politicalpartypoop.com

thanks Boo!
This is just a portion of a much longer article, link here. Now this article is not going to be earth shattering to those of you who are even moderately aware of the history of NOLA and of course those of you with basic common sense.

It’s scary, that despite all the evidence and knowledge available to people these days there are those who choose to allow emotion to rot grey matter and erode rational thinking.

The same people who believe that NOLA should be transformed to the glistening jewel it was before Katrina, are also the mentally challenged types who said O.J. was innocent.
Ignorance is a terrible thing.

***

With seas rising, storms getting stronger, and ground subsiding, another disaster like Katrina seems inevitable. Yet some residents would rather run that risk than leave the place they call home.Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in United States history, was also a warning shot. Right after the tragedy, many people expressed a defiant resolve to rebuild the city. But among engineers and experts, that resolve is giving way to a growing awareness that another such disaster is inevitable, and nothing short of a massive and endless national commitment can prevent it.

Located in one of the lowest spots in the United States, the Big Easy is already as much as 17 feet (five meters) below sea level in places, and it continues to sink, by up to an inch (2.5 centimeters) a year. Upstream dams and levees built to tame Mississippi River floods and ease shipping have starved the delta downstream of sediments and nutrients, causing wetlands that once buffered the city against storm-driven seas to sink beneath the waves. Louisiana has lost 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal lands since the 1930s; Katrina and Hurricane Rita together took out 217 square miles (562 square kilometers), putting the city that much closer to the open Gulf. Most ominous of all, global warming is raising the Gulf faster than at any time since the last ice age thawed. Sea level could rise several feet over the next century. Even before then, hurricanes may draw ever more energy from warming seas and grow stronger and more frequent.

And the city’s defenses are down. Despite having spent a billion dollars already, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers now estimates it will take until after 2010 to strengthen the levee system enough to withstand a 1-in-100-year storm, roughly the size of Category 3 Katrina. It would take decades more to protect the Big Easy from the truly Big One, a Category 4 or 5—if engineers can agree on how to do that and if Congress agrees to foot the almost unimaginable bill. For now, even a modest, Category 2 storm could reflood the city.

More

The great tragedy of Katrina is that the hard lessons learned in those earlier storms were blithely forgotten by all. After the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 wreaked havoc all along its course and came within a few feet of spilling over the river levees and inundating New Orleans, the growing city clamored for additional protection. Over the coming decades, the federal government erected a vast network of levees and spillways along the river and around the city, while giant new dams along the Missouri—the Mississippi’s longest tributary—ponded water all the way to South Dakota. The system was billed as a triumph of engineering over nature.

Yet Gilbert F. White, considered the “father of floodplain management,” came to a far different conclusion, one that Katrina drove home with a vengeance. As a young University of Chicago geographer, White had studied the delta after the 1927 disaster and realized that much of the suffering could have been avoided. “Floods are ‘acts of God,’ ” he wrote in 1942, “but flood losses are largely acts of man.” White and his colleagues argued that dams, levees, and other flood protections may actually increase flood losses because they spur new development in the floodplain, which incurs catastrophic losses when man-made flood protections fail. The phenomenon came to be known as the “levee effect.”

Nowhere was White’s advice more gleefully flouted than in the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project—the 125-mile-long (200 kilometers) system of levees and gates built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect the city after Hurricane Betsy ravaged it in 1965. City planners and developers applauded as the corps not only strengthened existing levees around the city but also threw new levees far and wide, enclosing thousands of acres of undeveloped wetlands lining the new I-10 corridor. In fact, 79 percent of the estimated benefits that the corps initially used to justify the cost of the project came from the future development of those wetlands. Within a decade, Jefferson Parish had built 47,000 new housing units—modern-day Metairie and Kenner—while Orleans Parish added another 29,000 units, mostly in New Orleans East.

“It was basically a development scheme,” says Oliver Houck, a Tulane professor of environmental law who has fought other corps projects. “They put it around New Orleans East, and the developers laughed all the way to the bank.”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under Katrina, NOLA.
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