Katrina

[filkertom]

It's been a year.

A lot of New Orleans is still screwed up beyond belief.

I know some of you left and came back. I know some of you left and didn't come back. And I know some of you have visited. What are your thoughts on the matter?

Comments

[tfabris.livejournal.com]

A friend recently took a drive through new Orleans. This is from only a couple weeks ago.

The most striking photo, a house on top of a car. Still there, one year later:

I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

...but I can't help but think that maybe they should have just demolished the city.

As a friend of mine put it "Why the heck are you living in a hole that is below sea level right next to the ocean anyway?"

I think they should have flooded the heck out of it even more than it was then built the new city around the rim. Guided boat tours and diving a plus.

I'm not trying to sound harsh here but when you can't bury a body below ground it's not really a place you should be living.

I can understand the lost history aspect but honestly it's never going to be the same again anyway. Just this once instead of rebuilding the old I think we should be building new.

Please keep in mind that is is ALL OPINION on my part. The last thing I want to do here is start a flamewar on filkertom's LJ.

[partiallyclips.livejournal.com]

I just want to know if anything has been changed. Has anything been learned? Are we the slightest bit better prepared to deal with the next one of these?

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Probably not. Between greed and chaos as a species we can't even consider helping our fellow man. How can we consider being prepared for these things? [/sarcasm]

Or even more important getting off this rock?

Sorry...the way this whole Katrina thing was handled makes me a little bitter when I think about it...

I had friends go down there and help and I couldn't go with so I also feel a little guilty. :-(

Truthfully though? There were a lot of people around here that shrugged their shoulders and sat on their asses. I think that attitude sickens me most of all.

I at least ponied up a couple hundred for gas for my friends while they were down there.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

And another thought just occurred to me:

There are literally TONS of cheap housing options out there that can be pre-fabbed in almost no time. Why didn't someone step in and fund those?

Hell! It would have cost almost nothing to construct sprayed concrete monolithic domes (http://www.monolithic.com/plan_design/house_plans/1/1043.html) that would withstand any future floods without a problem.

Are we truly so cold as beings that we can't perceive the need for these sorts of things?

[batyatoon]

Speaking purely practically? You're right. Of course you're right.

But there's no way we'll do that. We can't.



It is in fact possible to bury bodies below ground in New Orleans. Or at least it was a year before Katrina, when we buried my grandfather.

And yes, that's just one of a thousand kinds of reasons why people attach themselves to a place and won't leave it.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

*sigh* I totally understand the emotional attachment. I really really do.

But there's got to be a point where people say "Enough!".

On the other hand I can see many people staying just to prove they aren't beaten. I can identify with this too. I just think that maybe it's the wrong thing to do in this case.

Like I said though - only my opinion.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Those who haven't returned, aren't likely going to. So it's time for them to stand on their own two feet, wherever they've landed. A year is enough time to figure out what one is going to do and what direction one's life is going to go.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

By a stroke of good fortune, my wife and I left New Orleans last June. We just got home (two days ago) from visiting my family on the Mississippi coast and my in-laws in New Orleans.

I admit to being rather surprised by how much recovery was still to be done - having lived through previous hurricanes, I can remember things always springing back up with mushroom-like rapidity.

The Mississippi coast has recovered more than New Orleans, which I attribute to:
A. Having suffered only the hurricane, without the subsequent flooding.
B. Quicker action as far as new flood insurance maps.

We didn't go into New Orleans proper this time, as my in-laws have all used their insurance money to resettle in Metairie and Kenner (the western suburbs). Driving through/over the city at night on I-10/I-610, I was struck by the number of formerly thriving neighborhood which were now completely dark and uninhabited. Even in the western suburbs, which suffered less than the city proper, it looked like at least half the people were still living in FEMA trailers, and even the inhabitable houses mostly had blue roofs. The businesses that have managed to reopen don't have signs up yet. Businesses that were previously open 24-hours now struggle to find enough employees to stay upon on a more limited schedule. Even as far away as Biloxi, Mississippi, fast food places are still offering $125/week bonuses to try to attract employees.

At this point, I think the only things really holding back the recovery on the Mississippi coast is the need to rebuild the Highway 90 bridges in Biloxi and Bay St. Louis - I think once those are back in place, recovery will jump into fast forward. In New Orleans, on the other hand, recovery hasn't even properly begun. So many people are still in a holding pattern, waiting to find out if they'll even be able to get flood insurance if they rebuild and, if so, what the building requirements will be. The few people who have rebuilt in my wife's aunt's old neighborhood (a couple of blocks south of the University of New Orleans, have rebuilt up on pilings. You used to see that out at fishing camps, but never in the middle of New Orleans. To the extent that New Orleans does ever come back, it will (with the exception of the French Quarter and the Garden District, which Cannot Ever Change) look very different.

[filkerbrl.livejournal.com]

Take a long look at any of the photos of destruction in New Orleans. Go on. Let it burn into your memory. Now imagine that put INSIDE of a car. If you can imagine that, you can imagine the inside of Tom's car. I've NEVER seen so much trash in a persons car. You'd think it had been buried in a dump with the windows open.

If he's not busy emptying his bowels every 10 minutes, he's trying to pass himself off as a tech wizard. Just remember, there are people out there who know all about you. From your blatherings on politics to your chemical imbalances to your throwing down customer files and stomping on them because you have the mentality of a child.

Now go get me some mutton bitch.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Don't care for the Dutch much, do you?

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

I was there this past June, and it appears that in the last two months almost nothing has changed -- you said just about everything I wanted to say.

Something to ponder though: the parts of New Orleans with an elevation below sea level were once *above* sea level. There appears to be evidence that the levees themselves are part of the cause for the city's sinking.

[brithistorian.livejournal.com]

There's that, and also that cutting the shipping channels has led to erosion of the wetlands that had previously served as buffers for the city.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Not sure how to respond to this.

I'd honestly forgotten about the Dutch but I still don't think it matters in this case. The area is pretty trashed an IMO should have been wiped clean. Give those people a fresh start.

But you've got a very good point! And an even better one would be would anything the Dutch did over their history apply here? Can we apply some of their current technology to solve this issue once and for all?

Seems pretty silly that we can do all this industrial stuff in the world but we can't keep water out of a hole...

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in the photos of New Orleans from my husband gfish's trip. (They took a side trip to New Orleans when they went to Houston.)

So much that's just still sitting there, so much that's just deserted. And yes, there really is a house on top of that car...

[vixyish.livejournal.com]

Oh whoops, Tony beat me to it, I should've looked first.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

... Y'know something? I used to have a really trash-filled car. I did. I didn't take good care of it, and it was filled with garbage. And it's gone, and my van is not filled with trash, and what difference is it to you?

Oh, sorry, that's right. You're a troll. You're wrong about pretty much everything else, and I have no idea what brought this on, and you're banned.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[palenoue.livejournal.com]

Yes, there are prefab houses available, and the feds have quite a lot in storage. And they were still in storage throughout the Katrina disaster and are still gathering dust. The no-bid contracts for erecting temporary housing and rebuilding were all given to Bush croneys (especially haliburton) and the Bush adminstration has done everything it could to prevent investigations into what happened to the money and why there's nothing to show for it. In fact, from what little _has_ been uncovered, Haliburton got tons of money for handling the deployment of pre-fab temporary housing, yet six months later not one house was removed from storage _and_ Haliburton demanded more money to pay for equipment it's renting but has yet to use.

I just wonder when it's finally going to sink in the American consciousness. Hopefully before the coming election.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Wow. I grew up in southwestern Detroit, not the best neighborhood by any stretch but nowhere near as bad as some of the really riot-devastated areas that are still abandoned along Michigan Ave. east of Dearborn. I got kinda used to seeing beat-up buildings. But those look as bad as anything I ever saw in Detroit.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[pixel.livejournal.com]

Katrina Cottages (http://www.cusatocottages.com/index_content.html)

Real buildings, designed for a family of four, fully insulated, can withstand 140MPH winds, cheaper per unit than the FEMA trailers, able to be expanded onto or used as a permanent guest house.

And FEMA can't build them because FEMA isn't allowed to build 'permanent structures'. And they won't bend the rules, or change them to allow people safe permanent housing for less than the temporary trailers. Instead FEMA has nearly 11,000 trailers sitting on an airfield in Hope AK (http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/47/17632). Where they are not being used, and costing us a ton of money to keep their.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[beldar.livejournal.com]

FEMA ordered a crapload of manufactured housing units, and they just sat in a holding area in Texarkana, as no one had arranged any way of getting them to the Gulf Coast and distributing them -- I found out about this several months ago, not long after talking to someone living in Biloxi who said the main impediment to the rebuilding effort was lack of housing.

It's amazing that the Bush bunch can be compared to the old Soviet central planning that let wheat rot unharvested in the fields -- while Moscow begged for food aid from the U.S. -- because some bureaucrat hadn't thought things through (wasn't his job to).

Not all the city is so far beneath sea level. In fact the French Quarter had moderate flooding which subsided rather quickly -- very good news from a historical preservation and tourism standpoint. A Newsweek article quotes Dutch engineers as saying they could get cracking on a plan to make NOLA floodproof in a matter of months, if Uncle Sam would just ask.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[beldar.livejournal.com]

Not to nitpick but AK is Alaska, Arkansas is AR (which does not stand for Arizona, which is AZ)

You wouldn't believe some of the roundabout journeys mail took when they first went to two-letter postal abbreviations.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[beldar.livejournal.com]

Correction, to conform to other post: that was Hope, Ark., which is less than an hour from Texarkana.

Re: I know I'm going to generate some flamage here...

[pixel.livejournal.com]

Whoops. My error.

[batyatoon]

I'm not sure "right thing to do" or "wrong thing to do" are meaningful judgments to make in this circumstance.

It's a question of what people feel is important, and this is one of those cases where perceived importance is actual importance.

Mortgages

[bchbum-98.livejournal.com]

As someone who works in the mortgage industry I am interested in the financial mechanics of rebuilding, or not.

I would think (A.)that every house inside the levees would require flood insurance in order for the owner to write a mortgage note on it. And (B.) the folks responsible for issuing flood insurance would periodically test the worthiness of the levees. Assuming that (A.) happened and (B.) either didn't happen or was inadequate, the federal government, who underwrites flood insurance owes a boatload of money to the policy-holders. I'm pretty confident that the insurance has been or will be paid.

The next question is whether or not the feds should write new policies on existing or new homes in the flood-prone area. It seems to me that the answer should be "NO" unless and until the levees are rebuilt to withstand a category 5 hurricane coming straight at the city.

That hasn't happened, and therefore I don't think any homes inside the levees should get flood insurance, and the owners should not be able to borrow on the homes, and therefore the only construction happening ought to be by folks who have the cash to build and no mortgage debt - which is almost NOBODY.

I love New Orleans and hope it will survive, but let's not put the cart before the horse.