What's the real possibility for rebuilding New Orleans?

[frank280zx]

 

This is what N.O needs.... it was one of teh costliest pieces of infrastructure that will withhold rough seas with 12 meter elevation and up to 14 bft of wind.. and keeps us save.

and thsi is why

. this was rebuilt aswel.

 

here you can see what is able to be closed with giant doors

 

[cygnusx1]

Here are my two cents.

 

For STRICTLY historic/memorial/industrial reasons, a part of it should be rebuilt in it's original location. TO all the people that lost their homes, Greater-New Orleans (residential) should be built in a new location that would be not within reach of a 200year storm surge.

 

-Rebuild the dykes.

-Build a tourist/entertainment/memorial/industrial ONLY area in the original location.

-Create a Greater New Orleans for all the displaced residents in a "safer" nearby location.

 

It's a tough proposition but it can and should be done. With this plan, you end up with all the original industrial benefits of that geographic location, a place to remember, a place to vacation, and no permanent residents to lose.

 

This country is rapidly heading towards becoming an entertainment, services, and R&D country. This plan would fit the bill nicely.

[zguy95135]

They are going to have a hell of a time rebuilding the city.

 

Look at the pics in this thread

http://opszone.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=4969&hl=

 

Theres a pic of downtown under about 5ft of water, I can't even imagine the extent of the flooding. I've seen pictures of flooded suburbs with downtown far off in the background, the entire city is under water.

 

I hope they rebuild it back to it's original glory because of its historical value. A good seawall like in Galveston TX, and make the levy better so it won't break again.

[johnc]

New Orleans will be rebuilt and its up to the residents to decide in what way. It our job to help them for compassionate reasons and as part of our "social contract" here in the US.

 

BTW... almost impossible to permanently destroy a city. Nuclear weapons couldn't eliminate Hiroshima and Nagasaki, fire bombing didn't eliminate Dresden or London, eathquakes and fire didn't eliminate San Francisco.

[datsunlover]

Hard to permanently destroy a city yes.. but if you loose enough of it, it will sometimes be abandoned.. I can't remamber the name, but I'm sure there is/was a city in Russia that was destroyed and basicaly abandoned.. Makes sence to me; after a ceartain point, why bother? It would be easier to rebuild somewhere else wouldn't it? Kind of like... starting with a less rusty car to begin with, so you save time and $$$ in the long run..

[Vintage-TechZ]

I apologize if many of you have already seen this or dissagree. This is in no way my opinion or anythng else. I am simply posting for an unusual side of a Journalist today.

 

........BTW, I agree with those of you who feel the township should rebuild, only with newer tech safety margins and perhaps away from the shore altogether...........I'm just glad we didn't loose any of our friends from HBZ.It could have been much different.It sounds like this city has had a slow go of matureing and growing.Lets all hope they can get a grip this time around...socially and governmentally too!

.............Vinny

 

(article)

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State

 

by Robert Tracinski

Sep 02, 2005

by Robert Tracinski

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

 

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

 

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

 

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

 

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

 

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

 

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

 

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

 

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

 

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from aWashington Times story:

 

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

 

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

 

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

 

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

 

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

 

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

 

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

 

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

 

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

 

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

 

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

 

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

 

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

 

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

 

**********************************

[rudypoochris]

heavy

[Guest tony78_280z]

B.S.

A person can be poor, and respect the lives and welfare of others. A person who blames their own cruel and evil behavior on their social situation is simply cruel and evil with a hollow excuse.

Yeah turning out the criminals probably escelated things quite a bit. Those formarly in jail (already anarchists at heart) were released and SHOWN that the law enforcement can't stop them. It would only take a few hundred such individuals (who would normaly only be stopped or detered by the law enforcement) to terrorise an entire city.

 

But I also know many a honest poor person who wouldn't harm another and would risk his own life to save another regardless of social standing.

 

Suprised?

I recall a huricane or two (maybe four) past that just grazed the gulf area, and reporters saying that had it hit New Orleans it would drown the city. So when I heard that this last huricane hit the area I said, "Well you knew it was coming." If my mayor interupts my boadcast to say, "You got to get out of the city, we can not guarantee your safety!" then My butt is in the Z seat, wife and kids in the van loaded with clothes and food and we are taking a road trip. Period.

 

Huricanse have a bit of warning to them. You can't compare them to tornadoes and earth quakes. Tornado, you get a few minutes warning if you are lucky. Earth-quake not so much. But the huricane they knew was coming.

 

Granted there were probably ALOT of people who simply couldn't get out. But I bet a larger number are those who were just too stuborn. And alot of those stuborn, are having a blast killing and raping.

 

And now for the question I've posed to many that no one can seem to answer for me: A history question... Why the hell did they build the city on land below sea level in the first place? I'm not sure of the cities exact founding, but it is alot older than the United States. So 250+ years ago did some french guy came along and said, "You know, this place would make a great city if it wasn't under sea level. Lets bring in some pumps and settle down." ?? I understand it's a mighty port, and always has been, but they could have picked a site further up the misissippi or something, right?

[zdmz]

tony said:

 

"And now for the question I've posed to many that no one can seem to answer for me: A history question... Why the hell did they build the city on land below sea level in the first place?"

 

 

It is my understanding that NO was not always below sea level. The geography has changed over the last "250 years". The mississippy is rainsing because it is dumping sedement at its mouth, and NO is sinking due to the pumping of fresh water and possibly from oil being pumped. Please correct me if I am wrong.

 

Somewhere along the line, does anyone know when???, they figured out the need for the levy.

 

Ironically, I live in north central Nevada and have to buy flood insurance because I live in a flood zone. We get about half an inch of rain a year. Apparently there was a flood here back in 1962. A major cause of the flood was the rail line that is between the town and the Humboldt river. The raised railroad track acted as a dam preventing water from naturaly flowing to the river. The local lore says that some of the residents got some explosives from a mine and blew up the tracks to let the water out because the "authorities" would not do anything. There is a levy around our town - but it is not tall enough to protect the community. Our local leadership has tried off and on to get the corps of engineers to come fix the levy for years to no avail.

[dr_hunt]

Hit the nail on the head. I need workers, I had a guy come look for a job last week. He says how much do you pay, I said, $8/hr to start. He says, do you pay cash?, I say, No, that's illegal and besides, I have workers comp insurance. He says, well, that'd screw up my welfare so unless you pay cash, I'm not interested. I say, OK, then I don't need you.

[Pop N Wood]

B.S.

A person can be poor' date=' and respect the lives and welfare of others.[/quote']

 

I don't think the article is equating being poor with having a welfare mentality. It is more the attitude that somehow it is the government's responsibility to take care of you.

 

One of the best quotes I read out of all of this came from some small town in Mississippi. The town had been completely wiped out, but several days later there still were no government relief workers present. When asked why this was, one of residents said "we are suffering too, but you don't see use killing each other..". And somehow or the other, people in his town has organized their own relief efforts and were taking care of each other.

 

Yes, they can respect other people, but I think the welfare mentality is spot on. Compare what happened in New Orleans with what is happening in the rural areas. I have absolutely no sympathy for some one who spent 3 days sitting next to a dead body and did nothing to rectify the situation. I just thank God for the second amendment.

 

As for getting out of the city, you need to read a few of the news articles. It wasn't as easy as you think. Especially if you don't have a car.

 

BTW, looks like they didn't let all the prisoners go "free". Here is a picture of prisoners being held on a freeway overpass.

 

http://www.wwltv.com/sharedcontent/breakingnews/slideshow/083005_dmnkatrina/13.html

[johnc]

Sorry, this thread has crossed our political ban boundry...