posted
Apparently by rebuilding the dike system, the US taxpayer has taken on 77billion dollars in liability should the dikes fail: a minimum of $300thousand per man, woman, and child who was evacuated out of the city. a minimum of $300thousand per current resident of the city. The median-priced house in Louisiana was selling for less than $80thousand preKatrina.
Better to pull down the dikes now, so that the US taxpayer isn't liable for the next hurricane or other disaster. Especially the dikes along the rest of the MississippiRiver.
Posts: 8501 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
Apparently you've been so busy starting threads on this topic (what is this, the fourth nearly identical one?) that you haven't actually READ THE ARTICLE.
The lawsuit is about the levees' failure during Katrina. Not rebuilding them, or tearing them down now, would not help a whit.
Moreover, it is clear that the vast majority of that $77 billion is unsupported nonsense. I expect that even if they get a win (or more likely, a settlement), it will be substantially less than $1 billion.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
Rapidly re-editing the first post before a reply has been posted seems to cause multiple re-posting of the topic.
If the levees and dikes hadn't been there, the city would have no grounds to sue. If they aren't there in the future, there would be no grounds to sue. Should this lawsuit be allowed to succeed, US taxpayers are liable for every levee failure along the entire MississippiRiver, including tributaries.
Besides which, diverting the MississippiRiver from its natural path to maintain the connection to NewOrleans ensures that the rest of the Louisiana coastline will be eroded away by subsidence, regular wave action, and storm surges. The US is decreasing the values and lifetimes of properties along the entire Louisiana coast -- up to the line running from the southern edges of Beaumont(Texas) to PortStCharles to Lafayette to BatonRouge -- to keep the NewOrleans ship&barge canal open, to keep the port viable as a port. Actively destroying property is actionable.
NewOrleans ain't a person: it should be allowed to die its natural death. Current policy is cannibalizing the rest of the Louisiana coast and a large portion of the Gulf to provide an unnatural semblence of life for the undead.
quote:NewOrleans ain't a person: it should be allowed to die its natural death.
Beautiful sentiment -- except, y'know, people live there. And a large majority of 'em ain't leaving, which makes your plan somewhat problematic.
It would've been ideal to let the Mississippi change course the way it wants to (before building all the levees to hold it back), but I'm afraid that ship has sailed.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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quote:Originally posted by aspectre: Apparently by rebuilding the dike system, the US taxpayer has taken on 77billion dollars in liability should the dikes fail: a minimum of $300thousand per man, woman, and child who was evacuated out of the city. a minimum of $300thousand per current resident of the city. The median-priced house in Louisiana was selling for less than $80thousand preKatrina.
Better to pull down the dikes now, so that the US taxpayer isn't liable for the next hurricane or other disaster. Especially the dikes along the rest of the MississippiRiver.
The U.S. government can only sued if it allows itself to be sued. Right now, it does, under the Federal Tort Claims Act and several other acts which waive sovereign immunity under certain circumstances.
The choice is not "don't rebuild or face liability if they fail." We could easily rebuild and not ever face that liability, should our elected representatives choose to do so.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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People live in a location that they can expect something like this to happen on a regular basis, and they want the Fed. Gov. to bail them out of the disater every time it happens. It seems to me that many people moved there because it is cheap to live there? Why? Becuase the get flooded on a regular basis. The City of New Orleans should never have been built where it is, in particular as a place where people live. Maybe it should survive as a port only, where ships come in and load and unload cargo.
If you live 20 feet below sea level at the coast, you should expect to get flooded on a regular basis.
posted
How about San Francisco or Tokyo? Should people not live there because they are earthquake zones? We should probably evacuate all of Bangladesh too, since there's no shortage of flooding. And oh my, the Netherlands; the maintenance costs of those dikes and pumping stations to keep half the country dry despite being below sea level!
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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posted
aspectre, why NewOrleans and MississippiRiver instead of New Orleans and Mississippi River? Is there a convention I'm unaware of?
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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As to the other countries, that is up to the people and governments of those locations.
As to San Francisco, I do have some feelings along that line, however, earthquakes that would cause that level of devistation happen only once every hundred years or more. That makes it much less likely of it happening.
In New Orleans, there is a good chance, every year, that they will get flooded. The fact that it has not happened in a while is only good luck.
Also in San Francisco, they can build to reduce the damage from the earthquakes. When ideas were put forth to prohibit building in the worst flood zones people in NO when nuts.
quote:As to San Francisco, I do have some feelings along that line, however, earthquakes that would cause that level of devistation happen only once every hundred years or more. That makes it much less likely of it happening.
In New Orleans, there is a good chance, every year, that they will get flooded. The fact that it has not happened in a while is only good luck.
Hurricanes like Katrina happen about as often as the huge San Francisco earthquakes. In San Francisco, every year, there's a good chance they'll get an earthquake.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Also, half the international trade that the U.S. engages in comes through the Mississippi River. We sort of have to have a port there, or else lose a rather large chunk of the nation's economy. It's not as simple as it seems.
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Euripides: aspectre, why NewOrleans and MississippiRiver instead of New Orleans and Mississippi River? Is there a convention I'm unaware of?
I have no problem with a port there. A port could be made that would be able to withstand flooding on a regular basis, IMHO. It is the thousands of people living in a city that is below sea level and want us to keep paying them to rebuild in the same area. They want us to pay to protect them and change the natural flow of the river that threatens them.
NO never should have been allowed to flourish the way it has.
posted
My feelings on the matter, in general people who live in high risk areas should know that they choose to live in a place with a high probability of disaster. Knowing that, it makes little sense to bemoan a disaster and demand federal relief every time it happens. They chose to live there, they could have left.
For places like San Francisco. They've known for a long time that something huge could happen, and they plan for it by having strict building codes to protect against fairly major earthquakes, the kind that happen even less often than once every 100 years.
I would be fully in support of updating the levy system in New Orleans, and more so than that, of being good environmental stewards to the area. The reason the storm surge was so bad for NO, was the lack of (can't remember the specific name for them) natural buffer zones on the coast. Usually there are miles of sandbars, and mangrove forests and the like to catch and reduce the storm surge. But those have been eroding away for decades, due to human action and our own lazy stupidity, and then something like Katrina comes along, a freak head-on collision, and that lazy stupidity pays us back ten fold. We should rebuild the coasts to make sure that the next storm surge that comes rolling through won't be nearly as bad, and so updated levees can hold it. Mother nature is a powerful assault force AND defensive shield, we should take advantage of every asset we have.
But I don't support throwing money at the problem, especially when that money does nothing to ensure that the same thing can't happen again next year.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
People have to work at the port. And they have to live within a reasonable commuting distance of the port. I'm not sure that offices full of computer equipment and paperwork can be made to withstand regular flooding. I haven't seen any practical, workable ideas for how we make this work. I think it's mostly people who have no clue what all goes on there, and how much it would cost us NOT to rebuild.
The danger to New Orleans was well known well in advance, and it would have cost $14 billion to prevent it. Unfortunately, we didn't want to spend the money to do that. So now we have to spend far more to fix it, not to mention what it cost in lives and what it cost our economy to have it destroyed. That was very foolish of us. We need a way collectively to act smarter than this from now on. There are a lot more decisions in our future like this one that we totally muffed, and those will be even more important to our survival as a species. We must learn how not to make such stupid mistakes. Can anyone think how?
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Wow. If government shouldn't be used for disaster recovery on the scale of Katrina, what in the world should it actually be used for?
Euripides is right: it doesn't matter where in the United States you live. There is always a small (but not insignificant chance) that *some* freak natural disaster will reduce your livelihood to nonexistence. The argument that people should not have lived in New Orleans due to the tiny chance of a catastrophic hurricane could just as easily be applied to the District of Columbia, another city built on a swamp. Just because the capitol hasn't been wiped out by a hurricane doesn't mean it could never happen; certainly, major flood damage from a normal storm can cause enough problems without the need for a hurricane at all. Hell, one could make a similar argument that New Yorkers shouldn't live around large buildings, because who knows when some crazy nutcase is going to fly an airplane into one?
Preventative measures can help mitigate the amount of aid that will be required, but the face of the matter is that sometimes all the preventative measures in the world won't be enough. More often, it just isn't politically or economically feasible to put the necessary preventative measures into place, especially in a relatively poor city like New Orleans. You want to update the levy system? That's great! But that costs large sums of money, just like post-disaster relief. Where are you getting that money? The city sure as hell doesn't have enough on its own to do it- and didn't, even before Katrina.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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The problem is that the local government misspent much of the money sent it's way to updated the levies. NO is notorious for graph and corruption. The leaders there would rather line their own pockets then help their own people.
The chances of NO being flooded like it was is higher than most other places chance for natural disaster. Earth quake prone areas are requiring buildings to be built that can withstand a certain level of earthquake. They did this becuase they knew their area was prone to this.
Did NO do any of this? I do not remember reading anything like that? The local government abdicated almost all of its responsibilty to the federal government. If people had been made to pay to make flood proof homes, the poor would not have gone to NO.
I had the same response to the people who were flooded years ago when the Mississippi and Misouri flooded. Thousands of people lived in the flood plain complained when they were wiped out. Well, they lived there becuase it was cheap. Why was it cheap, becuase it was in a flood plain. They gambled and lost.
quote:Wow. If government shouldn't be used for disaster recovery on the scale of Katrina, what in the world should it actually be used for?
Are you being facetious, or can you really think of nothing better that the country could be putting its resources towards than rebuilding a city in a prime natural disaster zone?
Now, if you're really asking what I would rather the government use that 110 Billion dollars for, maybe you should start a new thread titled "109 Billion Better Things The Government Could Do With An Extra 110 Billion".
As an aside, I was curious as to what the government did for the San Francisco bay area in '89, and found that George Bush gave them 3.5 Billion in aid. Not a whole lot, even accounting for inflation, compared to the 110 Billion earmarked for New Orleans.
Posts: 5264 | Registered: Jul 2002
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posted
It is totally reasonable to expect that nobody would ever need to live or work at that exact logistical nexus. We should just have it evacwwwait a second.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
While it would certainly be prudent to minimize the population in that area, and maximize preventative construction...I'm afraid it's just not going to happen.
In the first place, in the short-term we as a nation are not going to simply say to the residents of New Orleans, "We will not help you rebuild after this horrible disaster." We might say, "You know, it's a crappy idea to rebuild in the same area on such a scale," but that's about it.
By 'we' I mean our government is not going to do that. It would be a political disaster easily capitalized on by any opponents for a national level politician to do so, and it's even more certain state and local politicians won't say that sort of thing.
So, we'll help them rebuild. And should it happen again, say next year? Are we going to say 'no' to people devastated by a disaster like this? Certainly not, for the same reasons we won't now. The only way this kind of thing would happen is if the residents themselves decide to vacate...as has already happened on quite an impressive scale in New Orleans. Its demographics have already changed quite a bit.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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As to the other countries, that is up to the people and governments of those locations.
Aren't you ignoring the substance of my post though? I was trying to point out that a surprising number of major population centres throughout the world and to a lesser extent in the US are in disaster zones.
It would be great not to have to invest millions or billions in the reconstruction of New Orleans, but I'm asking you to consider how many other cities your logic might apply to, and hinted at the logistical nightmare involved in abandoning a city and sending the population somewhere else or building a new city once the Mississippi is redirected. Not to mention such a move is now politically impossible (even more impossible than it was before Katrina) and in the short term, not very economically feasible. New Orleans is also a major cultural centre, which should be kept in mind.
Just some things to consider before advocating the destruction of a major city.
quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy:
quote:Originally posted by Euripides: aspectre, why NewOrleans and MississippiRiver instead of New Orleans and Mississippi River? Is there a convention I'm unaware of?
posted
Heck, there are entire landmasses that could be deemed financially uninhabitable by some standards (I'm looking at you, Japan!)
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
And Japan is looking at building mile high skyscrapers to deal with their population crunch. I have no idea how they make those things earthquake proof, but even in the last year there have been several 7.0+ richter scale quakes around the Home Islands. No direct hits, but the kind that set of tsunami alarms, and they're all around the same nexus of fault lines.
To say nothing of the fact that Japan makes up a rather large portion of the Arctic Ring of Fire all by itself. Short of uprooting their entire nation and buying half of Australia, they aren't going anywhere. Fortunately they can afford to fix much of whatever might go wrong.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Euripides: How about San Francisco or Tokyo? Should people not live there because they are earthquake zones? We should probably evacuate all of Bangladesh too, since there's no shortage of flooding. And oh my, the Netherlands; the maintenance costs of those dikes and pumping stations to keep half the country dry despite being below sea level!
If my parents' house in San Francisco was destroyed in the next earthquake, I think they'd pack it in. My godmother left along with many of her neighbors in 89. The issue here is that New Orleans has ALREADY suffered this catastrophe, so why rebuild it when it's such a non-ideal place to have a city? If SF were leveled tomorrow, I don't think there would be that many people eager to rebuild.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
The question presented by the lawsuit is not whether the government should pay for future losses, but whether the builders of the levees are accountable for their expertise.
This takes two forms: 1. Construction 2. Maintenance
The corps maintained [till the moment the levees broke] that they would stand. Being experts, the government [and the people] listened to what they had to say, and I think they should be held responsible for poor workmanship.
This is more like medical malpractice suit than anything else, in my opinion.
Posts: 142 | Registered: Feb 2006
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posted
I'm amazed people still live in Tokyo. There's only so many giant, fire-breathing lizard attacks I would be able to take before saying "I'm outta here."
Posts: 3486 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
We're confusing "people shouldn't get to live where they live now" with "the government should bail people out when they choose to live somewhere so prone to a certain type of disaster that they can't get insurance against that disaster."
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote: Seventy percent of the nation's waterways drain through the Port of New Orleans, which operates a Foreign Trade Zone, where foreign and domestic goods can be stored and processed without being subject to U.S. customs and regulations. Commercial vessels and ship tonnage entering and leaving the area make the Port of New Orleans one of the world's busiest harbors, with imports and exports serving the iron and steel, manufacturing, agricultural, and petrochemical industries. Port-related activities involve shipbuilding and repair, grain elevators, coal terminals, warehouses, and distribution facilities, as well as steamship agencies, importers and exporters, international banks, transportation services, and foreign consular or trade offices. The port is also a departure point for a variety of pleasure cruises to Caribbean destinations and for upriver riverboat and paddlewheel cruises.
You can't just get rid of all that and not expect some serious repercussions.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: They have Ultra Man.
The original power rangers too. And with all the crazy anime characters they've got wandering around Japan and specifically Tokyo, WW2 would have been a far different affair had it taken place now.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I saw on Nova once that there are a lot of farmers all along the Mississippi that get flooded and then bailed out by the government every decade or so. I think it was called "Flood."
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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