- Dear Jeff,
-
- You may have already posted this on your site, but I
wanted to send it just in case...In 2001, Scientific American published
a piece entitled "Drowning New Orleans" which outlined with chilling
accuracy the current scenario. I guess this contradicts Bush's and Chertoff's
claim that "no one anticipated" the "severity" of the
flooding.
-
- Here is the first paragraph, followed by the link to
the online essay:
-
- October 01, 2001
- Drowning New Orleans
- A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20
feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi
River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering
of southeastern Louisiana can save the city
- By Mark Fischetti
-
- The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls
of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in
all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the
right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under
20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri,
a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of
dead bodies."
-
- New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city
lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain
to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because
of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting
it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi
Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing.
A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the
size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes.
-
- Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash
over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside
and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would
be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes.
Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds
of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than
100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.
-
- http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=
00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000
|
