The True Ramifications of Katrina on New Orleans

[Kelvin Mace]

I really do not think most people in the media or government are actually grasping what has happened in Louisiana.

According to the 2000 census, 484,674 people live in the city proper. Of that total, 30% are 19 or younger and 15% are 60 or older. The city represents about 10% of Louisiana's total population, 19% live below the poverty line.

The total population for New Orleans and the surrounding metro area is 1.3 million people.

Conservatively speaking, 50% of this population is now homeless (realistic estimates go in the 75%-80% range). Schools, police stations, fire stations, churches and government services have been severely damaged or wiped out all together.

School buses, utility trucks, garbage trucks, cranes, bulldozers, grading equipment, paving equipment, are disabled or wiped out entirely.

A high percentage of roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and rail lines are damaged or destroyed.

Power lines, power plants, oil/gas pipelines, water/sewer plants, telephone lines, cellular towers and cable connections (providing internet services) are severly damaged.

Gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel are now in critically short supply.

The death toll for the city may be in the thousands.

The port facilities are badly damaged and likely to be shut down for weeks if not months.

Hospitals are damaged or shut down due to lack of power, food and supplies.

Postal service will be non-existant for weeks.

Prisons, juvenile detention facilities, nursing homes, pharmacies, dialysis centers, and banks are damaged or destroyed.

Unemployment, running 5.6% before the hurricane, is now running about 80%-90%. Businesses, including critical ones like grocery stores and building supply companies are gone and unlikely to be operational again for weeks at best.

Massive amounts of sewage and dangerous chemicals are now contaminating the flood waters and will leave dangerous residues as the water recede.

The vast majority of people affected, by this disaster (many who have always been a paycheck away from poverty) now have no jobs, no transportation, no homes, no food, and no clothes.

Those people also are unlikely to have had insurance to replace the cost of their homes, cars or possessions.

Speaking of insurance, because this is going to cost the insurance industry a fortune, you can expect to see premiums in unaffected areas rise to make back the money they pay out. Also, these same companies will refuse to write new flood policies for the area. Unable to get flood insurance and facing a Federal government that refuses to spend the money to prevent future floods, many businesses will locate elsewhere.

In October, these newly minted legions of unempoyed citizens will face a new bankruptcy law designed to screw over people just like them. They will be dependent upon the mercy of government assistance at a time when funding for such assistance has dried up in the name of providing tax cuts for the rich.

In order to even begin to repair this damage, tens of thousands of skilled workers will have to start cleaning up, people who will need places to live while they work. Heavy equipment will have to be brought in to clear debris, equipment which will need diesel fuel which is rapidly skyrockecting in price as it also becomes harder to get. Thus, the very machinery and people needed to repair the damage are already in dire straits.

At a time when people will be least able to afford it, food, utility and housing costs will increase dramatically.

Despite the fact that experts predicted this storm would be far worse than it was, the Federal government (BushCo) utterly failed to mobilze resources in any meaningful fashion. No attempt was made to help with evacuation, to organize and deploy trucks, ships, aircraft, medical supplies, medical teams, construction crews, food, or power crews. Such actions are now being done on an ad hoc basis, despite 5-7 days advance warning.

And as I asked in an earlier post, what the hell will they do if another hurricane pops up? Florida was hit with FOUR in a row last year.

New Orleans has effectively been wiped off the map and our "leader" couldn't be bothered to leave his cushy digs to do his job.

[havocmom]

1. I grasp that a big part of the US just joined the Third World

Rest of the nation soon to follow.

Did I distill that right, David?

Hey, been keeping you and the office crew in my thoughts regarding that loss you suffered last week.

[Kelvin Mace]

3. Pretty much my take

The economy just got rabbit punched.

Thanks for thinking of me and the crew.

[AllieB]

5. Quite a bit of AL, MS, and LA qualify as Third World

these are the poorest states in the US. I remember being shocked at the poverty down there compared to where I lived. There is no excuse in a nation as rich as ours that people should go hungry. Now the hurricane has truly destroyed what little these people had. :-(

[Kelvin Mace]

10. You are quite correct

And an ugly backlash is coming. If things are not gotten under control quickly, riots will be next.

[wli]

12. Not just in the remains of New Orleans. n/t

[Endangered Specie]

13. Many people have described the area as a "third world state"

before this hurricane.

[Inland]

2. I don't think the US has had a half million DPs since the civil war.

wandering bands of indigent NOs? who knows.

[expatriate]

4. Kelvin Mace this needs to be sent out to many, many people.

I have thought the same thing since before Katrina hit, when it was expected to hit New Orleans as a Category Five hurricane. In the past, I have lived in South Louisiana for many years. I spent some years living in New Orleans, and some of them I was living in poverty.

When people chirp that New Orleans will be rebuilt, all I can think is "how?" Those people are displaced NOW. They can't go into suspended animation for months - or years. They will have to find some way to go on with their lives. I can't see the current administration providing for their needs while they wait for that infernal mess to be cleaned up, decontaminated, and all the damaged and destroyed buildings replaced.

I would want desperately to see New Orleans revived, but I just can't see how. I can't see any insurance company ever offering flood insurance for a property in New Orleans again. I can't see parts of New Orleans being made habitable again after the chemical contamination that is going to occur. Louisiana is an environmental nightmare when it's in good shape. The pollution and chemical contamination of the environment is horrific. Toxic waste is one of the underlying causes of the high rates of cancer in the southern part of the state. That stuff is in those flood waters - all the illegal toxic waste dumps in the swamps, all the crap from the refineries.

So my question is "how?" when someone says "well, they gotta rebuild New Orleans because I want to see it someday" or "they'll rebuild it because I love it so much". The logistics are beyond belief. And saying "we're Americans, we can do anything" or "it'll take a lotta hard work, but we'll do it" isn't good enough. I want to know HOW anyone proposes to fix something that has been so utterly devastated, all infrastructure wiped out, poisoned. And I don't want to hear about the Netherlands or San Francisco. The Netherlands has never been contaminated with feet of toxic sludge and all their infrastructure completely destroyed, and San Francisco doesn't sit in a bowl five to ten feet below sea level.

Worst of all is knowing that the flooding did not have to happen.

[Kelvin Mace]

8. I was listening to a reporter interview a Dutch engineer

about the flood control projects in the Netherlands. While the levys in NOLA were designed to protect the city from everything up to a "100 year flood", the Dutch system was designed for everything up to a "10,000 year flood", in other words, 1,000 times safer than ours.

The reporter didn't get it and wondered about the expense of such a system. The engineer explained the cost was peanuts compared to what we will pay for Katrina.

[Pachamama]

17. The Dutch engineering of dykes and their "land reclamation projects" are

simply amazing....

I lived for awhile in Holland....dated an engineer who took me out to some of the projects...I will say its incredible to see them actually reclaiming land from the sea and building these incredible levees and dyke systems.

I do not believe for a minute that the "technology" didn't exist to have prevented the flooding disaster as a result of the failure of the levees. I blame the failure on those that cut funding to the Army Corp of Engineers et al that needed to have done the necessary work and were unable to do so because it was not treated as a priority.

[expatriate]

22. Yes, the levees in New Orleans have always been known

to be less than sufficient for a really big storm surge. In fact, the Lake Ponchartrain levee breached at Kenner in 1995 during torrential rains.

A truly massive and well engineered levee system would be needed. There was a special hurricane water control system in the works during the Clinton administration, but work on that has stopped since fuding was cut by Shrub and Co. Possibly if it had been finished, New Orleans would just be cleaning up today, instead of inundated.

I don't know if the dike system in the Netherlands would hold up to a Category Five hurricane. They say it could - but for some reason, I just can't see the Bush administration authorizing that kind of money, and such a system would take years and years to build.

[d-artignan]

24. About the Dutch project

Since I'm from the Netherlands, I might as well put in my say.

The project started after the 1953 flood of Zeeland which is basically comparable to this tragedy as far as scale goes. It was an unexpected flooding (even though the storm was predicted they forgot to maintain the sea dikes) at 2:00 AM. About 1800 people died in the tragedy. This was a rural area where about 100,000 people lived. The people were asleep at the time and caught by surprise, however - unlike New Orleans - there was an immense rescue operation which started in full force the next day and included almost the entire military, police force and fire departments as well as foreign aid which quickly arrived.

To prevent a flood like that it was decided to sustain a storm which occured either every 1,000 years or every 10,000 years. The dikes were raised to the 1,000 year level and the huge projects for the 10,000 year level because it is easier to repair a broken dike/leeve (that is if you start throwing in the sandbangs and concrete blocks right away)



http://maps.google.com/maps?q=rotterdam,+netherlands&ll=51.677665,3.935852&spn=0.474063,1.288971&t=k&hl=en

As you can see from the image the entire coastline is guarded by a thick white line which is the dike and all the inlets are closeed either by permanent dikes or by dikes which can be opened and closed.

One of the last parts of the project was the possibility to close the river Maas which later becomes the Rhine. This was also one of the most complex system. It's called the Maeslandkeering and was finished in 1997.



http://maps.google.com/maps?q=rotterdam,+netherlands&ll=51.952729,4.161072&spn=0.014724,0.040280&t=k&hl=en

Those hammers you see are 237 meters (777 feet) long, 220 meters (721 feet) wide and 22 meters (72 feet) high and can close.





Since the Maas and Mississippi are comparable rivers you problably need a similar system (the Thames has gates to close it off as well).

There is one thing which they didn't do and that is that the harbors of Rotterdam are allowed to be flooded in case of huge storms. And those harbors mainly consist of the ... oil refineries and other petrochemical industry, so I guess that the irony is that every thing is defended except for the oil companies...



The card showing the unprotected area

> The engineer explained the cost was peanuts compared to what we will pay for Katrina.

The total cost of the Deltaworks were 2,5 billion Euros at the time and about 100 million Euros a year in maintenance. So that's a fraction of the damage which Katrina did.

[Polemicist]

16. There are no private flood insurers now...

Flood insurance is all Federally underwritten. Local insurance companies just handle the paperwork for a small commission. That will not change.

In fact, the Federal government has been trying hard for years to mandate that everyone purchase flood insurance in Federally determined flood hazard zones. They have even gone so far as to declare some communities out of compliance with flood coverage, due to critically low levels of coverage.

They have made mortgage companies require flood coverage with mortgage loan in flood zones. But in mature communities like New Orleans, with lots of older homes that are paid for in full, or with small older mortgages, there is no way to require the owners to purchase flood insurance coverage.

Lack of flood insurance coverage will be the greatest loss of wealth in this New Orleans disaster. Many will lose everything with absolutely no insurance at all.

What will the government offer them? Subsidized loans. But little real aid to rebuild.

[Nothing Without Hope]

21. No, the flooding did not have to happen.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4523783
Thread title: CNN/New Orleans:"Mayor blasts failure to patch levee breeches" and that's {only the beginning}:

Did you know the Bush Administration has REFUSED search/rescue aid from Canada? What gives them the right to choose death for all those people that they are not bothering to try to help? It's like they WANT all those poor black people to die, and I'm not kidding.

[crispini]

6. Very true

and very scary.

[Old Mouse]

7. watching the television news gives the opposite opinion.

You are of course, correct. None of the existing, flooded buildings, homes, shops restaurants, offices, will ever be habitable again. The city would have to be effectively razed before rebuilding, and even if undertook the soil contamination would present significant problems.

It is possible that despite the toxicity, the decision could be made to just replace the bottom stories of sheetrock and start moving people back in, for an illusion of return to normalcy regardless of the health dangers.

But look on the bright side, even though we are in the middle of complete global environmental collapse, we can look forward to Bush's further dismantling of environmental protections as the solution to disaster!

[Kelvin Mace]

9. Methinks that Katrina

will be Bush's Waterloo.

[proud2BlibKansan]

11. I hope you are right

Oh please, I hope you are right.

[Garbo 2004]

18. Only a matter of time before the Bush Administration & their allied noise

machine will be complaining that the media is only showing the bad and not the good they are doing. They'll claim criticism of their handling of the disaster is just politics. They'll talk about acts of God and "no one could have imagined..."

Rummy on the breakdown of law and order and why people didn't evacuate before the storm: "Free people are free to make bad choices." The Pentagon will release pics of military folks distributing candy and toys to happy children. They'll have a hurricane refugee giving a testimonial and thanking God for all the assistance the Bush Administration has provided. (It will later turn out that the "refugee" is a cousin of a White House aide.)

No doubt they'll spin. But I'm also thinking more and more, fewer people will buy it. Even people who don't have much use for gov't figure a huge regional natural disaster is one of the occasions where they expect the the feds to step in effectively to help out since it's beyond the scope of local jurisdictions. And most folks just don't like watching their country in a disaster looking like a third world banana republic with folks begging for help and dying for want of basic necessities.

9-11, Iraq, Katrina: Bush's "trifecta."

[TahitiNut]

14. One of the biggest lessons: Failure to invest in PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE

Let's just take some easy examples. We already know about the levees.

The interstate highways. Perhaps most are too young to remember, but those were federally subsidized largely for civil defense purposes. (The dollars came out of general revenues, not gas taxes.) That meant evacuation and deployment of emergency assistance - manpower, supplies, emergency equipment. By truck and caravans. Now ... how does anyone keep their eye on the objective and allow interstates to be built below flood level in an area where the foremost KNOWN disaster risk is flooding? How the hell do they become impassible under the very conditions they're built to address?

Communications. Second only to transport, communications is essential to civil defense. Under what kind of inanity is that infrastructure allowed to be privateered and completely nonfunctional when it's needed the most??

Emergency shelter. How long have these people known about hurricanes and flooding? Where the f*ck have they planned to shelter thousands? It's completely insane to expect all the privateered hotels and motels to handle the load. A stadium. largely built on the taxpayers' backs, proved totally incapable. No fresh water cisterns. No chemical toilets. Totally inadequate ventilation. No cots. No medical supplies. And it was set below flood grade. Insane.


This country has coasted for decades on the investments made in public infrastructure built in the 30's and 50's. Hydroelectric projects (turned over to privateers), roads and highways, sewage systems, water systems, power systems, ... all now regarded as PORK, with slices of bacon handed out for the least work and highest profit.

Our public infrastructure isn't being managed for the common good ... it's managed for the narrowest and highest private profit.

[blue northern]

15. excellent points

The true totality of what's happened hasn't hit many people outside of the affected areas yet, relatively speaking.

Once the waters start to recede what they will reveal will be absolutely horrific.

:cry:

[anarchy1999]

19. Okay, you just officially broke my heart.

I'll see you all in the later am.
Peace
anarchy1999
S

[Lindsay]

20. Just wanted to thank you all

for an exceptionally clear,concise and thoughtful discussion of the issues.

[notadmblnd]

23. can't deny 1/2 million people displaced

and it is indeed a dire situation. But I don't think you are giving the human race much credit for their endurance and ability to adapt. But I don't believe all hope is lost yet. I want you to see this. maybe it will give you some encouragement and hope.

http://www.colpipe.com/press_release/pr_73.asp

Colonial Pipeline today announced that it is safely restarting its pipeline. The initial restart of Colonial's Main lines 1 and 2 is scheduled to begin within the next several hours.


Initial service restoration will provide between 25% and 35% of Colonial's normal operating capacity. Both gasoline and distillate service is included in this system restart. Colonial's first priority through all of these restart activities is the protection of public safety and the environment.


Colonial anticipates that the maximum percentage of normal capacity that these interim measures will provide is between 50% and 60%. Colonial continues to work closely with local electrical utilities as they begin to restore power along the pipeline.


Colonial Pipeline, headquartered in Alpharetta, Ga., delivers a daily average of 100 million gallons of gasoline, home heating oil, aviation fuel and other refined petroleum products to communities and businesses throughout South and the Eastern United States. Colonial consists of more than 5,500 miles of pipeline, originating at Houston, Texas, and terminating at the New York harbor.

[BamaBecky]

25. I'm at a loss for words......n/t