There is a huge difference between being grazed by (your choice of words) and being spared the full brunt of a hurricane.
It only means the eye of the hurricane didn’t pass over the city. Don’t try to downplay the power of the storm. You were trying to make it sound like a heavy thunderstorm and not one of the biggest storms ever.
Only on the Big Island of Hawaii is there an active volcano, and that’s pretty mild as exploding mountains go. The islands sit over a hot spot, which tends not to generate the vastly powerful earthquakes you see along some active fault-lines along the Pacific rim where volcanos are also common. The structure of the mountain itself is a vast cone of gentle slope with one region off to the East where streams of runny magma flow downhill to the ocean in a fairly predictable fashion. Relatively small numbers of people have lost homes when lava flows incinerated them, but most of those areas became off-limits to habitation. The majority of the state of Hawaii is safe from local geologic disaster, and there is a robust tsunami warning system, the two worst of which in the past 100 years originated in the Aleutians and Chile. The damage caused by them will be outstripped by a hurricane by many orders of magnitude.
If someone had made such a ridiculous claim, your complaint might have something resembling sense or merit. As it is, the hyperbole makes you sound like a fool. “Higher Ground” somewhere between the Gulf Coast and California would do, don’t you think? I do.
How about once every 1,000 years, at most? I imagine a majority of the landmass of the United States is safer than that. If you have evidence to the contrary, cough it up.
The irony. It stings.
Such brilliant repartee. Really, so carefully thought out and laden with good factual information for the opponent to mull over and consider. How generous of you to share such a wealth of edification and enrichment. Truly, someone really should blow you for the herculean intellectual effort it must have taken to compose that riposte.
I’d like to hear from the pro-abandonment side exactly how they plan on accomplishing this and under what authority they’re going to act. I’m not familiar with local government law in Louisiana, but if the city was granted a charter from the legislature it can only be revoked by the legislature. I’m sure the person that introduces “A Bill to Revoke the Charter for the City of New Orleans” will be one of the most popular people in the state. Additionally, What happens to all the “stuff” in the city? Is it just left in place to eventually be silted over? If so, who makes that decision? The property owners? What if they don’t want to go along with the program? What’s their recourse? I would suspect that not only do the property owner’s have a say, but the banks that hold the mortgages would want to have some input. I also suspect that the stock holders in all of the corporations that hold property in New Orleans may want to have some input.
Right. One can count the minutes before an absurd semantic nitpick rears its ugly head, and ridiculously distorted accusations about “minimizing” damage, suffering, human life, the plight of the homeless, whatever, rises to the surface of the pondscum like an oily excretion.
Fine. If a narrow miss by the region eyewall, the worst part of the storm everyone was worried about in terms of a total-loss scenerio, isn’t a sufficient grazing, then please, let me accomodate your refined lexicographal sensibilities with a superior adjective of your choosing, so long as we can all agree we know what “indirect hit” means.
Right. Because doing the same goddamn thing that got half-a-million people into trouble makes so much more sense. Political expedience ought to trump responsible civic planning every time!
Sad thing is, you’re probably absolutely correct. The Feds. and insureres will pump in just enough money to put Humpty Dumpty back together (after, at best, a few months of cleanup, during which the inhabitants of New Orleans will essentially be refugees). The water will be pumped out, the toxic waste and bodies reburried nearby, the levees rebuilt. The Army Corps. of Engineers will maybe get a small increase in funding to make some cosmetic changes that politicians can trumpet and preen over like it makes a fucking bit of difference, and in a generation, maybe sooner, maybe a little longer, the place will be underwater again, and everybody will be scratching their heads and wondering what the Hell happened to them.
I still say that having New Orleans back is worth almost any price tag. The city is an absolute treasure. I’d sooner part ways with New York City, Chicago, or London.
Ah, Loopydude. What is there to say about you that hasn’t already been better said by the DSM IV under congenital syphilitic dementia?
As a municipal planner I’m faced with a process of doing what you’ve proposed. I’m not arguing for or against abandonment now - I’m asking “how?”
The city of New Orleans has been around since 1718. While there have been floods before, as far as I am aware, this is the first disaster of this magnitude to strike it. What makes you and the other idiot so all fired certain that the whole thing will “be underwater again” in “a generation, maybe sooner”? :dubious:
Perhaps you ought to familiarize yourself with the town’s unique and changing relationship with sea level over time, Weirddave. Before you throw the word “idiot” around so loosely again, that is.
What is there to say about you except you are incapable of substantive debate?
Just curious, and spitballin’ here: could some kind of eminent domain legal principle be used? TPTB say, “Ya’ll get out of the way of the bulldozers, now”, and make it stick? It would mean that they’d have to buy out everyone in NOLA, but hey, as long as the discussion is flinging colossal sums of money around (I feel sorry for CNN, who have used up their entire year’s supply of the word “billions”), why not include the price of something like that in it?
Personal preference is a pretty irrelevant criterion when you consider, say, that Chicago will never be submerged under Lake Michigan by a hurricane, or any other weather phenomenon. It’s conceivable an Earthquake might damage it, but not anywhere near to the extent that New Orleans has been damages. Almost the entire city is presently uninhabitable. Pretty much the whole fucking thing. Most parts won’t even have electricity for two months, I just heard. The place is covered with chemical and human waste, and bodies are literally floating in the streets. Literally hundreds of thousands of people can’t go home because their basic needs cannot be met, and it would be highly hazardous to their health to remain for long, due to exposure to chemical toxins, bacteria, and disease-causing protozoans. Hell, you even have to worry about fire ants and water moccasins. In what American city was devastation of this scale not only possible, but expected?
Since those advocating abandonment haven’t got the slightest clue about what they’re talking about, I’ve done some digging -
The City of New Orleans exists as a political subdivision of the State of Louisiana and has a home rule charter. The charter, which creates the City from a legal perspective, can only be repealed by a majority vote of the eligible voters in the City.
Have fun getting that one on the ballot.
Jeez, I don’t know. How about “Every single city on the San Andreas fault line?”
OK. So is the solution, then, to put everything back the way it was? If not, what is it? I keep getting told moving to higher ground is stupid, but it seems to me staying put is at least as stupid. Vast improvements might be reasonable, but I’ve zero faith they’ll be made. I’m certainly happy to be persuaded by something more cogent than “you idiot, you don’t know what you’re talking about”, but would it kill somebody to share some of that wisdom and spread the sunshine of their optimism around rather than trotting out more tired insults?
Jesus, use the word “idiot” and Elvis shows up. Good thing I didn’t say “liar” or he would have been posting before I had a chance to hit submit. I guess the old saying about mentioning the devil is correct. In any event, I am familiar with the relationship between NO and the sea, would you care to answer my question, or did you just show up, as usual, to make moronic statements and avoid the actual issue at hand?
Evidence? Cites? Something?
Who’s going to bring the eminent domain suit? Eminent domain is a power of the state or a power delegated to a political subdivision of the state. Like I said earlier, I wouldn’t want to be the legislator in Baton Rouge who stands up and says, “Mr. Speaker, today I’m introducing a bill to acquire all of the property, both real and personal, within the boundaries of the City of New Orleans, through the power of eminent domain. I am also introducing a bill to repeal the City of New Orlean’s Charter.” What valuation are they going to use to compensate the property owners? Pre-flood? Post-flood? As an alternative, you’d have to have the City itself acquire all the private property within the City, then ask the citizens to disolve the City. “Here, we’re going to pay you the value of your property after its been destroyed by a flood and then we’re going to ask you to vote to dissolve the City government so that everything will revert to the great state of Louisiana (or maybe not, we’re not quite sure what happens once the City is dissolved, but that won’t matter to you because you won’t have any interest in the non-City anymore - or something like that - I have a headache).”
But of course, to those advocating abandonment, the issue’s pretty simple - move everyone out and, I don’t know, just paddle away, I guess.
So what the Hell is it to be then? Everything’s just hunky-dory as soon as people move back? Is there any evidence of a sound, long-term plan to deal with what in any sane world is an unacceptably high probability of another such catastrophe of equal or greater scope?