New Orleans: Just how bad a disaster is this?

Perhaps this belongs in GQ, but there are so many imponderable factors in play that GD is probably better. Mods, please move if you think appropriate.

Hurricane Katrina hit coastal Alabama and Mississippi pretty hard – but in ways from which they can probably bounce back readily, just as most parts of Florida hit by hurricanes last year have, for the most part, recovered. New Orleans is a different story. Base on news coverage as Katrina was approaching the Gulf Coast, I knew, in a general way, that New Orleans was in serious danger of flooding because so much of the city is below sea level. But I never imagined this! Eighty percent of the city has been flooded – with some areas under as much as 20 feet of water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Hurricane_Katrina_on_New_Orleans Authorities just announced that the Houston Astrodome has agreed to take in 25,000 (!) refugees because the Louisiana Superdome can no longer provide effective shelter for them. It’s not just a local/regional disaster, either. A lot of oil refineries are located in the NO area, and now more than ten percent of U.S. oil-refining capacity has been shut down. http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/31/katrina.impact/index.html There is also the possibility that all that water, mixing with industrial waste (plus the general, inevitable filth-on-the ground of any great modern city), will produce a toxic brew of chemicals that will leave the ground polluted even after the water is pumped out. No cite, but I’ve heard speculations on that.

In terms of destruction of property (it’s too soon to estimate the loss of life), this appears to be a worse disaster than 9/11. Much worse. I don’t think a disaster this big has struck a major American city since the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

How will this affect the economy of the New Orleans metropolitan area (pop. 1.3 million – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans)?

How will this affect the economy of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region?

How will this affect the economy of the United States?

How long will it take to recover? Will recovery even be possible?

How about, “We just don’t know?” I think that is the truth right now. After 9/11 we didn’t know if air travel could EVER return to normal. Outside of silly annoyances, air travel has returned to normal. The US economy has recovered from 9/11.

9/11 really didn’t “change everything.”

I’m just going to wait this one out for the long-term consequences.

I will vote for “Nobody, and I mean nobody has any idea”. We always like to think of our government and government as omnipotent entities but look what happens when you through them a real curveball (that you already said was coming).

They are not talking about it much because they don’t want to panic anyone further but the plans to drain the city are not know to be workable at all:

  1. You have to plug a 300 foot hole in a levee with water pouring through it. Nobody knows if any of their admittedly wacked out plans will work. That only stops the water.

  2. After the water is stopped you have to get the water out. No pumps in the world can handle that much water in a reasonable timeframe. Plus, there is no electricty anyway (you have to get the water down to get electricity. Chicken and egg). That means that they are going to have to blow a levee up on the other side of the city. You can’t get heavy equipment in there very easily and levees are huge.

  3. If you breech a drainage levy, then no one knows what that massive drainage channel that you just created is going to do. Huge parts of the city are going to be sucked through it and you may create a part of New Orleans that is even lower than it is now.

  4. Assuming 1,2,3 go OK, you have to get power back. Ok, that is a more definable problem but it may take a while.

  5. They have to fire up the normal drainage pumps to get the last few feet of water out of the city. Those pumps are unique to New Orleans and many are broken right now.

As the length of time increases for each of these steps, so does the possibilty of disease, environmental contamination, further damage to structures.

The biggest problem however is what we are going to do logistically. 1+ million people are going to have to relocate for months. How are they going to get money? How are businesses going manage their books if no one is paying past bills. How are these people going to get mail. What about contacting their doctor for prescription refills. Its all these little details that will make this a day to day tragedy for those forced to relocate.

I say that is bigger than 9/11 on most counts. The only place that it may not top 9/11 is in body count and that still remains to be seen.

It’s big. Real big.

Tune in in a few weeks for the quantitaive assessment. I’ve already seen this called the worst natural disaster to the hit the US, ever.

Here’s a breakdown of the costs for 9/11. I’ve really no idea if any or how many of these costs overlap, but the final tally appears to be nothing less than staggering. $40.2 billion just for insurance payouts. Holy crap.

As for Katrina: To echo JM, “biggest ever” is a reasonable estimate at this point, but it will probably take months before solid numbers are available.

Huge. New Orleans will obviously never, ever be the same; asking how long the repairs will take is almost meaningless because in many cases “repair” will consist of trashing whole neighborhoods and rebuilding. Many residents will never return.

The death toll will be in the thousands; the financial cost in the billions. In terms of people being directly affected, it’s obviously much worse than 9/11, or for that matter, anything in US history.

But we’re going to get this done. Come some Mardi Gras soon we’ll be passing out beads, jabbing voodoo dolls and telling Mother Nature to kiss our American ass.

I was listening to the news somewhere today and they actually said this was a disaster of ‘biblical’ proportions…whatever the hell that means. I’d say though that the only good thing is…it could have been worse from what I understand. A front came through and nudged the storm just a bit (it was headed right smack for N.O. earlier)…and also managed to bump it down to Cat 4 instead of a monster Cat 5. What I was reading today seemed to indicate that if the full brunt of the storm had slammed in directly…well, we might have lost N.O. completely (and gods know how many people too :frowning: ). So, we were damn lucky its only as bad as it is and not worse.

As to the rest of your OP…well, only time will tell IMO. Right now its a straight up rescue mission as there are still folks trapped in the city. After that its the logistics of caring for all those who now have no homes. Then they have to figure out some pretty knotty engineering problems (like how to get rid of all that water). After that then we just have the trivial problems of re-construction…and what mid-term effects this is all going to have on such trivial things as the US economy (not to mention the economy of the state and the city).
One question I have if anyone knows off the top of their head…why is the US not asking for any aid in this crisis? Is it that we don’t need it…or don’t want it? Or maybe they have changed their minds and we are accepting it now…I’ve kind of been out of touch today for long stretches.

-XT

That’s interesting, considering we’ve had some doozies. San Francisco 1906 comes to mind, or the Seattle Fire of 1889, or earthquakes in Anchorage AK in 1965, even. It’s too early and too tender to poke at it much, but I wonder how they compare to natural disasters of other kinds in the history of the U.S.

It will be the most expensive disaster that the US has had especially if they rebuild the cities and design the levees how they need to be designed.

A related question is what the usual practice is in these cases: did Thailand/Indonesia have to ask for aid before it was sent?

Nobody died in the Great Seattle Fire. All things considered, it turned out to be an extremely positive development in the history of the city. New Orleans has a whole lot more bitter lemons to try to turn into something else.

I think it is going to dwarf the impact of those cities. This isn’t just New Orleans but all the major coastal cities in the region. This isn’t just something broke and it will cost a lot to fix. I think the oil shock may hit the entire US nearly as hard as the arab oil embargo of the '70s. I could be wrong but I’m not betting that way. Bad time to own a Hummer dealership.

On the bright side we may be paying as much as Europe for gasline soon so it may be the thing that forces serious conservation efforts and new energy technology.

Are there really that many people in New Orleans? :eek: There are states with lower populations than that; as of the last census my own state only has 1.2 million.

Is it cost effective to “fix” the problem? Or would the wisest thing be to use whatever relief funds are gathered to relocate those displaced people permenently? If the sinking below sea level is going to get worse, it just seems like the city would be in peril again before long even if it was completely restored…
It would be a shame to lose a historical city, but I can’t help but wonder if fixing things is really the smartest (or kindest) thing to do, and if it’ll just lead to more people dying the next time a storm of this magitude blows in.

You live in one of the smallest states… Here in CA, the population is around 30 million.

It’s not just Ner Orleans, remember, but the whole coastline from that city and hundreds of miles east.

As already stated, New Orleans is only one piece of the bigger picture. Check out this link for some good footage of the Mississippi Coast damage

Mississippi Coast damage from skycopter

This station’s helicopter made 3 different trips to different areas (different link on their site for each trip).

This is of course true, but Cecil’s recent column on natural disasters shows there are other ways to evaluate their effects other than by loss of life, significant though that is.

I wish I’d seen New Orleans, because the city that existed is gone. There’ll be something else there in time, and I’d like to see that too, but a lot of historic buildings which I’m sure lent a lot of character are gone. Between that and everything else, we’ll see what remains and what is done with it.

The September 11th attacks destroyed a couple of (huge) office buildings. Aside from the death, a lot of the damage was commercial - the economy was damaged, the airlines, lower Manhattan, etc. This flooding has totalled cities. Almost 500,000 people lived in N.O. proper, and there’s also all the damage in the surrounding area. I’ve read that major cities in Mississippi were almost obliterated. I’m not sure how a lot of these things will be dealt with, plus the disease issues and trying to evacuate people and keep all these refugees alive and healthy. The cleanup may be harder and longer; I imagine it’s easier to clear rubble from felled towers than get rid of all that water. There’s more risk of disease, so many bodies from the storm and elsewhere… bodies are buried above ground in New Orleans… etc. etc.

Not to be pessimistic, but the hurricane season isn’t over yet, is it? I just read that Katrina started to form on 08/23 and hit NOLA on 08/29. and what I remember from last couple of years, there are 3-4 hurricanes per season. Shouldn’t they wait it out before commencing serious rebuilding?

I’ve been watching footage from various Gulf Coast TV stations all day and if no one has yet figured it out, let me say it for y’all: this storm will have left millions of people homeless. This will take the better part of a decade to recover from. The costs for this one will range up in the hundreds of billions of dollars. This is big, folks. Bigger than big; this is ginormous.

The one thing I haven’t seen: sea-surface temperature maps post-Katrina. Just before Katrina, I saw a map of the Gulf indicating zones of unusually-warm water that fuelled the hurricane. I also saw a map showing how the water was cooler after a different hurricane (Ivan, I think) went by.

What I’m wondering is, how long does it take for the surface seawater to ‘recharge’ and become as warm as it was before Katrina? If it will do this within a couple of weeks, say, we have conditions for another cat-4 or cat-5 storm to form all over again, and then hit weakened cities, towns, oil rigs, etc.

And there is still two months left in hurricane season.