ABANDON THE NETHERLANDS! LOL It's not rocket science... Comprehensive protection from the sea is well understood by some, and it is completely within our capabilities to save and rebuild N.O. Refreshing that not everyone in the country ascribes to the "not my problem" line of thinking...
I think NOLA will always remain or be rebuilt to some extent. As other posters have noted it is at too valuable of a strategic location and has too great historical value. The question though is should NOLA remain a major metropolitana area? One of the biggest problems we have now is with sprawl too many people are living in the path of disasters or where development is unsustainable. New Orleans as a city naturally probably can't be developed much beyond the French Quarter and Garden districts and some its suburbs like East New Orleans probably couldn't be there. I think there is a real issue regarding how much infrastructure can be put in and maintained to protect those places indefinately. Category 5 resistant levees and pumps might be technically feasible but fiscally impossible. Given where our government's priorities are now and the state of our economy I strongly doubt that the necessary investment will ever be put into the NOLA area to make it hurricane proof. Whether NOLA is rebuilt as is or not my main concern is that the residents aren't left destitute and still will have the resources to start a new life. Given though the problems that many of those dealing with the aftermath Katrina is proving to not just be a failure of our government infrastructure but also of our insurance industry. Finally I stated this before but it bears repeating. What makes our response to NOLA important is that if we abandon NOLA and its residents then any city in the US can also be abandoned.
It would be great to rebuild NO with state-of-the-art hurricane protection. The problem though is: 1) we don't know what state of the art protection is (unless we buy that tech from the Japanese) 2) they have issues building things on the land in NO for years. 3) this would mean removing whatever structures are currently in place and then replacing them, which would take years and the logistics would be astronomical. I'm not saying it cannot be done, but our government has don't nothing but stop gap measures for decades (with the sole exception of the rebuilding the Freedom Tower) when it comes to rebuilding cities, structures, and prepping cities and communities for major catastrophies. Unless private companies come in and do it themselves, it does not get done right. More importantly though the question becomes, will people go back to NO if Gustav destroys NO? Realize that 3 years post-Katrina: 71000+ homes are still abandoned, Employment is at 86% of pre-Katrina school enrollment is at 76% or pre-Katrina only half the number of child-care centers have re-opened 25% fewer hospitals Wages are lower and rents higher than before. If Gustav does major damage, and those numbers will get worse again. While NO is a major oil, energy, port for US economy, more families will not return after Gustav. Who wants to put their children in harms way? Even if there are numerous memories there, everyone will remember the images of Katrina and Gustav and say they would never let put their kids in that position. The city of NO will not survive or return to what it was without those families and other new families coming in and helping the city to grow. I'm not saying they won't return, but there is good chance they will not. At that point you would then be attempting to rebuild a city that the people will not return to, and using Billions in taxpayers dollars to do so when, when numerous taxpayers won't go back to living in the city.
i think the city is sinking in some places at one foot per year. Making levee fortification a continnuous and neverending process.
It APPEARS AT THIS POINT Gustav will spare NOLA of the worst-case scenarios....this should be a wake-up call, though. I'm sure it won't be given our leadership on both sides of the political spectrum...but it SHOULD be.
LOL good thing nobody in the other 49 states have say so in the matters of Louisiana... NEW ORLEANS FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER AND EVER! us Cajuns will forever rebuild New Orleans, no matter what happens to it. So, keep on hating you bunch of Louisiana hating punks!
Fair enough. Let Louisiana alone rebuild it. As Gov. Palin said in declining Alaska's bridge to nowhere: "If we want a bridge, we'll build it ourselves."
Rebuild it as Nuevo Orleanos. Huge areas of South Louisiana are at risk to hurricanes. It's not practical to think you are going build a Netherlands type system to protect all of it. I think it will take a very complex plan of looking at the risks, square mile by square mile, looking at the needs and rewards of protection efforts, making good decisions on where to spend your efforts and realize that some areas will have repeated exposure to hurricane damage and anything you put there probably will face damage every couple of years. Get good information and make good value judgments and accept that the distribution of benefits won't be universal ... some people will just be f**ked. Land Planners to the rescue! LSU has a great Landscape Architecture program and they have been studying Louisiana ecololgy for a long time. But it will take federal money. New Orleans is vital to the economy of the entire country, there is a national return of investment there.
the feds assumed control years ago...because they realized that securing a port is a federal interest....it's why federal money went into building the port of houston years ago, as well. these aren't state projects. Dubious -- you can't protect against everything...but you can protect against what we've seen in the last 100 years. you can protect against a katrina. you don't have to have a situation where 80% of the city goes underwater. the city flooded because the levees didn't do what the federal govt told us they would do. if they even did what they were supposed to do, katrina would have been a far lesser event.
Whoa, Madmax. Dubious had some decent points, and I agree the port needs to stay. The city just can't sustain the residential infrastructure -- and that's why I advocate transporting the work force in by rail or bus. Let the French Quarter and the Garden District move to safer cities. Don't you believe in global warming? The arctic and antarctic ice is melting and the seas are rising. That makes the constantly sinking New Orleans even harder to protect. There is no 100-year precedent for this.
Considering that Congress removed the stipulation that the funds were to be used for the bridge/airport and that the funds could be used for anything the state deemed appropriate, she would have been vilified had she not accepted it.
