It’s the mouth of the Mississippi river. There has to be a port city there.
Relocating a city is much harder than what The Simpsons has lead you to believe and it would be terribly expensive to do and expensive in the loss of future earnings from the abandoned city.
You mean . . . we can’t just put New Orleans on a big dolly and roll it up to somewhere near Minneapolis?
I suppose now is as good a time as any to figure out a way to fix the problems we are going to be stuck with following years of environmental neglect and abuse by the current political regime.
It will be interesting to see what can be done to save New Orleans, as the same thing will probably have to be done to save New York City and a few others on the coast as the Arctic slowly melts and the oceans rise.
Could New Orleans and area use any of the Dutch technology that they use in their fight in keeping storm surges and such from wiping them clean? I recently saw a show on the big “storm doors” they have on one of their larger channels - very cool.
Maybe the question should be: Should it remain the largest port?
Is there another city along the gulf coast with adequate infrastructure (or suitable building area) that would be more “hurricane resistant”? Is there such a thing?Would it be feasible to build a pipeline offshore to pump petroleum inshore to a high enough altitude? What about other type of cargo? Would it be cost effective to basically build a h-u-g-e berm and build a shipping city on top of that? And then, would it need a canal to the Mississippi?
I dunno.
The city of New Orleans istelf might be a lost cause. Personally, I don’t consider architecture alone to be enough of a determining factor when deciding to spend billions of dollars in order to prop up an alcohol-based economy. (I’m speaking of the city itself–not the shipping facilities.)
I’ve been to conventions in Nawlins. They’re enjoyable, and the French Quarter is fun for a night or two, but come on, getting drunk ain’t rocket science.
The shipping and refining will probably have to stay, but the Crescent City itself is doomed. Water will always seek its own level, and Lake Pontchartrain and Big Muddy are suqeezing each side pretty hard.
I think that one difference between the beaches, etc. and Buffalo is that the beaches are (for lack of a better phrase) self-sustainable, whether because there are jobs in that area, or because they are so beautiful to live in that people are willing to accept the risks to continue living there. For example, even if we stopped fighting the forest fires, people would continue to build there because some people like to live next to nature. Conversely, if the government stopped pouring money into Buffalo, would people continue to live there? As elmwood said, people are leaving Buffalo (Rochester, Hartford, Gary, Syracuse - name your Rust-Belt City of choice) and very few people are moving in. Regardless of how much money the government pumps in, how many more generations will it take before the city just dies out on its own? Before real estate can’t be sold regardless of the price, before even the Wal-Mart can’t make it’s sales numbers and closes?
Having grown up in nearby Rochester, an area with similar economic troubles, although perhaps not as severe, I can say that, although I loved the area, there was no economic future for me there. So I left and now live in Dallas.
So the question is: is New Orleans more like California, or more like Buffalo? I happen to think that it is more like California in that people want to go there, and because of the tourism and oil/chemical industry, it is economically viable. The next question is: even though it is more like California, how much are we willing to spend? Are we willing to encase the entire city in a plastic bubble and let it bob out in the Gulf?
Crap. On preview, I see that I’m repeating a lot of elmwood’s second post. I still say that the decision to abandon an economically dead place like Buffalo is a separate discussion from what should be done with NO.
Cancun.
The Dutch don’t often get hit by Category 4 &5 hurricanes.
There is not much of a city left to relocate. Just pay to set the populace up in housing in other cities in the region. I think this would be cheaper than rebuilding all of those homes and businesses.
Much of any future earnings are offset by the cost of reconstruction, as well as the fact that this will happen again.
Yes, so why bother rebuilding it?
If much of those treasures have been destroyed, what is left?
I do not think it is worth spending massive amounts of taxpayer money to bail water out of this sinking ship. As far as compensating people for their losses, the Fed. government could offer to pay to relocate people but not to rebuild in the specified areas. The government isn’t taking anyone’s land, just refusing to pay to build homes and businesses in a doomed area.
There is no city on the Gulf Coast that has good protection against a Cat 4 or larger hurricane. What you are proposing is crazy expensive and in most cases, just plain crazy. As stated above, there needs to be a port at the mouth of the Mississippi river. The costs to rebuild and protect the city more are trivial compared to relocating all industry and 1.5 million people.
Direct hits to New Orleans don’t come all that often. It has existed for almost 300 years with only a few major storm problems. It is a gambling game but one that we have to participate in.
For how long?
From what I’ve read (John McPhee’s The Control of Nature), the Mississippi wants to switch to the Atchafalaya river as its outlet to the Gulf. The only thing that has stopped it is the Corp of Engineers, and there are questions about how long they will be able to preserve the status quo.
In 1906 San Francisco was practically wiped out. Gone. It has risen from the ashes of that disaster to become home to the city we know today. It can happen.
A similar thing happened to Galveston, TX in 1900. It was a bustling port town of 37,000 people and one of the first cities in Texas to have electricity, telephones and such. In fact, it was the largest city in Texas at the time. Then they got nailed by a massive hurricane that leveled the whole town. A 15-16 foot storm surge flooded the town and winds are estimated to have been around 130/140 mph. About 6,000 people died in Galeveston alone, thousands more died inland. The storm caused about $30 million in damage (about $700 million by today’s dollar).
After the storm they built a seawall seven miles long and seventeen feet high (I think it’s 10 miles long now, and the original engineers goofed and made it a foot and half too short). They also raised the level of the entire city, including sewer and gas lines, by as much as 11 feet in some places. It took a long time for the city to recover. Houston may not have become the city it is today if it weren’t for the devastation of Galveston.
But if they wanted to make New Orleans a viable port in the long run, they’ll have to do about the same thing. They’ll have to jack up the city and build a seawall. They’ll have to raise the infrastructure and utilities.
Or they can periodically deal with billions of dollars in damage and thousands of deaths. Who knows.
In that case, your coworker doesn’t know what they are talking about.
In any event, most of the major points have been covered. But to summarize, New Orleans as a city has a certain strategic, economic and historical value in it’s current location. Category 5 hurricanes destroying the city are a relatively rare event. The benefit of keeping NO where it is and making engineering improvements to protect it outweight the cost of moving it.
And where would you move it to? Just about every location in the country is exposed to some sort of risk.
Not so.
Pipelines are a feasible alternative. See California, f’rinstance. Tankers pull up and offload at sea. See also Alaska. There’s a big one there. Built in probaby less ideal circunstamces.
Building a berm isn’t impossible, either. Airports exist in Hong Kong and Tokyo where either there was nothing there to begin with, or a rocky, peaked island existed.
Actually, an alternative might be to build a new refinery right where the city used to be. At least then, if there’s an oil spill, it’s contained by the levees.
Okay, that last line was sarcasm, but in truth, I believe there are better places to build.
The Corps of Engineers could maintain a shipping channel far enough upriver so as to remain above the highest reasonably-expected storm surge and yet maintain a port on the Mississippi.
If you want to maintain the French Quarter, fine. Just impose a tax on bars, restaurants, taxis and hotels. Probably pay for a flood wall itself after a Mardi Gras or two (once it’s operable again).
Would I say the same about Biloxi, Galveston, Tampa, or other Gulf Cities? Probably not, because they don’t exist in a ditch. At least they’re starting at sea level. The water come in, then later flows out.
Not the case in New Orleans.
[ Les Nessman ] “Every day the Mississippi river dumps18 milion tons of silt into the Gulf of Mexico. How much longer will we alow this to continue! ?” [ /Les Nessman ]
There’s a difference. People are the engines of change in New London, and as such they (arguably) have a conscience and can alter their actions to the benefit of all (naive statement); natural phenomena happen regardless of our desires. You gotta do better than that.
Insurance guy is looking at this picture and wondering: if so much of the city will need bulldozing before it can be rebuilt, why rebuild it just there? We could eminent domain a few hundred people the hell outta the bayous further inland and rebuild the bulk of the commercial interests there, and run high-speed freight/commuter trains to the ultramodern docks down at the mouth of the river.
It’s a nice city, sure. But it got blasted. floodwaters are doing damage to the foundations of structures already 100 years old–I’m guessing that most of the old & beautiful architecture has already been rendered uninhabitable or will be shortly, and can’t be repaired.
While you might be correct, I can’t see how this is obvious. Who’s done the analysis? It looks like the city is pretty much destroyed anyway. If you have to rebuild a city almost from scratch in a location where it is still prone to hurricanes and flooding OR build a city somewhere else that is not as prone OR just let people and businesses migrate elsewhere naturally, it seems that rebuilding NO is the worst of the options.
Yeah. A tourist who shows up at a couple of conventions to party knows a lot about the city. Alcohol-based economy my ass, Mr. Conventioneer. You do know that hundreds of thousands of people live, work and go to school in New Orleans? That it has stores and churches and jazz clubs and Little Leagues and historical societies and museums and libraries just like any other biggish city? My best friend is the manager of a Williams-Sonoma, which, last I heard, was not an “alcohol-based” business.
Not quite the same case, here. If the SF Peninsula had sunk in 1906 so that the city was under 10 feet of water, and they rebuilt it anyway, you’d have something.
I’m guessing that the people who rebuilt San Francisco recognized that there was a fault line nearby and that the possibility of another catastrophe was very real. I don’t see the difference. The threat was there even after it was reconstructed.
It saddens me that so many people only think of New Orleans as a party town.
Eve, I think alot of people have respect for the culture of the city, which includes the free-flowing alcohol and partially-dressed bead acquirers. However, assuming the city is completely wiped out, the only things that the rebuilt NO will have in common with the old NO is the latitude and longitude. Now, if a large portion of the city is salvagable (not sure if this is a word), then you might have a point. It boils down to a cost-benefit analysis, in which the costs and benefits do not necessarily have a monetary value.