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Here is the article I remembered reading in Scientific American about the danger of flooding to New Orleans the next time a major storm hits. It's from October of 2001 and it's dead on accurate.
It talks about the danger to oil and agriculture and shipping from losing this major city, and it details exactly what would happen.
quote:Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die.
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A direct hit is inevitable.
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As if the risk to human lives weren't enough, the potential drowning of New Orleans has serious economic and environmental consequences as well. Louisiana's coast produces one third of the country's seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas. It harbors 40 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands and provides wintering grounds for 70 percent of its migratory waterfowl. Facilities on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge constitute the nation's largest port.
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Since the late 1980s Louisiana's senators have made various pleas to Congress to fund massive remedial work. But they were not backed by a unified voice. L.S.U. had its surge models, and the Corps had others. Despite agreement on general solutions, competition abounded as to whose specific projects would be most effective. The Corps sometimes painted academics' cries about disaster as veiled pitches for research money. Academia occasionally retorted that the Corps's solution to everything was to bulldoze more dirt and pour more concrete, without scientific rationale. Meanwhile oystermen and shrimpers complained that the proposals from both the scientists and the engineers would ruin their fishing grounds.
Len Bahr, head of the governor's Coastal Activities Office in Baton Rouge, tried to bring everyone together. Passionate about southern Louisiana, Bahr has survived three governors, each with different sympathies. "This is the realm in which science has to operate," Bahr says. "There are five federal agencies and six state agencies with jurisdiction over what happens in the wetlands." Throughout the 1990s, Bahr says with frustration, "we only received $40 million a year" from Congress, a drop compared with the bucket of need. Even with the small projects made possible by these dollars, Louisiana scientists predicted that by 2050 coastal Louisiana would lose another 1,000 square miles of marsh and swamp, an area the size of Rhode Island.
Then Hurricane Georges arrived in September 1998. Its fiercely circulating winds built a wall of water 17 feet high topped with driven waves, which threatened to surge into Lake Pontchartrain and wash into New Orleans. This was the very beast that L.S.U.'s early models had warned about, and it was headed right for the city. Luckily, just before Georges made landfall, it slowed and turned a scant two degrees to the east. The surge collapsed under suddenly chaotic winds.
A Grand Plan The scientists, engineers and politicians who had been squabbling realized how close the entire delta had come to disaster, and Bahr says that it scared them into reaching a consensus. Late in 1998 the governor's office, the state's Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and all 20 of the state's coastal parishes published Coast 2050--a blueprint for restoring coastal Louisiana.
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If Congress and President George W. Bush hear a unified call for action, authorizing it would seem prudent. Restoring coastal Louisiana would protect the country's seafood and shipping industries and its oil and natural-gas supply. It would also save America's largest wetlands, a bold environmental stroke. And without action, the million people outside New Orleans would have to relocate. The other million inside the bowl would live at the bottom of a sinking crater, surrounded by ever higher walls, trapped in a terminally ill city dependent on nonstop pumping to keep it alive.
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When Allison, the first tropical storm of the 2001 hurricane season, dumped five inches of rain a day on New Orleans for a week in June, it nearly maxed out the pumping system. Maestri spent his nights in a flood-proof command bunker built underground to evade storm winds; from there he dispatched police, EMTs, firefighters and National Guardsmen. It was only rain, yet it stressed the response teams. "Any significant water that comes into this city is a dangerous threat," he says. "Even though I have to plan for it, I don't even want to think about the loss of life a huge hurricane would cause."
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Don't have time to read all of it right now, but boy, did they hit the spot with that one! And to no effect, it seems... Posts: 4519 | Registered: Sep 2003
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The thing is, none of this is news to people living in N.O. I mean, I lived there for years, and it was before this article came out, btw, and everyone around there during hurricane season would talk about how if one ever hit directly the city would be toast. That sounds flippant, but it's the way people looked at it.
All you people in California, if a huge earthquake strikes and kills thousands are you going to be surprised? We've been talking about that possibility for a long time in this country too.
I don't think anyone is denying that we knew it would be bad if a hurricane hit N.O. They've known that for decades. And every time the subject came up, there was talk that N.O. could never be evacuated in time. That was another thing everyone knew, because when a city is surrounded by water there are only so many ways out, you're kinda dependent on bridges, ya know. Again, no surprise.
Certainly there are questions to be asked - why the levees weren't shored up, why the local and state government made the calls they did, why FEMA was being run by someone who showed horses for a living, etc. but one question should not be "Why didn't we know this might happen ahead of time?" because I'm telling you, we did know, and the people living there have always known as long as I've been alive and had relatives in N.O. When my aunt and uncle lived in N.O. and we lived in Bham it was always understood they would evacuate to Bham in event of a hurricane. We talked about it every year when hurricane season started.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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My in laws were talking about "why bother rebuilding N.O." And I said "if there were a quake here, you would rebuild." They were groping for reasons why Salt Lake is different. I guess the fact that it's different is why we want to rebuild where we do.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:My in laws were talking about "why bother rebuilding N.O."
Next time ask them how much money they want to pay for gas if we abandon New Orleans. A huge amount of our oil and gas comes through that port and an untold number of goods reach the rest of the country through New Orleans and the barge system on the MS river.
We need that city. New Orleans must be rebuilt, perhaps not to the same extent, it might not be the tourist trap it used to be but this country certainly needs to get that port operational ASAP.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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1) If you clearly see a major disaster coming, then it's much better to spend the money up front to prevent it, than to wait until it happens.
2) When you get a near miss, as we had with New Orleans in 1998, you really ought to take notice. Near misses mean something is wrong. You should treat it like a fortuitous dress-rehearsal for the real thing, and do whatever it takes to fix things.
We had 7 years. God, if you like, gave us at least seven years to prepare for this before it happened. Seven years that we squandered. Now we will pay so much more than it would have cost to prevent the floods. And we all will pay, with higher gas prices and utility energy costs, with higher prices of everything that requires energy to produce. Some will pay even more, with loss of jobs, homes, everything they own, and with the loss of loved ones. And far too many have lost their lives.
Did we, the American people, care enough about this in advance? Did we insist that our representatives do something about it ahead of time? We are the literate people in this society. We hatrackers are the thoughtful ones. We have the knowledge of how things work and the foresight to anticipate dangers. We have the maturity to understand that it's better to pay 10 billion up front than 100 billion afterwards. If we hatrackers don't take note of dangers like this and call for them to be averted, then nobody will. We have that responsiblity. This is a democracy. Part of being in charge (as we all are, as thinking people in democracies) is saying "this was my fault, I will learn from this and do better". It's not just politicians' fault, it's all our responsibility, all the people.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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Wow this article is so great! Check out the picture of the area by clicking the link a little ways down on the right "Infographic: Sinking out of Sight". It shows it all so clearly, the lake and the city, the levees, the way the river would naturally change course over time if allowed, the very rapid land loss, everything. If you want to understand what happened to New Orleans and why, read this article.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I don't think that Salt Lake is different. I don't live there, so if a giant quake destroyed it I wouldn't rebuild there. I think that anyone who wants to rebuild in N.O. is welcome to do so. I'm not going to, and it looks like a lot of people that used to live there aren't going to either.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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If a major quake struck CA, hopefully not as many lives would be lost-- hopefully buildings would be up to code and people would have followed authorities' advice on bolting down large objects, what to do in an earthquake, etc.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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Aren't most buildings built in California required to meet much higher building standards than those build in non-fault line areas because of the known threat of an earthquake? Is there anyone here who can vouch for the effectiveness (or warn us of the ineffectiveness) of the California building code?
Bassicaly, what do the moddels predict happening if a massive (+8 richter(sp?) scale quake) hit San Francisco?
Posts: 43 | Registered: Oct 2001
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Oh, they are expected to meet much higher standards than buildings in the rest of the country. If a 6.1 earthquake, for example, struck, oh, Oklahoma City, it would be much more devastating than if it struck most parts of CA.
But when the Northridge quake (I think it was a 4.8?) struck, we found that many buildings, including apartments, were, in fact, not up to code; contractors had used sub-standard materials, and people lost everything as a result.
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:...the strengths of the LosAngeles/NorthRidge earthquake and the Iran/Bam earthquake were comparable. The NorthRidge region has about 50times the population of the Bam region. The NorthRidge earthquake killed about 40people. The Bam earthquake killed about a 600times that number. The difference in results is due to difference in building regulations between the two regions.
In other words, an individual Iranian was about 30thousand times more likely to be killed than an individual (Los)Angeleno. Even here there is a difference. Most Bam citizens were killed by buildings collapsing on top of them. Most of the NorthRidge deaths and injuries were due to homeowners ignoring earthquake home safety recommendations -- eg strapping bookcases/refrigerators/etc to the walls to prevent tip-over, putting "childproof"latches on cabinets to prevent the contents from spilling out, etc -- and being smacked by unsecured bookcases, wardrobes, raised televisions, etc.
While more buildings were condemned for demolition than what had been expected from full compliance with the building codes after the Northridge quake, it was nearly all due to structural damage, and not from structural failure: ie houses and buildings were not collapsing. Only one apartment building failed structurally. (Definitely from lack of compliance with the building code). And even then only one side collapsed by one story; the building didn't pancake.
* Corrected for numbers. There was a decrease from the initial official estimates of ~40thousand Iranian deaths to an official bodycount of ~24thousand since I last wrote about this.
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