There's talk of New Orleans taking " months to years to come back". Talk of cleaning up and rebuilding. I wonder if that's wise.
It might be worth it for all those other gulf towns and cities, like Biloxi, where all the damage was caused by the hurricane, and any future damage would likely also be storm damage. New Orleans, however, wasn't wrecked by the storm. It was wrecked by the breaking of the levees. That could happen again from any of several causes.
The talking heads natter on about repairing the holes in the levees, then pumping the water out, which would "take several months". They make it sound simple, but it's not. The water is not pure. It's full of pollutants - oil, chemicals, bodies, disease. It's not "running off", as it would in higher areas, so it's soaking deeply into very permeable soil. You can't pump the water out of the mud. You can't pump the pollutants out. It's one big super-fund site. It will be a very long time before some of that deep silty mud will be dried out enough to rebuild on. I predict that within a few months, some of the remaining buildings will begin sinking, subsiding, tilting, even faster than they were before.
Maybe now is the time to give it up. Maybe clean up the downtown and reopen it as a huge museum, a tourist mecca. The downtown Canal Street area and the more touristy part of the French Quarter are relatively higher, so perhaps a small population could be allowed there, but don't allow anyone to live in the depths of that fragile-sided bowl any more.
That would be stupid, and it's just too tempting.
~~Silk
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1 comment:
silk, i agree with you all the way. my blog says just about the same thing. i think they should just level the land and just let it lay there doing nothing. it will take many, many years if ever to return to be a human habitat. roberta berts world
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