Looks like the hurricane dodged the worst destruction at the last moment.  Happy news, but Robertson will probably say it was because of prayer instead of, oh, the weather.

All I can say about Pat Robertson: What a fool.

Cheers BunBun

Are you kidding! New Orleans is the sin capitol of the world! Mardi Gras, Burbon Street, shall I go on? He’s probably been wishing such an event on them for years!

Maybe it is time to sue.  Supposedly, Pat has the God-given ability to prevent disasters, but he didn’t.  Hell, supposedly Pat’s BOSS caused all this destruction!  Millions + dollars of damage is definitely cause for litigation.

If the “true-believers” want us to believe in their god and give it credit where credit is due, then that god (or its earthly representatives) should be able to be sued when it decides to trash the place.

This one really could have been bad. Fortunately it wasn’t. I heard reports that up to 100,000 people didn’t evacuate. Not because they chose to stay, but because they had no choice--poor, no transportation, disabled.

Now’s the time to send in the Louisiana National Guard. Oh wait, 3,000 of them are in Iraq.

Oh it’s bad, VernR, REALLY bad...for New Orleans, for Mississippi...it’s bad.

Things have definitely taken a turn for the worst.

I read that they’re probably gonna be rebuilding for 2-3 years. And I ask myself: what for. With the statistical increase of tropical storms, won’t they just all get blown away again in a few years? Especially with the (careful: sanctimonious Euro comment ahead) typically less-than-sturdy kind of buildings preferred in the US.

Oh well, at least we in Germany haven’t learned NOT to build in major flood risk zones either. Some of the housing destroyed in the great East Germany floods of 2002 was rebuilt with federal aid right at the same spot…

Hard to imagine what kind of building you’d make in a below-sea-level spot in hurricane country.  But I suppose it isn’t feasible to talk about moving New Orleans.

Hard to imagine what kind of building you’d make in a below-sea-level spot in hurricane country.  But I suppose it isn’t feasible to talk about moving New Orleans.

DOF, I wasn’t thinking of a fully hurricane-PROOF building. Nor can you do that much (except build higher levees or moving) against below seal-level spots, or those too close to the beach).

You can however build houses that take much less damage from storms than the timberframe construction so common in the anglo-saxon world. You might only have to rebuild the roof instead of the whole house.

Hey, I’m moving to NZ soon. They got the same building style. And the odd hurricane. Natch.

Now I’m reading that residents of New Orleans have been told that they will be away from their homes for 3 to 4 months! Man, I just went through a storm that took out our power for 47 hours. I thought that was really bad. Sheesh!

What in the world do you do for 3-4 months while officials get a “city” to a point where people can even return to it.

Unreal!

It would be a ridiculously ambitious undertaking, but it would seem like the smart thing to do would be to dump fill dirt into New Orleans until it’s at least slightly above sea level before trying to rebuild the city. It would also help if they rebuilt the wetlands that the levees have drained which helped to protect against these storms in the past.

But I doubt either of those things are likely to happen.

Not likely.

I don’t know if you remember much of the “Flood of ‘93” in St. Louis, but that flood took out a lot of places. Well, one of the places that got hit was a place called “Chesterfield Valley”. There were a few businesses there and a prison. They managed to remove all the prisoners before the flood engulfed the area. Anyway… Now, there is a *HUGE* shopping complex there and a bunch more businesses have built there.

We were told that the flood of ‘93 was a “once in 150 year” flood. So what do they do, they build the place up like it ain’t ever going to happen again.

On the other hand, another small suburb in St. Louis called Valley Park would get flooded out just about every other year. Yet the residents would rebuild and go back. The city/state/whoever decideds these things decided that that area of Valley Park would be turned into a Park and be done with it.

New Orleans looks like it has some decent sized buildings in it’s heart. I can’t see anyone tearing those down so that they can build up the area to make it above sea level. I suspect they will just raise what ever tax is used to make sure the levee is rebuild and built to withstand something like a Cat 5 hurricane so that the city is a little safer.

Who knows. I’m just glad I don’t have any family or extended family there.

That would be an intriguing project, no?  To raise a city 20+ feet.  Or to talk about moving it.

Some interesting thoughts from Daily Kos about Accountability for New Orleans.  Kos notes the irony of a good part of the Louisiana National Guard, um, not being in Louisiana, along with some relevant war-related budget decisions.  Not pretty.

That would be an intriguing project, no?  To raise a city 20+ feet.  Or to talk about moving it.

The legal hassles of moving a city of that size alone would make any politician quail before proposing that.

And really, you CANT raise a city without changing it almost beyond recognition. Raising a building is likely to be more costly than simply building it anew, and you can’t really built a historic part of a town like New Orleans anew without making many of the new ‘old’ structures into parodies of history I guess.

So its likely to simply be rebuilt bit by bit in the same place and height as it is now. If the residents/future residents are lucky, they levees will be raised enough to protect them for a decade or two.

What in the world do you do for 3-4 months while officials get a “city� to a point where people can even return to it.

Spend time in refugee camps, as people always have. But in fact, I think it would be idiotic (to say nothing of untenable) to keep them there beyond a point when health concerns would dictate. 3-4 months sounds too long for me, but then I am just sitting at a desk in sunny Germany.

Well, reading educates. Apparently they won’t even be able to START pumping out the city before a month has gone by (repairing the levees, repairing pumping stations). At that point, you’d then have a lot of corpses and other rotting stuff settling, drying in the heat… Okay, 3-4 months doesn’t sound that unreasonable now.

Repairing levees, pumping stations, stuff drying in the heat…

Florida was hit by 3 hurricanes last year.  The season isn’t over yet.

So WAS it wrong of our head of the Dept. of Environment (here in Germany) to say that basically its due to gobal warming - implying that the US had better get in gear on that?

Obviously, the timing wasn’t very charitable, and it smacked of ‘We told you so!’.

No, it was not wrong.  Nasty, perhaps but dopes are what the dope-slap is for.

Bush (who recently advocated teaching Intelligent Design) went to such lengths to say that global warming was ‘fuzzy science’.  Here’s a clue, GWB; hurricanes follow warm water!!!

Apparently, New Orleans HAD to be destroyed...like Sodom and Gomorrah:
WOW

Can’t say I surprized, though.

Oh...give me a swamp..like the one being filled..
too sickening to be a song.  US Govt has a way with allocations, funds, contracts and total lack of common sense when dealing with warnings and more urgency needs.  Each Ninth Ward and Orleanian-adjacent parish who lost property should file suit to recover....liability vs location vs ineptness.  Sadly...we suffer!