Get the Hell out of Dodge, or Up Above Sea Level, At Least

[Polycarp]

@Jonathan Chance

Don’t be so quick to giggle. I was in Iowa City for the 1993 floods. That wasn’t any damn fun at all.

And I just went through two floods in six months here in Ohio.

Dammit. I’m a magnet. Maybe I should move in with my mom in the Black Hills. Other than blizzards what could go wrong?

No wonder you lived up on the mountain in NoVa!

Perhaps you ought to seek funding to live in the middle of a chronic drought area?

[Rilchiam]

@spoke-

You are familiar with a little place called California?

Since when are earthquakes predictable? Or brush fires?

[BrainGlutton]

@Renob

Just get rid of FEMA and economic forces will help to determine if it’s worth living in areas like New Orleans or Florida that are guaranteed to be hit by these storms.

You seem to have a lot of faith in “economic forces.” Look at the big picture (and reread the OP). It might not just an occasional, unpredictable threat to below-sea-level areas we’re looking at; it might be a general process of global warming – possibly anthropogenic global warming; if so, then it’s a problem that market forces created, and almost certainly not a problem market forces can solve. You don’t like FEMA? FEMA’s just the beginning.

[Honesty]

@Polycarp

Okay, we have the California fault system. We have the Cascade volcanoes. We have Tornado Alley, and the Southeast tornado region. We have the areas endangered by hurricanes, which basically constitutes everything south of the Catskills and east of the Appalachians, plus all the Gulf states including much of Texas. We have the areas that get blizzards and ice storms.

And the one small region that is not included in all of the above is due to be hit by earthquakes from the New Madrid Fault someday.

So where is everyone supposed to be moving to?

Well, up in Michigan, we get reasonably pleasant summers, a wonderful Spring and Fall, moderately cold winters, and the ever-so-rare tornado that might destroy a house or two. Torrential rains, severe flooding, or even blizzards are almost non-existent. Honestly, the only bad thing about Michigan is our perpetual state of freeway and highway construction.

I just recently visited Florida and we were just shocked at just how severe the weather was. The days were unreasonably hot and the storms were abrupt and very fierce. In almost an eyeblink, the weather would go from scorching our backs to drenching us throughly with rain-water. It was almost like Florida, at least Orlando, just isn’t meant for human inhabitants. If it weren’t for air conditioning, I don’t see how that place is even remotely survivable or comfortable.

• Honesty

[Marley23]

@Lissa

Guess who that will be? The poor-- those who can’t afford to move. The ones who don’t have a choice.

Oh, well. Fuck 'em. It’s their fault they’re poor, anyway.

And, naturally, if what I’ve read from other Dopers is correct, a large number of the people affected in New Orleans seem to fit that description.

[Loopydude]

Interesting op ed in the NYT this morning. I immediately dug up my copy of Sci Am (I’ve kept them since 1996) and read Fischetti’s predictions. Disturbing, even as hindsight.

[Loopydude]

I found the article on-line, if you are to read:

Drowning New Orleans, from October of 2001.

An exerpt:

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.

Again, we might consider the situation in NOLA is probably better than it could have been.

[Loopydude]

Sorry, “care to read”