

I want to get my vote in early.

First New Orleans should not be rebuilt in toto. The historic and tourist areas should be leased out to Disney (or someone like them) and be turned into a theme park and tourist attraction.

The rebuilt city could include housing for the people who work there and second homes and condos. It could even include housing for some eccentrics and color types. It might have a permanent population of 100,000. It would be built behind new reinforced levies with more safety features.

All industry and commerce would be moved away.

The main flow of the Mississippi would be re routed (as it has wanted to) from the junction with the Red River down the Atchafalaya River into the Gulf. Petrochemical industries and shipping should be relocated to there or other suitable locations on the Gulf.

Service business such as banks, insurance companies, major medical centers should be relocated to Baton Rouge or other locations.

Major educational institutions such as Tulane and UNO should be relocated to safer locations.

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at August 31, 2005 12:31 AM

Damn near everything is built on a fault line, it turns out. Some are more visible and/or recently active than others, but the planet is criss-crossed with them.

The country that put men on the moon in 1969 seems incapable of putting them into orbit in 2005. Actually, it can, it's just that we've become a nation that's so risk adverse and bureaucratic that even our adventurers must be assured that everything will go right or we won't let them go.

The engineering case studies coming out of this will be fascinating. The way the oil rigs were washed ashore and the way the bridge decks disappeared but left the pilings intact are just two things I don't think anyone expected (at least never made it to the popular press).But most of all, I will want to know how these levee breeches got out of hand.

Note also that if this were in the Bay of Bengal, we'd be hearing about a death toll not in the hundreds, but in the hundred thousands.

What I don't understand is why the city wasn't compartmentalized so that a single levee breech couldn't flood the whole thing. I will object to any plan for rebuilding which doesn't include a grid elevated highways and parklands on the top of a levee system. Also, anyone who accepts Federal bucks (because they didn't have insurance, for example) should be inelgible for future assistance and even flood insurance if they rebuild there. They should be encouraged to take the money and go somewhere else, Baton Rouge, Mobile, Galveston or even L.A. It's time to stop subsidizing future disasters of this type.

By the way, the other major US city which is essentially at or below sea level and dependent on levees is Sacramento. I was there in '85-'86 when a quick series of late winter storms threatened to wash it away. I worked just downstream from the Nimbus Dam on the American Riverat the Dept. of Fish and Game then, and it was the only time I've seen 20 foot breakers going upstream. I also remember seeing several sandbagged spots along the I-5 levee where boils (whcih can lead to breeches) had been found and stopped.

Wow, so this is Bush's fault, too.

And they think Katrina was their tsunami. Brace yourselves for a royal roiling media tsunami.

Mississippi sounds like it could be as equally hard hit--if not more so. This newspaper's headline is "Hundreds feared dead" in Biloxi alone.

Raoul:

The Linda Levee breach (1986), 40 miles north of Sacramento, just settled for $428 million against the State of California. Why take care of the problem in advance when the state can put off compensation for twenty years?

Two things struck me as eerily similar between New Orleans and Linda. One, its the levee breach that'll cause the most damage. Two, just when you think it's safe (i.e. at Linda, the floodwaters were receding; at New Orleans, the hurricane had apparently passed), that's when you've got to worry most.

"No one can say we didn't see it coming," says it all.

I have spent a lot of time in New Orleans, during various assignments at 4th Marine Aircraft Wing Headquarters. It was almost impossible to avoid the sword of Damocles effect: the whole place is underwater. I used to take my morning run along the levee, up to the French Quarter and back, and I remember looking up at passing ships. Driving over the causeway across Lake Ponchatrain added to the sense of impending doom.

Another thing I noticed was that most of the wooden houses in the city had badly peeling paint. I asked several locals about this, hypothesizing that it was due to the humidity. That was a factor, they told me, but the main reason was cultural: people down here don't care about things like fixing up bad paint.

We are going to pitch in as a nation to help the victims, with contributions and prayer. We don't need to subsidize anyone's decision to go back to living in such a place: we don't ask them to come up and shovel the snow from our driveways.

Did anyone see video of the looting? I'm not talking food, but electronics, toys, and whatnot. Also read reports that NOPD were participating in the looting. Disgraceful, if true.

If I need a lock on the front door of my house, I buy a lock and put it in the door, I don't call my congressman. If New Orleans thought it was threatened with catastrophe, and it did nothing but wait for free Yankee money, it can only blame it's own self.

Bruno,
Yeah, maybe we can do these things, but at what cost? There is one benefit to this disaster, and that is there is now an opportunity to rebuild somewhere else. You don't spend space-program type money on problems that can be avoided by better planning. And this is not a 1000 year occurrence, with the warming of the oceans they can probably expect a hurricane like this once a decade going forward.

At a minimum they could demolish the city areas closest to the river & lake and build two concentric rings of levees. The moat in between would be a dry basin to capture the overflow. Or maybe build a seawall with gates out into Lake Pontchartrain and the river access from the south east.

Relocate the majority of the population out of the bowl, and offer tax abatements and incentives to companies willing to build on the now available land. They could take the risk-reward factor into account, based on the now-understood flood threats vs. the closeness to the Gulf and the Mississippi, and would be more likely to be properly insured pending the next flood, while those who don't have those types of resources could be moved to higher neighboring areas, where the risk factors would be lower (though still being close to the coast, not eliminated entirely).

Is there any higher ground near New Orleans?

Or if we simply had not developed some of the wetlands (Lousiana lost over a million acres in the last decade or two), that would have absorbed a lot the flooding. New Orleans would still have been devastated, but by a lot less. And it would not have cost a single dime. But I'm sure some people down there had objected to such govt interference.

Everyone knew this would happen one day - it was never disputed - but people kept thinking it wouldn't happen in their lifetime. After the mess is cleared up, I bet people will think there'd never be a repeat in their lifetime either. The same mistakes will be made all over again.

As for looting, it's easy to stop. The governor only needs to instruct the Guard to shoot to kill. That's the only way to stop looting.

They'll all rebuild it exactly the same.

Chris: the flooding in NO is not related to nor was it caused by rain. The levees broke because of storm surge. From there its just gravity.

Robert: I think Baton Rouge is above sea level.

OJ: You are probably correct, but I think i have a better plan.

Posted by: Robert Schwartz at August 31, 2005 1:40 PM

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Have any experts come up with reasons why that portion of the levee didn't hold? It certainly answered the prayers of our moonbats. Thousands dead, gas rationing, flights cancelled, anarchy, looting, law of the jungle, federal dollars diverted to the war in Iraq and it can all be blamed on Bush.

Robert:

Plan, schman. Remember when the Feds tried getting folks to move their podunk topwns out of the Mississippi's flood plain? They wouldn't. We prefer the disaster to the plan. Nothing wrong with that as long as you accept the risk.

Elevation of Baton Rouge is 19 feet.

Apparently most of the levees weren't built until after Betsy hit in 1965. Had Katrina hit 40-50 years ago the death toll probably would have been staggering. As it is, the total number of deaths from Katrina may surpass the count for 9/11.

erp: Are you suggesting something?

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence and stupidity.

It won't surpise me to learn that the levees weren't properly built and maintained due to the graft and corruption for which New Orleans has been notoriously famous.

And let's not forget that the one gov't agency most hated by all good Gaians is the Corps of Engineers, who would have oversight over existing and new levees. So it's ironic that they probably celebrated those budget cuts they are now going to use as a way to pin this on Bushitler.

David, Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised by anything, and don't think thousands of deaths, thousands more sickened by disease and millions left homeless would be seen by the Bushitler haters as a deal breaker if a simple thing like a breached levee would bring them closer to getting Bush.

The Rovian genius has its work cut for it this time.

Anon above is stating the obvious when he says the levees weren't built or maintained properly and I'm not sure if he's speaking well of the USACE or not, but we've had dealings with them about some wetlands in our county and they didn't exactly stun us with their competence or their concern about saving one of Florida last unspoiled waterways.

Posted by: erp at August 31, 2005 6:20 PM

That was me. This new comment system doesn't want to remember me, sometimes doesn't even keep my name between Preview and Post. I think it's trying to tell me something...

I saw a report that the breaks in the levee were in ship canals, well away from the Mississippi and the Lake. One looks it was little more than a high wall. There were what appeared to be houses little more than yards from it.

Why weren't there floodgates at the ends of these canals, so that by closing them, they turn the canals into bulkheads/firewalls keeping flooding from spreading from one part of the city to the other? Why not use eminent domain the way its supposed to be used and build a second layer of levees along these canals? Or why not close the canals (keeping their levees as firewalls) and build replacements outside the urban area?

If this is true, then this disaster really was self inflicted. One of the duties of state government is to protect its people from this sort of thing, and its beginning to appear that Lousiana state gov't has never taken this seriously. When the Discovery Channel does a 21st century remake of "The City That Waits to Die" staring your city, that's a sign that it's time to do something.

Maybe it's too early to assign blame, but we are already seeing the way the political games are shaping up. If I sound angry, its because this is beginning to appear to be the case study in how to turn a major inconvenience (the city was intact Monday night) into a catastrophe, for which we are all going to pay. And like 11 September, I just know, cynic that I am, that those who should have seen it coming and prevented or mitigated the effects (Army Corps, Lousiana St. Government, etc.,playing the roles the CIA and State Dept. previously held) are going to get off without a scratch.

I don't really have anything useful or thought provoking to add to the comments here. But, I did want to let each of you know that you've given me some worthwhile things to ponder. Thanks.