New Orleans started as a port for the whole Mississippi valley. It’s old and well established, but it must be that it is becoming cheaper and more efficient to ship out of other coastal cities. If that was not the case, there would be a lot more effort to rebuild New Orleans and no one would be questioning that effort.
Something that big doesn’t die quick. It has too much history. But as the threat from the ocean gets bigger and bigger, more and more businesses will pull out, less and less money will be spent on the dikes and levies and more and more of the city will be destroyed. Eventually it will be gone.
Don’t expect governments to make the right decisions ahead of time. That never happens. Governments always go with the flow. Things take time. Hundreds of years. Sometimes longer. The earth is littered with the ruins of big cities where nobody lives anymore.

New Orleans is on the way out. All the bickering isn’t important.

Many of those cities actually support themselves in one way or other. New Orleans wants everyone else to support them. Then again that is also the mind set of the majority of the people there.

We’ve got stupid cities all over the place, like desert cities and cities in the far North. They’re all places that will die if humans stop spending resources to battle nature.

Don’t live in one of those cities and everything will be fine.

Had it hit directly with a force of a force 4 storm there basically would have been nobody alive. The 9th ward would have been basically a flat mud bog. Even the very small part of New Orleans which is above sea level would have been demolished. The Super Dome with all of the people in it would have been completely obliterated. There would have been almost nobody left alive. Out of the entire population you might have had less than 1000 survivors. And everyone including Negin knew this. But yet he didn’t order an evacuation. Heck he basically didn’t even really allow an evacuation.

Katrina did also wipe out about 85 miles of coastline, and so the coast is now 85 closer to New Orleans. It also eliminated and flattened a lot of the growth between New Orleans and the Gulf. A direct hit from a category 3 storm would have the same effect as a category 4 storm at the time of Katrina. That is a category 3 storm would totally flatten the city if it was a direct hit.

There is in reality no engineering solution we could apply which would change this. New Orleans is next to to the sea and is below sea level. The term for land that is next to the sea and below sea level is sea floor. The Dutch system that everyone says we just need to implement here would not be capable of protecting a location so badly located as New Orleans. And that is today. The shore is also eroding away. It is doing so in part because of the ecology movement in the US. In a way this is a good thing, but it does mean that some time in the next 100 years the shore of the Gulf of Mexico is expected to reach the edge of New Orleans. Within a few decades of that New Orleans will become an island in the Gulf. Islands which are below sea level or not a functional concept.

It is time we realized this and said “we can’t have this, and we won’t spend another dime on supporting it.”

OK this was definitely not FEMA’s finest hour. But the fact of the mater is that while in many areas they failed they did not do so in New Orleans.

The federal government is not the primary responder in a disaster unless that disaster is a foreign invasion (or probably an attack by a foreign nation). Even the 9/11/01 attacks would have given the federal government primary authority and responsibility. Hurricanes do not give the federal government such responsibility. Instead it is the local authorities.

In the case of Louisiana which is where New Orleans is located parish administration is responsibility for the citizens of unincorporated areas and in incorporated areas such as New Orleans this is the responsibility of the city administration. This responsibility is to be able to care for their citizens and manage the recovery from any normal routinely occurring event. In the case of a routine event no Federal response is allowed. If a major non routine event occurs then it is still the local authorities’ responsibility. It is their responsibility to if possible evacuate if they can’t keep people safe. It is also their responsibility to declare a disaster and request federal aid. It is then their responsibility to provide survival level aid (Keep everyone sheltered fed and alive) for the first 72 hours after the declaration. Only in the case of war is this the responsibility of the feds. It is then the governor of each state’s responsibility to insure that the local authorities are capable of doing this. Only 72 hours after the federal declaration of a disaster which can only come after a local request for such a declaration is it the federal responsibility to provide survival aid and to assist with rebuilding.

As a matter of trivia any FEMA aid which has been and still is being provided in New Orleans is in fact illegal and a misappropriation of funds. Yeah I can’t imagine anyone making a point of this either??? But Nagin has steadfastly refused to declare a disaster and request the aid so the feds are actually forbidden by the Stanford Act as amended from declaring a disaster for New Orleans and providing aid.

We knew that Katrina was coming. It actually was a whole lot less of a problem and hit with much less force than was expected. But yet Nagin refused to order an evacuation. He was unable to and frankly to level that he was able to was unwilling to unless he could get political favors for doing so to save the people of his city. He should be serving life in Angola Prison for manslaughter for his handling of this disaster, and the Governor should have been convicted of dereliction of duty for allowing him to continue to show such a low respect for the lives of the citizens he was personally responsible for.

Yeah I have yet to see any reason we should be rebuilding New Orleans. In fact I think a good argument could be made that if we have a moral duty with regards to this issue it is not to allow New Orleans to be rebuilt at all.

You made my point, and that is why I am tired of hearing about it. The Dutch system was designed to protect against unusual events and to make otherwise usable land safe during those unusual events. The New Orleans system has to full time protect against “events” several times bigger than the unusual events that the Dutch system was invented to protect against. The unusual storm type events that can hit the New Orleans area are even several times worse than this.

It is a little like saying that the Dutch built a system which prevents fires from going through a house long enough for everyone to get to safety, so that means we should have the tax payers build a system that allows people to build in the middle of a blast furnace. These are two different things, and the fact that the Dutch built a successful system to meet their actually fairly limited requirements doesn’t mean we can build one to reliably protect New Orleans from what it does and can face.

To claim that the “Dutch did it so the federal government should do it to” is a red herring.

The article restates the Judge’s conclusion that the design and maintenance problems of Mr.Go were the main cause of the flooding. Poorly designed levees and inadequate flood plain provision (standard procedure in Europe)to divert storm surges led to the “natural disaster” that happened after Katrina.

To the person who is tired of hearing about the Dutch system: The reason the Dutch built their massive flood defences was as a reaction to a terrrible flood that happened in the 50s. The lesson was also learned in the 60s in Hamburg after a flood that caused massive damage and loss of life. These are not just “high tides” but tidal surges that bring water two meters or more over the banks of the river channel and break dikes.

Instead of being “tired” you could inform yourself. Another place that has a history of deadly floods is London and the project in London to protect its citizens is the Thames barrior which not only closes the Thames but forces water into basins along the river. Are there any such provisions for New Orleans? Who gave zoning permission for all those houses built along the Lake and private marinas? New Orleans is not just a city but a metropolitan area and there are other adjacent developments that are built up around it preventing the water from flooding previously uninhabited areas.

In the days of Google earth ignorance about geography and land use is no longer excusable.

Chris Brown in Hamburg