Let the city go?

[Tentacle_Monster]

I agree that Idaho is more or less beautiful. But good luck picking up a decent radio station.

[Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor]

Actually, I think Wisconsin is safer.

[Johnny_L.A]

@Tentacle Monster

Hey, people, there’s a place in the US where there are practically no natural disasters. No earthquakes, no hurricanes, no floods, no volcanoes, no tornadoes, no plagues of locusts, nothing except the occasional drought in parts of the state; and that just means you have to dig wells a bit deeper.

That’s right, I’m talking about Idaho.

Massive fires.

[sturmhauke]

@Loopydude

My personal oppinion is that everything not essential the Port should probably be abandoned, or scaled-back dramatically. Either that, or bite the bullet and build the most robust system of levees the world has ever seen. Oh, and fill in some of the goddamned land so that water will run out, not in. Otherwise, you’re just asking for the city to get flooded again, which will happen, eventually, and possibly sooner than many are willing to believe. Seems pretty stupid to dump tens of billions of dollars back into a bowl below sea level, surrounded by water, and in a region plagued by hurricanes, if you’re not going to acknowledge the daunting reality of that arrangement and do some fucking efficacious thing about it.

But, of course, I got my first pitting for such thoughts, so obviously I’m stupid, insane, and un-American.

Someone in one of the other threads posted that it would take billions of cubic feet of earth to raise the level of New Orleans enough to prevent flooding (the calculation was raising a 100 square mile area by 10 feet). Also, there is no bedrock in the entire delta until you go down several hundred feet, so unless you somehow built a bunch of pillars that far down, any earth piled on top would just settle downwards again.

That said, the area is still vital if you want to use the river for shipping. New Orleans was first settled because of its strategic and trade importance, and those reasons haven’t disappeared. Superpowered levees seem like the most likely solution.

[Loopydude]

Yeah, admittedly, that’s a lot of dirt, but who says you have to elevate the whole thing? Why must every acre of NO be saved? Is that even possible now? OK, you’ve got a massive shipping port and oil infrastructure, it it would be nice to have sufficient land nearby so you don’t have to build a railroad and huge pipeline out to a small island from which the docks protrude. What would that require?

Also, if you look at this map of Boston, it’s easy to see that most of the city is actually built atop fill. From 1830 to 1890, approx 1100 acres of land was added to the city by digging up hills in surrounding communities and carting the remains to be dumped onto water and tidal flats. I’ve no idea what the cubic yardage is (trying to find out), but with 19th-century tech, they moved a hell of a lot of land from one place to another and build a big city on top of it.

[Cervaise]

@Tentacle Monster

Incidentally, there aren’t many natural disasters in Wyoming, either.

Well, until the giant-ass Yellowstone volcano goes off.

[Loopydude]

Yeah, but then we’ll all be dead, so why worry?

[rocking_chair]

have we decided on whether we are moving buffalo to nola or is it moving nola to buffalo?