New Orleans Sinking Faster Than Thought

Originally posted by Nygdan

imbalanced
but how much will a "Move New Orleans" project cost and who will pay for it?

Anything that has to be rebuilt on the delta could be rebuilt more inland. As far as who pays for it, maybe no one pays for it. Maybe no one pays for anything, maybe we just don't use federal and state funds to rebuild a city that we know is going to experience the exact same devastation, perhaps within a year of completing the rebuilding, perhaps in the middle of the rebuilding. The city can just be left to die, and anyone that is nutty enough to sink their money into rebuilding any of the homes or businesses is welcome to it, but the rest of the country probably shouldn't engage in some national effort to restore it.

Just for the record, I was the one who posed the question

You cant just move our fair city as its the Port that has made New Orelans. It is what drives the economy of the city. If you move us you kill us. The location is entirely important thats why the british attacked new orelans in 1812 and that why we bought the Louisiana purchase. The port makes new orelans you can move the city you can move the culture but you cant move teh port. St. Bernard parish may be gone and so may New Orleans East but the people still stand and are deterimend. We hear it every day. Everyone tells their stories and everyone listens.

The city can't be moved as part of a central project anyway, thats just not how cities are born and live.

Ancient Rome was far inland and on the Tiber river, it used a city called Ostia, on the coast, as its Port, things were loaded into warehouses, then onto barges, and shipped upriver. The city of Ostia infact later became a vacation spot for the rich, filled with villas and the like. If people 2k years ago could accomplish this, so can we.

And, of note, Ostia isn't the Port of Rome anymore. Just as the Missisippi isn't depositing enough sediments to keep New Orleans above water, the Tiber deposited too much sediment, and literally extended the coastline, so that Ostia was just as landlocked as Rome itself, and the city just up and died. So to will new orleans, just like Venice, but it will take a long time of course. But just as inevitably as Ostia became landlocked, so to will New Orleans, at least the part on the delta, sink beneath the sea.

Originally posted by imbalanced
If I was from New Orleans like you I would of moved. You want to stick around for the next cat 5, feel free.

Dude, I live SOUTHwest of New Orleans, and I intend to spend the rest of my life here. It's going to take more than just some category 5 storm to take me from here. I lived elsewhere; nowhere else is home.
One big way most South Louisianains are extremely diffrent from other areas of the country is that we can go a block or two from home and find 7th generation cousins, and know exactly how we are related to them, and their neighbors, as well. I have more of a sense of family with the family I have down here than with the rest of the family I have all over this country. Few people know the sense of belonging I'm talking about. It hurts to leave this behind. I'm not talking about things. A house can go; I can build that with my own two hands. My sister's grave is here.

Don't misunderstand. I run from the storms. I'd live in other states if my things were more important than my family.

Plus I'd waste away to nothing on food from other regions. And where else are you going to eat for free for the rest of your life but in Southern Lousiana? (Easily done here, for the most part.)

Go bug the Californians. Their earthquakes are harder to predict and kill as effectively. Most of them aren't going to move, and haven't even though about moving. They are loyal to the things that make their home unique.

But oh, wait, you know what you have to deal with in New York (faultine through NYC--look it up) and in the midwest(Missouri flowed backwards from one of them and everyone seems to forget about the extensive flash flooding in the midwest only a little more than 10 years ago..levees broke then, too)...ooo more Earhtquakes.
We have Earthquakes down here. But they don't damage houses because we are but a crust on a huge tub of jello. Shock absorbtion.

My point? It doesn't matter where you run. There's some natural devestation that can get you, and is likely to, at least once in your life. People that moved to the Midwest to escape a Katrina ever happening again live next door to those who have had tornadoes tear their houses apart. We moved back down from Iowa (where we ran into the basement to the sound of sirens almost ever single summer, multiple times) to have a tornadoe pass in front of a truck my mum was driving south of where I live, then smack into a building, in a smaller storm system than normally plagues the midwest.

There is no safe place from nature but the delusion you build from it inside your head. I know, fo rthe most part, how to deal with my end of natural trouble, so I'm staying.

[edit on 30-8-2006 by jlc163]

Relocating is more annoying than finding an effective way to build up lost barrier islands and marshes (that's what much of NO is, btw). There used to be more coast to knock out the huff and puff of the Big bad Wolf. They need to be rebuilt. Considering how much Iowa Farmsoil goes off the continental shelf via the Mississippi, we should be able to come up with some ideas.

Originally posted by jlc163
But oh, wait, you know what you have to deal with in New York (faultine through NYC--look it up)

Yes, and the last time it shook was well over one hundred years ago. Major and minor fault lines run through every city in the world. Does that mean that they're all at risk of a quake? Certainly. Does it mean that it will actually happen? No.

and in the midwest(Missouri flowed backwards from one of them and everyone seems to forget about the extensive flash flooding in the midwest only a little more than 10 years ago..levees broke then, too)...ooo more Earhtquakes.

The Missouri flowed backwards nearly 200 years ago. As for flooding in the Midwest? That happens every year. Is it always really bad? No, but once in a great while it is.

We have Earthquakes down here. But they don't damage houses because we are but a crust on a huge tub of jello. Shock absorbtion.

They don't damage much because they're microquakes. If you knew anything about geology or plate tectonics you would know that the soil that the majority of land in the midwest and along the Mississippi would cause more damage over a wider area. So your "shock absorbtion" is actually backwards; more like shock intensifier.

There is no safe place from nature but the delusion you build from it inside your head. I know, fo rthe most part, how to deal with my end of natural trouble, so I'm staying.

Well stated.

And we are rebuilding ...why?

It's going to sink or be destroyed by a hurricane sooner rather than later. Katrina was a warning. Heed the warning. Let nature reclaim the area. Move the people out before the next category 3, 4,or 5 comes along and flushes what's left.

I know .... Easier said than done. But unless we want to be dealing with 10s of thousands dead and the destruction .... let it go ... just let it go.

Originally posted by cmdrkeenkid
They don't damage much because they're microquakes. If you knew anything about geology or plate tectonics you would know that the soil that the majority of land in the midwest and along the Mississippi would cause more damage over a wider area. So your "shock absorbtion" is actually backwards; more like shock intensifier.

Hey, I wasn't talking abuot the midwest, at this point. I was talking about the Mississippi delta. Things past a rock layer higher than the contenental shelf. Right where I live, if it was the epicenter. There's some doubt as to whether it would really affect us....but then, the mud could become a mud/tsunami. We haven't gone through it to check it. But where I live it's literally a skin on top of a bowl of jello....or maybe mroe like a thick pudding. I don't live in the midwest or in NYC. Homes aren't built on bedrock down here.

Was just pointing out that an earthquake can and does happen in other places in America that are long viewed as safe. It's not a consistent threat to those areas, but it can and will happen again. Dormant volcanoes errupt. Fault lines act up. Hurricanes, flash flood, any storm is potentially dangerous. Ice storms kill, but leave the house intact. *sigh* I'm wondering when the next dust bowl's going to start up. There are so many things that can kill you and wreck your things that you can't run from them all.


[edit on 30-8-2006 by jlc163]

Originally posted by FlyersFan
And we are rebuilding ...why?

It's going to sink or be destroyed by a hurricane sooner rather than later. Katrina was a warning. Heed the warning. Let nature reclaim the area. Move the people out before the next category 3, 4,or 5 comes along and flushes what's left.

I know .... Easier said than done. But unless we want to be dealing with 10s of thousands dead and the destruction .... let it go ... just let it go.

Those dead were from people who couldn't leave and others who refused to leave. That can be fixed, and could have been fixed with the mishandled money that's been in NO for generations. We had enough money flowing through here to fix much of our own problems long before it needed to be a federal issue. The reason so many stayed is because of storms like Lili and Andrew. Lili was approaching cat5 and dumped it's power down to a 1 before it actually made landfall. Andrew was around a 3. It didn't hit NO; it hit Houma and ground down before it got near NO. No one's screaming at Houma to be closed down and never be rebuilt...and we can have 10,000+ die here too, with all the stubborn people we have down here not leaving for stroms. (Much of my family is the same; they won't leave when they need to. I want to drag threm by their throats to their cars. You run when it's time to run.) Those that evacuated for Rita wouldn't have done so before Katrina. We would have lost the majority of people that live in Cameron parish, an dthe neighboring parishes as well.

You can rebuild in the same area and deal with the sinking problem. The deep end of the bowl needs to be filled in, leveled off. Houses that are important relocated and put back on top of a much higher pile of mud. Rebuild the coast much further out. Make a sytem of levees, much further out. (We've got to get most the laws on what you can do to a marsh out the way, first. The laws are so busy "protecting the environment" that we forget to protect the human habitat, too. I'm all for saving marshland, but I'm not for never touching it or modifying it. Modifying needs to be done to the marsh further out, anyway. Some "marshland" down here doesn't even flood--dry every single year.) My point is that there are easier and cheaper ways to make NO safe that we haven't even bothered to look into.

People see that there is a possiblity that there could be another sorm to hit NO again like that, or worse, and automatically go, "Oh, this next year, its going to happen again, let's not rebuild." Just because something can happen doesn't mean it will. Let's try rebuilding, and improving, first, and then see when the next sorm hits NO before we make such decisions. It took how many years of saying this could happen before it did? If it take just half that time, for the next time, we can be more than prepared...actually overprepared, if we were willing to. My issue is more "Are we going to be prepared or not?"

New Orleans is so much more than just the City Limits of New Orleans. People not from here forget Kenner, Harahan, Gretna....etc. Parishes and townships that New Olreans has swallowed over the years that were not nearly as badly affected. New Orleans gets relocated, and they will function with or without New Orleans. They had to when NO was under water. Seriously, you are talking about moving multiple parishes...whole counties people. Believe me, there are much better alternatives...safe alternatives, that we could handle.

Are we going to do it, or let this happen again? We have ample warning to leave. We often have years in between major storms hitting the same area. We can protect ourselves. That's the part that upsets most of us down here, that without moving away from here, the worst of this was preventable. No one had to die from this.