posted
If it's people that make a city more so than buildings, than why can't they build it where it can actually survive for more than a mere couple hundred years?
Posts: 4089 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Because what makes the city more than the people or the buildings is the port, which we need for commerce. And that's the spot with the best water access.
Or so I understand things.
Posts: 650 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
A mere couple hundred years? A couple hundred years is all America has existed for.
I think we should look to the Netherlands:
quote:As U.S. military engineers struggled to shore up breached levees, experts in the Netherlands expressed surprise that New Orleans' flood systems failed to restrain the raging waters.
With half of the country's population of 16 million living below sea level, the Netherlands prepared for a "perfect storm" soon after floods in 1953 killed 2,000 people. The nation installed massive hydraulic sea walls.
If they can do it, we can do it.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Of course New Orleans should be rebuilt. It is a national, possibly international, treasure, an important port, and the home to millions. Many who live there would rather live no where else because they love it.
Maybe it's too early to assign blame, but the suvivors are seething, so it may be appropriate now. It's clear that the city and the state had no practical plan for a disaster. Maybe it was arrogance, or maybe it was stupidity, but many people along the line screwed up.
I don't want to take a High and Mighty stance here because I am not effected directly, and I have never been near Louisiana, but some reading of the news has made a few things jump out at me as being obvious: The evacuation started a day too late, the city offered little or no help for getting the poor and infirm out, and the city sent it's people out without guidance on how to be taken in elsewhere.
Of course people should have their own plans, and I hope that many did the smart thing and made disaster plans. The reality is, many people didn't or couldn't do that, and it is one job of the government to protect citizens in a disaster. The local, state, and federal levels did little for the citizens of New Orleans and Louisiana prior to the storm.
Posts: 684 | Registered: Jun 2002
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quote: If you lived in an under water bubble, would you need an eruv?
That depends. How many people pass daily on the larger thoroughfares?
quote: If you can't see the sky, how do you know when to daaven?
First of all, maybe you can see the sky. How deep would the water be? Even if not, it shouldn't be a problem. They'll do like what they do in northern Alaska, and go by the closest city that has a normal sunset.
quote: If you live in a bubble, can you grow a garden? What if it were hydroponic? Do you still say "ha'adomah"?
Didn't you ever make one of those garden-in-a-jar terrariums in school? (I did, and guess who with? ) Gardens shouldn't be a problem. And whether it were grown using hydroponics or not, the bracha would be ha'adomah.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:"A huge chunk of America's heritage - the remnants of what was once France's largest North American colony, a Creole culture unique on this continent - is in severe jeopardy,"
This says what I feel. New Orleans is one of the oldest settlements on the continent. It needs to be preserved as a living place.
Posts: 4953 | Registered: Jan 2004
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quote: If it's people that make a city more so than buildings, than why can't they build it where it can actually survive for more than a mere couple hundred years?
posted
Move to Ohio...we only have tornadoes, but not in the cities. No ocean to look at, but really who cares. Ocean brings death. Vote no on oceans.
Posts: 70 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Enigmatic: Let's take it one step futher than the levees and city under sea level situation and build New New Orleans as an undersea dome city. Isn't it about time we had one of those?
I've been thinking about it. If the flooding is bad when a couple of levees fail, then imagine the horrors if the bubble is breached.
So, I'm voting "no" on the under sea bubbles.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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posted
I'm not reading anything that anyone has written except the initial question. (Not because I don't want to hear your opinions but am afraid of reading something that would make me too angry.)
Yes, New Orleans can and will be rebuilt. A city is not static. It will not be the same as it was the day Katrina hit and the levee broke. That New Orleans will never be back - just as the New Orleans from 1800s or 1920s or 1950s, etc. will never be back. The New Orleans where my daughter was born is not the New Orleans that it was last Sunday before the storm hit.
It would inconceivable to allow a city in the USA to be an abandoned wasteland, an Escape from New York scenario, while we rebuild foreign cities.
To even suggest to not rebuild is UNTHINKABLE.
Posts: 874 | Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
I lived there for several years, and still have family in Slidell, plus family on the MS gulf coast.
Yes it will be rebuilt, but I think there will be a substantially lower population, at least for a while. Already many refugees in TX are saying they don't plan on leaving, they want to start over and set up roots in TX or other states.
Many of the people evacuated were the poorest of the poor. They don't have jobs to go back to, many of them lived in government housing or government subsidized housing and have no homes to go back to and no checks from insurance companies to look forward to. Other than roots in the area itself, they have no lure back to the city - all their family that might have lived in N.O. has also been uprooted.
We have hundreds of people here in Bham. I wonder how many regugees/evacuees, whatever you want to call them might just stay here. Can our schools absorb that many new students, without any additional tax revenues to help pay for it? What about our hospitals, our public health services, our infrastructure, can it take this new influx? I'm not saying that as a way of saying "We don't want or need evacuees here" I'm saying it because those are questions we do need to be addressing, and soon. How are we going to absorb these people and care for them, and get their children educations? I mean, it's not enough just to get them out of the city of N.O. they have to find a way to resume their lives, and I feel pretty confident many of them will just plan on doing it where they are and staying there.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:No it won't be exactly the same. But it's the people that make a city a city, more so than the buildings.
Maybe France would be willing to help with the architecture of rebuilding the old French Quarter.
Actually, the French Quarter is largely intact, because it sits roughly 5 feet above sea level and has a better pump system.
Downtown, near the dome, will need a lot of rebuilding, as will St. Louis Cathedral/French Market Area.
That, for most people, will complete the rebuilding. New Orleans will be restored as it was. The real problem is the poor sections of town. They are the low lying areas, and because they have less opportunity to grease the wheels of government, their pumps/levees are the worst. We need to rebuild the levee system from scratch over the next 5 years or so, so it can withstand a Cat 5 hurricane. We need to update the pump system and the individual pumps with the biggest, baddest pumps around. And then, hope that we never need them.
Abandoning the city is a ridiculous suggestion. Plenty of cities exist below sea level, and New Orleans has too much history, culture, and commerce to be abandoned.
EDIT: I agree with Belle. Probably a lot of residents won't want to go back, either out of fear or simply not having anything to go back to.
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
We should look to the Netherlands. They built giant hydraulic walls to keep water out of their country, 50% of which is below sea level. If they can protect their entire country, we can protect a single city.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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You can't rebuild history. Two years ago I was dragged kicking and screaming into Louisiana. I hated the education system, the small-towns, the alcohol problems...etc. But during my trips to New Orleans, I've fallen in love with the city in the middle of all the madness. My childhood home is underwater and my current home has a Katrina-granted skylight.
If we're going to stop rebuilding in disaster areas, then Floria and California can be the next to be abandoned.
Florida gets hit every year. New Orleans gets its worst hit in 150 years and people want to wipe it off the map.
Posts: 1733 | Registered: Apr 2005
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It's almost laughable to say that rebuilding NOLA is unreasonable. We rebuild San Francisco, we rebuild Florida seemingly every year. We rebuild the flood plains of of the mid west, we rebuild in tornado alley, we rebuilt after St. Helens, Hawaii continues to build ONTO THE SIDES OF ACTIVE VOLCANOES, and yet out of all that potential for destruction, the one city that is being brougt into question is the one with the smallest number of catastrophic disasters.
posted
Most of the billions of dollars are not optional, though, and most of the people receiving them will move back into NO.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I think it is incredibly ridiculous. Asking HOW to rebuild it is certainly relevant, and should be considered from every single angle. But IF, asking IF we should rebuild is insulting to the citizens of New Orleans.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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IF it isn't rebuilt correctly, it will cease to be an insult when the city is destroyed again, by another hurricane.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Right, because it has been destroyed so often by hurricanes in it's 300+ year history. At least pretend to be reasonable. I'm happy to consider not rebuilding it, but I'm still waiting for someone to put forth a reasonable alternative.
Until I hear that, I don't see any reason to consider "if".
Posts: 5462 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Let's face, there are some disaster scenarios where it would be the right decision not to rebuild. And when the expenditure is going to be this big, then the question should at least be asked.
As for the 300 year history, there are a combination of factors that make it more dangerous there each year: eroding wetlands, subsidence caused by the pumps in the city, possible worsening weather patterns.
I think it should be rebuilt. But I hate the idea that we can't even consider not doing so.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I won't consider it, because considering it means giving up.
And I do think it is insulting. For all the reasons I listed above, that we've never batted an eyelash before at rebuilding areas that are 10 times more accident prone than New Orleans. That we continue to build in accident prone areas, and that we have forecasted disasters in areas we spend billions of dollars developing.
Mount St. Helens will erupt again, probably in the next hundred years, but we've built around it. Experts predict the San Andreas fault will cause a devastating earthquake any time now, it's long overdue, but we California is the most populous state in the union. I could go on, and on about tsunamis hitting the Atlantic seaboard, hurricanes devastating Florida, tornadoes, earthquakes, drought, so on and so forth. But we continue to build in those areas, and we've ALWAYS rebuilt them when they've been knocked down.
The citizens of New Orleans have been paying taxes all this time into the funds that go to clean those places up, and that will clean them up in the future. And in their hour of need, where thousands have drowned, or starved, or been shot, or in a dozen other ways have met a wretched fate, we have sent them aid, perhaps too late. And when that is over, many will want to go home, and they will want to see their city rebuilt, like hundreds of others have been in this country over the last two centuries.
So yes, to think of not rebuilding is insulting, that after everything they have been through, which I think would rate up there with the worst psychological torture ever inflicted on a city at large, that at the end of all that we'd say "Sorry, we don't think that YOU are worth it, you are the exception to the rule, but please, give generously next time a Hurricane hits Miami."
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:I won't consider it, because considering it means giving up.
No, considering it means considering it.
quote:And I do think it is insulting. For all the reasons I listed above, that we've never batted an eyelash before at rebuilding areas that are 10 times more accident prone than New Orleans. That we continue to build in accident prone areas, and that we have forecasted disasters in areas we spend billions of dollars developing.
Mount St. Helens will erupt again, probably in the next hundred years, but we've built around it. Experts predict the San Andreas fault will cause a devastating earthquake any time now, it's long overdue, but we California is the most populous state in the union. I could go on, and on about tsunamis hitting the Atlantic seaboard, hurricanes devastating Florida, tornadoes, earthquakes, drought, so on and so forth. But we continue to build in those areas, and we've ALWAYS rebuilt them when they've been knocked down.
And maybe we need to consider some of those, too.
quote:"Sorry, we don't think that YOU are worth it, you are the exception to the rule, but please, give generously next time a Hurricane hits Miami."
Where did I say we shouldn't rebuild?
You know, for all your complaints about not wanting it considered, you've actually done a whole lot of considering. Which is a good thing.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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You certainly know how to take the wind out of someone's sails.
I shall shift my argument away from "ifs" and considerations. And I'll save my long winded high and mighty speeches for people who actually disagree with me. Guess I got a little carried away.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Lyrhawn - you are right. It is an insult to consider the "if" and whoever brought it up in the first place should have to go through the experience of the citizens of New Orleans and then have someone else pose the "if" question.
And I'm not just talking about whoever posted this topic, but all politians, media, etc. who asked the IF question.
It never, never should have been "should we rebuild New Orleans" but always and only "how do we rebuild New Orleans BETTER" - NO place is ever completely safe from natural or man made disasters.
IF we abandoned every place on Earth after a disaster then MOST places wouldn't be here today. I'm thinking Rome burning down, Paris burning down, London burning down. I'm thinking all the places in Europe destroyed during WWI and WWII. I'm thinking Pearl Harbor, I'm thinking the first White House destroyed. I'm thinking of Chicago burning down, Atlanta burning down. I'm thinking of the Pentagon and NYC terrorist attacks. I'm thinking of every place in Florida hit by hurricanes. I'm thinking of San Francisco being knocked down by earthquakes over and over and over.
I don't know where all the population of the world would live if we just moved on and started over each time. In outer space?
Most of the OLD CONSTRUCTION in New Orleans is FINE. My uncle stayed in Uptown and drove out Wednesday night to Baton Rouge. His OLD house is FINE. The French Quarter is fine. The old Causeway bridge is fine but the newer twin spans are toast. Obviously this begs a whole new topic but still....
Posts: 874 | Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Of course New Orleans should be rebuilt for the same reasons it was built in the 1st place - it's an incredibly important port city. How much of American commerce depends on being able to efficiently move goods through the New Orleans port and up the Mississippi River? I would reckon it's a lot. Barge traffic is cheap, you can't move something by rail or truck as cheaply as you can float it. Can you replace the artery that is the Mississippi? And what is the most important port city on the MS? New Orleans.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:Most of the OLD CONSTRUCTION in New Orleans is FINE. My uncle stayed in Uptown and drove out Wednesday night to Baton Rouge. His OLD house is FINE. The French Quarter is fine. The old Causeway bridge is fine but the newer twin spans are toast. Obviously this begs a whole new topic but still....
I was wondering if this was true. I've been looking at pictures and it does appear that the really modern buildings have survived and the old buildings look to be intact. I thought it seemed like the mid-range stuff (built in the 70's maybe a bit before) took the worst hits.
Not sure about transportation infrastructure in comparison to the buildings in town. There's a much different issue with things like bridges. Even if they look fine, they may have been subjected to stresses that exceed their design and only after some review will they be deemed safe (or unsafe). Of course some stuff was just washed away.
Anyway, the pics show NO as not completely flooded and the buildings as mostly standing.
It may not need rebuilding so much as some serious structural testing and renovation.
Posts: 22497 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Yes, the French Quarter is fine. There were people who actually rode out Katrina from their business establishments. There are also amazingly fast pumps in the area so that water can be cleared away to limit damage (wish as much could be said for the residential parts of town.) They have reporters walking up and down Canal without any problems. The Square and all the famous buildings are intact.
With so many residents displaced, most are eager to return to their normal lives. Staying in a shelter for atleast 3 months doesn't sound appealing so many have already said they won't be returning. Instead they'll find a new city and start rebuilding their lives.
I don't doubt that it'll be rebuilt. Its too important for the Louisiana economy. But it will be shadows of its former self.
Posts: 1733 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Yeah, the French quarter did survive because it's one area of the city that is actually above sea level. That's good for the tourist trade, it means they can get back up and running faster.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
There's nothing wrong with asking questions. One relevant question is: do we really want this to happen again? Because it certainly will. There will be category-4 hurricanes in the future.
Maybe the answer is "yes" -- maybe preserving the city and its port is worth having some 10K people die from flooding every 50 years or so -- but it's not awful to ask. And it's a little strange to claim that trying to save the lives of N.O. residents is an insult to N.O. residents.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Does anyone know about toxins and disease problems, though? It sounds like the area is going to continue to be ripe with cholera, typhoid, and other diseases for a while longer.
It doesn't sound like a simple problem of rebuilding some buildings and infrastructure. It sounds more like an enormous clean up and decontamination project.
Posts: 1261 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
After they drain the sewage water out and treat it, the situation won't be so bad. Certainly it isn't going away anytime soon, but draining out the water, which has to be done anyway, will get rid of a lot of that. The standing sewage water is what is spreading mosquitos en masse, that's a large part of the problem.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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The sewage water is only 1/2 the problem. The toxic sludge that will reamins will be a danger for a while.
Posts: 514 | Registered: May 2005
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They say the hurricanes in the Gulf are expected to get worse over the next 20-30 years. Rebuilding New Orleans where it is would be pointless, unless it's protected in a way that probably hasn't even been invented yet.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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As for the diseases, see the thread I started about dysentery and cholera. Mississippi officials have been evacuating shelters due to suspected outbreaks of these diseases, so yeah, it's going to be a big problem.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
There is good technology out there for water purification (e.g., UV Waterworks). I hope it is getting there.
Even chlorine bleach in certain doses can be used to disinfect water and keep it potable, for the most part.
Posts: 14017 | Registered: May 2000
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All of the "clapboard" houses from the dust bowl era need to be cleared out and replaced (if they haven't already by the storm).
That's another observation about New Orleans that is at least different than the cities I have grown up around.
In New Orleans they do NOT ever tear things down and build over them. The city is like the large trunk of a tree with a ring for each epoch of growth and building.
It's why the FRENCH QUARTER is clear to the west and the DOWNTOWN New Orleans is way to he east.
The cities I grew up in when things get run down, they get condemned and torn down and then new buildings/homes built in there place.
In NO that doesn't happen. The clapboard homes built in the dustbowl era? They were still there and had people living in them. The lyrical "home where you could see the lights from inside through the craks in the boards"? That's reality in New Orleans alot.
The "If it ain't broke don't fix it" mentallity is very much alive there and unless it's falling down on your head, it ain't broke.
I visited a Self Storage facility in Metairie off of Causeway BLVD for a company called SAFEGUARD. It was an office building built in the late 60's early 70's that was bought very cheaply because it was very run down, they then gutted all of the floors but the top and converted it to storage instead of tear it down and build anew. EXCEPT the top floor that they didn't convert due to access. It still has the 70's shag carpet and orange and crome office furniture in it.
I take that back, there is SOME new construction, but not in homes and not in the "middle" areas of Metairie where the flooding is. Certainly not in the poorest areas.
Posts: 1533 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I vote "yes". That the question could be seriously considered is shocking. I am horrified at the news reports coming from there. It will take a lot of time and a huge amount of effort.
Building a city is one thing. But building in that same place? I'm not so sure it's a good idea.
And would Kohanim be allowed to enter such a city? Serious question.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Tante Shvester: If you lived in an under water bubble, would you need an eruv? If you can't see the sky, how do you know when to daaven? If you live in a bubble, can you grow a garden? What if it were hydoponic? Do you still say "ha'adomah"?
Well... do you say ha-adamah on Alei Katif?
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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