collection of articles and media concerning New Orleans...

[grindmonkeh]

The Big Easy on the Brink
If it doesn't act fast, the city could become the next Atlantis

by ADAM COHEN, Jul. 10, 2000


If a flood of Biblical proportions were to lay waste to New Orleans, Joe Suhayda has a good idea how it would happen. A Category 5 hurricane would come barreling out of the Gulf of Mexico. It would cause Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans, to overflow, pouring down millions of gallons of water on the city. Then things would really get ugly. Evacuation routes would be blocked. Buildings would collapse. Chemicals and hazardous waste would dissolve, turning the floodwaters into a lethal soup. In the end, what was left of the city might not be worth saving. "There's concern it would essentially destroy New Orleans," says Suhayda.

Suhayda, a water-resources expert at Louisiana State University, is the kind of guy who could have given Noah a computer model of all 40 days and 40 nights of rain, including the Ark's soft landing on Mount Ararat. So it is real cause for concern that he has joined the chorus of scientists and environmentalists who are saying that the watery threat to New Orleans is extreme that in the worst-case scenario, in fact, there might not be a city of New Orleans left standing by the end of the century.

New Orleans has always had a complicated relationship with the water surrounding it. Everyone told the first settlers this was the wrong place to build a city. It is wedged precariously between the mighty Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, and most of it was once swampland. Aggravating the problem is the fact that much of New Orleans is below sea level, so that after a good rain, the water just settles in. There is now a decent pumping system, which helps. Old-timers, however, still talk of the days when, after a bad storm, bodies washed out of the cemeteries.

What is threatening New Orleans is a combination of two man-made problems: more levees and fewer wetlands. The levees installed along the Mississippi to protect the city from water surges have had a perverse effect: they have actually made it more vulnerable to flooding. That's because New Orleans has been kept in place by the precarious balance of two opposing forces. Because the city is constructed on 100 feet of soft silt, sand and clay, it naturally "subsides," or sinks, several feet a century. Historically, that subsidence has been counteracted by sedimentation: new silt, sand and clay that are deposited when the river floods. But since the levees went upmostly after the great flood of 1927the river has not been flooding, and sedimentation has stopped.

The upshot is that New Orleans has been sinking as much as 3 ft. a century. That's bad news for a city that is already an average of 8 ft. below sea level. Making things worse: sea levels worldwide are rising as much as 3 ft. a century on account of global warming. The lower New Orleans plunges, the worse it will be when the big one hits.

New Orleans' other major man-made problem is that its wetlands and its low-lying barrier islands are disappearing. The Louisiana coast is losing 16,000 acres of wetland each year, mostly as a result of population expansion into once pristine areas, destructive oil and gas drilling, pollution and land loss through lack of sedimentation. As it turns out, wetlands and barrier islands aren't just nice to look at; they are also a key natural barrier to hurricanes. (Every 2.7 miles of wetland absorbs a foot of storm surge.) As the wetlands go, the chance of a hurricane blowing the city away grows.

So environmentalists and engineers are frantically coming up with plans to save New Orleans. One idea is to raise levee walls to increase their effectiveness against storm surges. Another is to create large-scale diversions that would allow the Mississippi to flood in a controlled mannerand through sedimentation add thousands of acres a year of new land. Yet another would be to take immediate steps to reverse the loss of sensitive wetlands. Adding land through sedimentation is one of the best ways of restoring wetlands. Among other possible schemes: cutting back on shipping routes that harm marshes, installing wave absorbers to reduce wetland erosion and rebuilding damaged barrier islands.

The big sticking point, not surprisingly, is money. The price tag for a complete solution could be as much as $14 billion in federal and state moneywhich may be more than Washington wants to spend, and more than Baton Rouge can. But experts are also working on scaled-down remedies, including construction of a "curtain wall" that would bisect the city, creating a safe haven to which residents could evacuate.

So far, little has been done. Part of the problem, of course, is that excessive worrying and planning are radically at odds with the spirit of the Big Easy. Despite the damage inflicted by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and the near miss of Andrew in 1992, New Orleans is still a place where the primary meaning of hurricane is a fruity rum drink the law lets you carry openly as you carouse in the French Quarter. While the grimmest of the doomsayers warn that New Orleans could be the next Atlantis, some laid-back residents are saying that it could just as easily become the next Venice and that after the deluge, the good times won't roll...they'll float.

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Relief workers confront 'urban warfare'
Violence disrupts evacuation, rescue efforts in New Orleans

Thursday, September 1, 2005; Posted: 11:36 p.m. EDT (03:36 GMT)

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Violence disrupted relief efforts Thursday in New Orleans as authorities rescued desperate residents still trapped in the flooded city and tried to evacuate thousands of others living among corpses and human waste.

Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown said his agency was attempting to work "under conditions of urban warfare."

Police snipers were stationed on the roof of their precinct, trying to protect it from armed miscreants roaming seemingly at will.

Officers warned a CNN crew to stay off the streets because of escalating danger, and cautioned others about attempted shootings and rapes by groups of young men.

"This is a desperate SOS," New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement Thursday afternoon, with thousands of people stranded at the city's convention center with no food, water or electricity -- and fading hope.

Residents expressed growing frustration with the disorder evident on the streets, raising questions about the coordination and timeliness of relief efforts.

"Why is no one in charge?" asked one frustrated evacuee at the convention center. "I find it hard to believe."

Government officials insisted they were putting forth their best efforts and pleaded for patience, saying further help was on the way.

One displaced resident at the Louisiana Superdome issued a warning to authorities who may be headed to the stadium, where up to 30,000 people sought refuge after Monday's Hurricane Katrina and now await evacuation to Texas by bus.

"Please don't send the National Guard," Raymond Cooper told CNN by telephone. "Send someone with a bullhorn outside the place that can talk to these people first."

He described scenes of lawlessness and desperation, with people simply dragging corpses into corners.

"They have quite a few people running around here with guns," he said. "You got these young teenage boys running around up here raping these girls."

Elsewhere, groups of armed men wandered the streets, buildings smoldered and people picked through stores for what they could find.

Charity Hospital, one of several facilities attempting to evacuate patients, was forced to halt the effort after coming under sniper fire.

Recovery efforts also continued Thursday in Mississippi, where Katrina smashed entire neighborhoods and killed at least 185 people.

"We got hit by the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States," Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told CNN Thursday.

'Thousands' dead

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco gave the grim news that "thousands" of people died in the hurricane and its aftermath in New Orleans and surrounding parishes, though she said no official count had been compiled.

Brown said those who ignored the city's mandatory evacuation order bore some responsibility.

"I think the death toll may go into the thousands and, unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," he told CNN.

Stranded people remained in buildings, on roofs, in the backs of trucks or gathered in large groups on higher ground, with little knowledge of when -- or if -- help would come.

Despite the deteriorating conditions in the city, hurricane survivors from neighboring Plaquemines Parish have started streaming into the city, according to Nagin.

"We are overwhelmed and out of resources, but we welcome them with open arms and will figure this out together," the mayor said in a written statement.

Police officers told CNN that some of their fellow officers had simply stopped showing up for duty, cutting manpower by 20 percent or more in some precincts.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday that 4,200 National Guard troops trained as military police will be deployed in New Orleans over the next three days, which he said would quadruple the law enforcement presence in the city.

Pentagon officials said the first contingent of 100 military police officers would arrive at Louis Armstrong International Airport at 10 p.m. (11 p.m. ET) -- combat-ready for immediate deployment in New Orleans.

'Unsanitary and unsafe'

Blanco said Thursday she has requested the mobilization of 40,000 National Guard troops to restore order and assist in relief efforts.

A humanitarian catastrophe unfolded at the convention center, where thousands of increasingly frustrated people waited for help amid dead bodies, feces and garbage.

Numerous bodies could be seen, both inside and outside the facility, and one man died of a seizure while a CNN crew was at the scene.

A National Guard helicopter dropped food and water Thursday afternoon, although the amount was far short of enough to meet the needs of the throngs that had gathered.

Nagin advised those gathered at the center to march over the Crescent City Connection bridge to the west bank of the Mississippi River to find relief in neighboring Jefferson Parish.

"The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies," said Nagin, adding that officials did not expect to have enough buses for evacuations.

Brown told CNN Thursday evening that federal officials only found out about the convention center crisis earlier in the day, and that he had since directed that "all available resources" be made available there.

Boat rescue teams looking for Katrina survivors told CNN they had been ordered to stand down Thursday by FEMA officials concerned about security.

However, FEMA issued a statement from Washington denying it had suspended operations, though the agency conceded there had been "isolated incidents where security has become an issue."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that the Coast Guard has rescued about 3,000 people from flooded areas in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes.

At the city's airport, a field hospital set up by FEMA was "overwhelmed" with patients, a medical team commander said.

Equipment normally used to move luggage was instead ferrying patients to a treatment center and to planes and buses for evacuation.

"I do not have the words in my vocabulary to describe what is happening here," said Ozro Henderson. "'Catastrophe' and 'disaster' don't explain it."

Outside the Superdome, throngs of people waiting for a bus ride to Texas completely covered an outside plaza, where they waited in the heat and rain.

Buses ferried displaced residents to Houston's Astrodome, which will serve as a shelter until FEMA can come up with more permanent housing.

"We're finding more and more people coming out of the woodwork," Brown said. "They're appearing in places we didn't know they existed."

Blanco said more school buses would be brought in from across Louisiana to increase the pace of the evacuation.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it expected to complete the sealing off of the 17th Street Canal, where a flood-control levee breached.

Other developments:

In Washington, the Senate convened in special session Thursday night and approved a $10.5 billion disaster relief request from the Bush administration. The House is expected to do the same when it takes up the matter Friday.

Gasoline prices spiked as high as $5 a gallon in some areas Thursday as consumers fearing a gas shortage raced to the pumps. The runup in prices prompted Bush to warn against gouging and to encourage Americans to conserve.
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Geraldo Rivera and Shepard Smith appeared on Hannity & Colmes to report on the hurricane, but were in no mood for spin or optimism. - September 2, 2005
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on Kanye..."George Bush doesn't care about black people."
Bush asked for "mandatory evacuations" last Friday. Mayor Nagin waited until Saturday at noon (24 hours later) to announce mandatory evacuations. Obviously some people are at fault for neglecting preparations and while Kanye was obviously upset, he should have thought a little bit harder about who to point the finger at. Blaming Mayor Nagin wouldn't have had had the race card shockwave since Mayor Nagin is black himself. To quote...

"Mayor Nagin and the governors are in deep shiat. Emergency response plans and disaster relief are planned at the local and county (sometimes state) level. This is where FEMA and other federal agencies start off, basing their response and help on the existing state and local plans. The feds do not plan evacuations (except on multiple state levels) and do not release aid until asked for by the state governors. Bush has done all he can and has done more than was required by declaring the area a disaster BEFORE the hurricane hit. Other than that, it isn't up to him to do anything since it is in FEMA's and the other state agency's hands. All the lack of planning and early lack of response for help can be put SQUARELY on the mayor and governor."

Also, ask Condoleezza Rice how much she cares. Oh wait, you're not allowed to...read below.

According to Drudge, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has recently enjoyed a little Broadway entertainment. And Page Six reports that she’s also working on her backhand with Monica Seles. So the Gulf Coast has gone all Mad Max, women are being raped in the Superdome, and Rice is enjoying a brief vacation in New York. We wish we were surprised.

What does surprise us: Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes (we’ve confirmed this, so her new heels will surely get coverage from the WaPo’s Robin Givhan). A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman.

Angry Lady, whoever you are, we love you. You are a true American, and we’ll go shoe shopping with you anytime.
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while Michael Moore (surprise!) has criticisms of Bush...

"MICHAEL MOORE: DEAR MR BUSH

Dear Mr Bush,

Any idea where all our helicopters are? It's Day 5 of Hurricane Katrina and thousands remain stranded in New Orleans and need to be airlifted. Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag.

Also, any idea where all our National Guard soldiers are? We could really use them right now for the type of thing they signed up to do like helping with national disasters. How come they weren't there to begin with?

Last Thursday I was in south Florida and sat outside while the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed over my head. It was only a Category 1 then but it was pretty nasty. Eleven people died and, as of today, there were still homes without power. That night the weatherman said this storm was on its way to New Orleans. That was Thursday! Did anybody tell you? I know you didn't want to interrupt your vacation and I know how you don't like to get bad news. Plus, you had fundraisers to go to and mothers of dead soldiers to ignore and smear. You sure showed her!

I especially like how, the day after the hurricane, instead of flying to Louisiana, you flew to San Diego to party with your business peeps. Don't let people criticize you for this - after all, the hurricane was over and what the heck could you do, put your finger in the dike?

And don't listen to those who, in the coming days, will reveal how you specifically reduced the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for New Orleans this summer for the third year in a row. You just tell them that even if you hadn't cut the money to fix those levees, there weren't going to be any Army engineers to fix them anyway because you had a much more important construction job for them - BUILDING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ!

On Day 3, when you finally left your vacation home, I have to say I was moved by how you had your Air Force One pilot descend from the clouds as you flew over New Orleans so you could catch a quick look of the disaster. Hey, I know you couldn't stop and grab a bullhorn and stand on some rubble and act like a commander in chief. Been there done that.

There will be those who will try to politicize this tragedy and try to use it against you. Just have your people keep pointing that out. Respond to nothing. Even those pesky scientists who predicted this would happen because the water in the Gulf of Mexico is getting hotter and hotter making a storm like this inevitable. Ignore them and all their global warming Chicken Littles. There is nothing unusual about a hurricane that was so wide it would be like having one F-4 tornado that stretched from New York to Cleveland.

No, Mr Bush, you just stay the course. It's not your fault that 30 per cent of New Orleans lives in poverty or that tens of thousands had no transportation to get out of town. C'mon, they're black! I mean, it's not like this happened to Kennebunkport. Can you imagine leaving white people on their roofs for five days? Don't make me laugh! Race has nothing - NOTHING - to do with this!

You hang in there, Mr Bush. Just try to find a few of our Army helicopters and send them there. Pretend the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are near Tikrit.

Yours, Michael Moore MMFlintaol.com; www.MichaelMoore.com

P.S. That annoying mother, Cindy Sheehan, is no longer at your ranch. She and dozens of other relatives of the Iraqi War dead are now driving across the country, stopping in many cities along the way. Maybe you can catch up with them before they get to DC on September 21st."
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I hope that I will never know what this man is going through.