Perhaps we can call this city… Vicksburg?
DDG, I’m going to look at a map of that area to familiarize myself with it. My first question, though, is why wasn’t the area already developed? If the area is prone to flooding why build there? If it seems a reasonable place for a major city, what wasn’t it built already?
If I’m missing it, is it N. or S. of Vicksburg?
Rhysdad, repeat after me: New Orleans is an important port city. Do you have any idea how important? It acts as a gateway to the world from the 14,000 mile long inland waterway system. 6000 vessels a year move through that port, and 2200 load and unload in New Orleans. 700,000 cruise ship passengers move through that port every year.
New Orleans is also a railroad hub, with six class 1 railway lines moving through it - more than any other port in the U.S.
So all this handwaving about how much rebuilding costs per resident, and how it would be better to make a new city elsewhere is just crazy. Without the port of New Orleans, U.S. trade will be seriously hurt, and the economic effects of that will be dramatic.
That port will be one of the first things repaired and re-opened.
The area around Vicksburg is no less than 225 miles upriver from New Orleans, and that doesn’t even account for all the bends in the Mississippi. I’d guess the actual distance by river is closer to 300 miles. Feel free to make your own calculations. Even if there is enough land there to build a New Orleans-sized city and port, and even if the government builds new roads and rail lines there to accomadate the necessary land traffic, it would take a hell of a lot of work to make the river navigable by sea vessels. It may be possible, but we’re talking way more fucking expensive than any extant canal - orders of magnitude more.
How much traffic are we talking? An extremely fucking large volume of traffic:
This country needs a port where New Orleans is. Period. Trying to build or expand a port farther upriver that can handle the same traffic, or spreading the traffic across various other ports, will ultimately take more money to implement and maintain, and drive up the prices of all kinds of goods.
Nah, nah, nah, you’re wayyyy too far to the north.
Get out yer Rand McNally 2005 Road Atlas. Start at Baton Rouge. Now look up and to the left about 3/4 of an inch, see where it says “New Roads” in boldface? River takes a big bend to the west there, where the teeny print says “Francisville”. Now look to the right–there are two pine trees labeled “Locust Grove SHS” and “Audubon SHS”. That’s where I’m talking about, that chunk of land in and around US 61, Lindsey, St. Francisville, Jackson, where the river turns to the left. The reason it hasn’t been “used” yet is almost certainly because Baton Rouge’s urban sprawl simply hasn’t reached it, not because it’s unsuitable for building. US 61 is marked as “four lane yellow and red” on the Rand McNally all the way from Baton Rouge to the “Audubon SHS”, which says to me, “Heavily traveled strip development and light industrial area servicing Baton Rouge bedroom community commuters who wanna live in the ‘country’ but who still want plumbing and police protection”. And on the Gazetteer the space is full of the tiny meandering red lines for roads and mixed white “open space” and light green “trees” that says to me, “Farmland being converted to subdivisions.” And I see contour lines, which means “slope” of some kind, i.e. it’s not flat river bottomland or marsh. Obviously, although I’m not a geologist, the reason the Mighty Miss hangs a ralph at that point is because there’s some insurmountable geology underneath West Feliciana Parish. You could have a NOLA there that wasn’t below sea level for a change, and then the next question would be, “Is a NOLA that isn’t below sea level–still NOLA?” 
And if the answer was “no”, you could dub the new city, “North Baton Rouge”.
Or how about “Naginville”…
Nagin City? Nagintown?
Because it’s not a reasonable place for a city. Cities have to have a reason, and there’s no reason for a city to have grown there.
Everything all up and down the river was built in relation to the river. Early explorers didn’t stage many forays out into the wilderness around them: they simply went “up the river” because it was easier. So all the little settlements and plantations were founded “up the river”, in a narrow strip along the river. And everything traveled by river, goods and merchandise, everything.
So the chunk of land I’m talking about isn’t “up the river”. It’s off to the side. You’d have to get out of your boats and really hike up in there, through the jungle, and nobody wanted to do that for a long time. Jackson, Louisiana, was named for President Andrew Jackson, which puts its founding at about 1812 I guess, and the people who would have settled there wouldn’t have been founding a great river trading center, they’d have been founding a small country town, but one which was nevertheless still connected to the big river by Thompson Creek, everything still moving by water.
But if you were a farmer homesteading in West Feliciana Parish, you still had to pack your goods from your farm over to the creek or river by oxen or mule, and if you lived too far away from it, it wasn’t economically feasible to homestead there. So basically nobody did, much, which left the middle parts that were too far away from water underdeveloped, until people started building roads for cars to drive on. And then you could get up in there, but why would you want to build a city there? There’s nothing there, except empty land.
But nowadays, with our technology, we’re not dependent on natural cultural and geological forces to dictate where a city should arise.
As witness Brasilia.
So just because a city isn’t there already doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a city there.
Can you Mapquest it for me? I can’t find Locust Grove or Audubon.
It looks to me like you’re referring to the triangle of land where the Mississippi takes a hard left before curving North.
Is that it?
One idea I’ve not seen mentioned is for New Orleans to annex nearby higher ground. The adjacent suburb of Metairie could become part of New Orleans. Going a few miles further west, perhaps Kenner could be subsumed as well.
At the same time, St. Tammany Parish – north of Lake Pontchartrain – could be annexed as well. The idea is to increase the square mileage of New Orleans so that the vast majority of it’s residents can inhabit relative high ground. The port can be repaired and kept in place, as can many historical areas and the touristy areas.
I think I’ve pulled together most of the resources I need, and I’ve begun breaking it down into chapters. These chapters will each be quite lengthy, but the working titles of the chapters are:
Silt - And Related Nastiness
CHiGRs - Scylla is infested
Scylliar
The Twist - In Which I Lose by Winng
The chapters may take me a couple of days. Y’see, I have a live other than this board, and I’ve been ignoring it.
And so, it begins…
Yup. Thass the place.
Mapquest map. There’s St. Francisville, and then Jackson up to the northeast, and Lindsay down a bit to the southeast. Zoom out one click and you’ll see Baton Rouge.
I’m not surprised you can’t find Locust Grove and Audubon, since all they are is state historic (or commemorative) sites. Those little Rand McNally pine trees tend to be that way, almost as much fun to locate as their “red squares”. Locust Grove is just a single cemetery, all that remains of Jefferson Davis’ sister’s plantation; Audubon is the place where Himself did a lot of sketching, and has a restored house, a garden, and a nature trail.
The big green directly west of St. Francisville is Tunica Swamp, which as Google will tell you ad infinitum, is the home of the nation’s largest bald cypress (do tell). Also the Tunica Hills, which the Nature Conservancy gets very excited about, their binocs jiggling frenetically on their skinny little chests, are apparently spang where I’m proposing a new site for New New Orleans, or Brasilia North. Very little of it is actually “preserved”, so the bulldozers may scoop at will.
Not wishing to derail a good squabble or anything, but why is it totally necessary to have a brand spanking new city rather than just upgrading an existing one by a few sizes? This happens a lot in Europe where some tiny village gets picked as the site of a ‘new town’ and then BLAM is swallowed whole by new development.
Places like Biloxi, Mobile or even Laplace seem like they could be built up to take on some or all of the functions of NO if you were to start pushing pins in a map - Houston is a major port which relies on a lengthy canal to connect it to the gulf, so there is SOME flexibility, if one is tossing billions of dollars around like water. Re-routing freeways, railways and so on isn’t that difficult, just expensive. I’m sure the engineers could even connect Baton Rouge directly to the Gulf if it was felt necessary.
Because it’s fun? It’s more fun than Sim City, that’s fer sure.
Besides, how are you going to explain to, say, Baton Rouge, that it’s not “forcible dumping of 800,000 people on them”, it’s an “upgrade”? Bend over and hold the vaseline…
And what about all the people who take a chauvinistic pride in being “from” NOLA, and who have spent all their lives jeering at the poor unfortunate folks who are merely “from” Baton Rouge, and then find themselves moved upstream, so that they, too, are now “from” Baton Rouge? I see a lot of hara kiri being performed with shrimp cocktail forks…
I proposed exactly this a few posts up, except that I mentioned that the adjacent suburbs (on plenty high enough ground) would serve well. No need to rebuild a new city 100 miles away when suburbs within 10-15 miles away could be subsumes into the city limits.
Silt - And Related Nastiness
“It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi Mud.” - a line from the song, Mississippi Mud: by Harry Barris and James Cavanaugh.
No, no it’s not.
First, I’m going to give you a little of my background so you’ll understand from where I speak, and then we’ll move on to the nature of silt.
I live in Minneapolis. Have all my life. The Mississippi is only about a mile from whre I’m sitting and typing this. (It’s also several hundred feet lower in elevation, thank God.) Anyway, I’ve been recreating on the Mississippi since I was young. Currently, I own a houseboat. It’s moored in a marina on the Mississippi. Before that, I’ve owned a succession of other boats–in all of which I’ve enjoyed lots and lots of time on the Mississippi. I’ve fished in it, waterskied on it, and camped alongside of it.
I say that in order to say this: I’m familiar with Mississippi mud and silt.
It’s amazing stuff, really. It’s gluey enough to suck the shoes off of your feet if you try to walk through it, yet it’s slipprier’n snail snot. Here’s a picture of the kind of stuff I’m talking about. There’s another picture on this page, the fifth one down, that shows another example.
Ah, but you don’t get the full effect from a picture. To really appreciate it, you have to smell it.
It’s vile. It’s fetid in every sense of the word. The odor of the rotting biological component is nicely complimented by the fumes from the human and animal waste products all the while blending with the pungent tang of petrochemical pollution. With a hint of lemon.
This is what’s going to be left when the waters in NO are drawn down. Each square inch of land will be covered with it. Every flat surface will have silt at least inches deep, if not feet or yards deep in the areas more deeply submerged.
Every crack and cranny will be permeated. While the stuff is in suspension, it’s fine. By that I mean finely granulated, not neat and/or groovy. It gets into everything. Since the houses in NO weren’t hermetically sealed, it will be in every single one that was flooded–no exceptions.
And, it’s not as if NO is in the middle of a flowing current that is washing away silt as it’s deposited. No, it’s sitting in standing, stagnant water. So the stuff is settling.
This is a problem. When silt settles, it gets heavy. Real heavy. Heavy like the minute rock/clay particles that it’s made of. Begin to see a problem yet? Once the water is drawn down, the natural bouyancy it provided the houses won’t be there anymore. And it won’t run down into the basement, since houses in NO don’t have basements. They’re built on pilings above slabs that, initially, rest on the ground. (I say initially, because there is something called subsidence continually going on in NO, and it’s a tremendous problem in its own right.) The silt will simply settle on the floor (floors if the second story was also under water).
Let’s say that the level of settled silt in a house reaches, oh, four inches–not an unreasonable number. Now, remove the bouyancy of the water and remember that the entire house, not just the floor itself, is saturated and waterlogged. Add the weight of a 4 inch by 20 foot by 20 foot rock to the floorboards (and maybe the ceiling. What do you get?
A big splash as the house collapses.
Now, I’m not saying that this is going to happen in every house. Of course not. But it’ll happen to some, and it’ll weaken the structures of many more. Alot of floors and ceilings are going to sag even if the silt is able to be removed. But at least if you drop something and it rolls away, you’ll know where to look for it–in the middle of the floor.
Remember, we’ve just been talking about silt, and not some of the naster components of the silt. We’ve been leading up to this:
I said:
and you replied:
As a matter of fact, I do. Read down to the part that says:
Yes, he said “what levels of concentration.” Maybe those levels will be within acceptable limits (acceptable to whom?. I’m saying, here and now, that the “acceptable limits” standard will be exceeded. And you’re about to see why…
This is a survey done on the entire length of the Mississippi River by the US Geological Service. It’s in regard to heavy metals. The following quote is interesting:
This means that the heavy metals precipitate out into the silt. Don’t read it wrong and think that it “reduces or eliminates the heavy metals” completely. It means that they’re simply not in the water. They’re still there…in the silt.
But, maybe by some miracle there aren’t any heavy metals in the water around NO. (There are, but to reveal the cites for that would ruin the surprise ending I’m planning at the end of this saga.)
So, instead, lets confine our research to the icky stuff that we know is there.
I find this site amusing in a dark humor kind of way. It’s published by the State of Louisiana itself. It’s a PDF, but it’s worth a glimpse. It lists all of the microorganisms that are found in Louisiana’s waters, and it advises people to “Swim at your own risk.”
It contains other advisories such as, “Do not swim near a drainage pipe or ditch, or near runoff or littered areas.” (This seems to describe the city of NO to a T.) It further advises, “Minimize immersing your head when swimming.” Actually, I wouldn’t want to immerse my feet, much less my head.
And right in the middle of the page it lists some of the nasty bugs found in Louisiana’s waters. These little nasties include, but aren’t limited to: E. coli, salmonella, rotavirus, Norwalk, hepatitis A, Cryptosporidium and Giardia.
Now, someone is going to come along here and say, “But, but, but…those bugs are found everywhere–not just in New Orleans.” And I’m here to say, yep, they are,
BUT. NOT. IN. THE. SAME. CONCENTRATIONS!
The State of Louisiana saw fit to publish a notice regarding all of it’s waters (I wonder how many states have done that?), and can we suppose, just suppose, that the waters inundating NO and environs might be just a teensy bit more contaminated? What with the garbage that was indundated, the tens of thousand of toilets underwater and backing up, and the further contributions of human waste donated by the stranded inhabitants (What, you thought they were storing it in the closet until the water went down?)
Whooeee. That’s some nasty stuff that city is stewing in.
But even after all this, you’re saying, what do microorganisms in the water have to do with silt?
This study, if nothing else, contains a couple of interesting lines:
and
[Church Lady voice]
"Now, what can we use to kick silt up off the bottom…a hurricane? "
[/Church Lady voice]
The picture must be clearing up now. It must. Even for Scylla.
Enormous amounts of silt have been deposited in New Orleans. The silt is* toxic. It’s settling in the homes, in the schools, on the playgrounds, in the restaurants, in the hotels, everywhere. It won’t just wash away when the water is drawn down. No. Rather, it will congeal. Remember those pictures above? It solidifies into a mass so stinkingly foul and putrid that it rivals even that noisome, purulent sack of loathesome pus that Scylla uses for a mind.
-----------and on that pleasant note, I have to take a break. This chapter isn’t finished, not by a long shot, but I have a life, and that has to take precendence. When I return, I’ll try to finish out this chapter.
Besides, I don’t want to take a chance that I lose all of this and have to start over.
Pardon me if I don’t reply to any posts you might make to this particular epic yet. I’m on a roll, here, and I’m not going to get sidetracked. ------------------
When last we left you, the silt was settling, the microbes were multiplying, the petrochemicals were percolating, and the heavy metals were having a discussion about forming a new band called La Trine–not only because it’s a nice French-sounding name, it accurately reflects just exactly what NO has become: a latrine.
Okay, the water has gone down now, and the houses are beginning to dry out (doubtful, since the average humidity is 76%, but anyway…) . All we have left to deal with is the remaining layer of silt.
Well, just leave it there. It’ll dry out. Someday. Maybe.
Well, you can’t. It has bad stuff in it. Really, really bad stuff. Bacteria, viruses, heavy metals, petrochemicals, worms…the list goes on. And what’s more, it’s a fine growth medium. When the water is drawn down, and the crap is concentrated, it’s like Six Flags Over Shigella. Not to mention that the chemicals and metals aren’t going anywhere. So, you weigh your options, and after a lengthy thought process, you do the only logical thing:
You move right in.
What I’m about to attach here is one lengthy bastard of a PDF file (114 pages). If you click on the link, go take a nap and come back later. It’s about an International Lake Ontario - St. Lawrence River study.
Whether you think this study is pertinent to this discussion or not, you have to appreciate the following line excerpted from the study:
That’s nice. What?!
If anyone still reading this at this point still doesn’t believe that the silt currently settling in NO right now is toxic, then you might as well stop reading right now. I’m not going to try and convince you any further.
Ok, the water is gone, and the ground has dried up. Let’s say I have convinced you that the silt is toxic, and just leaving it there would be a bad thing. There’s nothing left to do but…
Scoop it up and cart it off somewhere. (Even that “somewhere” is in doubt. Who wants to say, "Sure, I’ll take a bunch of poisonous mud. Dump 'er over yonder.)
Well, now, just how much are we talking about? I guess we’re going to have to make some guesses here. I personally believe that, in some places (like Ward 9), the silt will be at least a yard deep. Other places, not so much. I’m going to take a WAG here and say the average depth, if it were to be spread out all over New Orleans, to be one foot.
One foot. That really doesn’t seem so bad. A fleet of dump trucks and front end loaders would be able to accomplish that kind of clearing out process in, what, a couple of weeks?
Not so. The bulldozers have to come in first. Why?
The houses.
The houses have been sitting and stewing in an unbelievably foul sauce for however long it takes before the water is drained. It’s not like many places where, in a flood, the waters rise and then recede after a couple of days. No, they’ve been there, simmering under the 90-degree sun, letting all of the tasty little bugs multiply.
In the walls. In the floors. In the couches (sofas for you southerners). In the mattresses. In the rugs. In the curtains. In the pillows.
The houses can’t get any more waterlogged. They’re saturated. And, they’re probably not drying out due to the constant high humidity.
What’s more, they stink to high heaven. Even if you don’t believe any of the other things I’ve told, believe this one: After a flood, the stuff left behind smells real bad.
The following are some words to live by:
Very few fools would find it fun to frolic in the fetid fumes of a Funkytown fourplex.
Even if the buildings are still structurally sound (they won’t be), and even if you’re unconcerned about the toxins that are left over inside every nook and cranny after you’ve swept out the stuff as best you can when the house has dried out (which it won’t), the smell alone would drive most people away.
Here, I have to reign it in and say, simply, the existing houses are uninhabitable. Period. They’ve got to go. The vast majority of the houses in New Orleans will have to go.
So the bull dozers come in. How long do you think this demolition will take? I can’t even hazard a guess. Let’s just say it’s done, and the houses are gone, and we’re back down to the mud.
Before, I allowed for an average depth of the mud of one foot. Finally, we can get to some serious shoveling.
Hold it there, bucko. There’s another consideration: the pre-existing dirt that now lays under the mud. Now, it’s toxic, too. In fact, it’s indistinguishable from the mud because it, itself, is mud.
New Orleans wasn’t built on clean fill. It was “built on muck.”
To quote the previous link,
Another quote:
And, here’s one more that should be noted:
Back to the previous point…
I’ve said that you’ll need to scrape off a foot, on the average, of silt from everywhere in New Orleans. Complicating that, you’re going to have to remove some of the pre-existing soil, which is now also polluted.
How much? I dunno. Let’s say another foot. (I’m being generous.)
Since NO is 100 square miles, and a mile is…wait a minute, this is beginning to sould awfully familiar. If memory serves, someone made a remark regarding something much like this scenario. I wonder who it was?
Oh, yeah…
Of course, there’s a big difference between adding 10 feet as opposed to removing two feet, that difference being the shit you’re removing is poisonous. Where the fuck are you going to put it, on top of the gargantuan mound you created “somewhere” when you trucked out the demolished houses?
I don’t know. I doubt if anyone knows. If Scylla knows, he ain’t talking.
So where does that leave us?
Arguably, the problem with the silt alone might be unsurmountable. There should be no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that it’s poisonous–even more so in the area occupied by NO. (New Orleans silt is grade-A prime world champion silt, and it’s getting even better by the second.) It’s incredibly pervasive, so it’s quite literally everywhere. It’s difficult to build on. No consideration has been given as to where you’re going to have to put it (along with all of the other stuff that you’ve going to have to get rid of).
And it stinks.
So, I put it to you, Scylla, and your squad of suck-up stooges:
Would you, yourself, want to live there?
No?
Then what you must be saying is that the people that lived there before Katrina are too damn foolish to take into account the situation as it exists now and will move back anyway, all logic and reason be damned.
I think two things are coming into play here. 1) The natural reaction people have to return to hearth and home after a disaster, rebuild, and start over, and 2) the facts aren’t out yet.
Number 1 is completely understandable. Of course people want to go home. But, my God man, give them some credit. When they are finally faced with the reality of the situation, how many clear-thinking people will want to return somewhere that was a death trap before, and is even moreso* now?*
As to point number 2…actually, the facts are out there. I found them. The average guy could reason them out. And there will be more facts to come to light in the not-so-distant future.
So let’s say they return anyway. Some stay healthy. Some get sick. Some have deformed offspring.
That last one scares me most. What if those deformed offspring happen to turn out to be (oh god please no) more little baby Scyllas!!!
-End of Chapter One-
Well, you certainly do seem to know a lot about Mississippi silt. I’m not so sure about the toxicity. NOLA gets its drinking water from the Mississippi. Since NOLA is on the delta the ground is little more than Mississippi silt, so I don’t really see the problem there.
I guess it’s fortunate indeed for New Orleans that it was the Lake Ponchartrain and Lake Ponchartrain industrial canal whose levees broke and not those holding back the Mississippi. Otherwise we sure would have a lot of silt to deal with, wouldn’t we?
At least that won’t be a problem.
DDG:
That site happens to be vacant because it’s a pretty major swamp containing the famous Alligator Bayou.
If you wanted to build there you’d have to drain it and build levees to hold back the Mississippi’s seasonal flooding of the whole region. Really doesn’t give it much advantage over the current NOLA, does it?
Zoom in on Mapquest and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Re: Clearing large # of NO houses, rapidly.
Daisycutters?
Sounds nuts, but if we’re talking about clearing houses wholesale, it seems like a decent proposal.