Hurricane Katrina

Total evacuation planned. In areas where it is dry, they have buses picking up people. About 20% of the area.They are sending Navy ships around. Plan to helicopter people to the big ships. It will take a couple of days for them to get there.The situation is becoming desperate. They are evacuating the shelters that people went to in the first place. Water still rising.The bodies floating in the water, I heard, do not constitute a health hazard.

I cannot believe it, but according to Nightline, they didn't get aircraft in to begin flying sandbags in until tonight. With that sort of level of investment on the line, it is hard to imagine we didn't have aircraft dropping sandbags within 2-3 hours of the levee breaking.Anyone know if they can repair it before the city is totally flooded out?

i have faith they will.well, faith may not be the right word. something like 80% of the nation's oil is refined along that coast.

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אָרַח

It seems pretty likely that they cannot stop the flooding.When the city is below sea level, and a storm like this breaks the levees, there isn't much you can do but let it flood. The water would be pouring in at too high a rate to stop with sandbagging.They have to wait for things to settle down. Then they can repair the levees. And then they can begin the pumping.Recovery will take a while.

I think I finally found an article talking about the issue more precisely.
Geography Complicates Levee Repair - The New York TimesApparently, they have been working "feverishly" but they have to make sure they have a continuous drop going, or do the scenario you are discussing and just wait for it to settle.I suppose starting at the slack high tide and then working on the outgoing tide would be the way to go so that, hopefully, the water is not really pushing in (or out), and then try to cram it full as fast as possible, and hope by the low tide we've gained the upper hand for the incoming.Of course, maybe the Gulf has lower tides than some places.This seems to me about as worst-case as you can get.If they rebuild, they should build levees that can stand anything. Moving dirt is not nearly as expensive as losing a city.This message has been edited by randman, 08-31-2005 01:39 AM

But they can't build a levee to "withstand anything", eventually Mother Nature is going to always win.The core problem is this -- the delta exists because regular flooding of the Mississippi deposited new layers of sediment to compensate for the compression of the existing delta.Since we've stopped the annual flooding, New Orleans is going to continue to subside lower and lower as the delta compresses.Even after we rebuild, which I'm sure we will, the situation isn't going to get better, only worse.Eventually there will be another storm, or a big flood on the Mississippi and we're going to see something like this again.Kind of reminds me of Pompeii

Problem is, this sort of this is usually handled by the National Guard and they've got their hands full rebuilding Iraq

You can build mountains around the city if you have to. If you are going to have a city there, you have to do what it takes to protect it. Build bigger and more massive levees, and it won't be flooded this way again.It CAN BE DONE.If New Orleans sinks 10' lower, it can still be protected from the Gulf.Of course, the issue may become whether rebuilding is all that viable.

I agree, viability is a big concern.But, I still maintain that no matter how big they make the levees, Mother Nature always gets the last laugh. It may be 10 year, 100, or 1000, but eventually water always wins

somebody seems to have messed up bigtime WdsuHow could they not have a couple of hundred blackhawks at their disposal?I cannot believe this. Apparently, they did not try to stop the leveee break. This is just incredible because this is like writing off most of the city.I voted for Bush, but New Orleans is bigger than the Twin Towers. This is way bigger than 911 in some respects, if you ask me, but maybe not in lost lives (we don't know). Just what the heck is going on?This message has been edited by randman, 08-31-2005 03:17 AM

Probably a Bouy?

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France

Bob.

tides in the gulf are only a couple feet.

50% of the Netherlands is below sea level. From memory, I think parts are up to 23 feet below. While dykes have been built for centuries, the big push came in the 1900`s. A Dutch friend told me many of the levees are hundreds of yards across. Might be an idea for New Orleans to consider Dutch expertise when they recover.http://pp.korthalsaltes.com/holland.htm

Um, what do you mean? It's not like cities..or even states have hundreds of blackhawks just lying around. How do you stop a levee break? You don't know its broken until after the fact. What does Bush have to do with anything?

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"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein