True story: One of these years, a major East Coast paper will reveal in a dramatic five-part series that New Orleans flooded because of design and construction flaws by the United States Army Corps and Engineers, and will win a Pulitzer for its efforts. Until then, we have to put up with stories like this one, a Washington Post piece on the voting plans of Katrina evacuees in Texas.
The premise: these frustrated exiles will take out their frustrations at the polls, probably to the benefit of Barack Obama. But the reporting: start with the first paragraph, in which we learn that
Hurricane Katrina uprooted (Gregory Sam) from his home town of New Orleans
As if the winds, possibly tornado-style, picked him up and deposited him eight hundred miles west.
Three paragraphs in, we learn that it was not just wind...
For the nearly quarter-million people such as Sam who were evacuated to Texas after the hurricane and its floodwaters left New Orleans devastated in 2005
So Katrina had floodwaters. Why, in a city that had a "Hurricane Protection System" under construction for the past forty years thanks to the Federal government, why was that possible? Silence. Crickets.
Back to the exile voters. They're angry, we learn...
They are angry, for instance, that Donald Trump will soon construct a 70-story hotel in the city's central business district while neighborhoods in the Ninth Ward are still rodent-infested wastelands.
This is reported as fact, from a Houston dateline. In fact, half of the Ninth Ward, the Upper Ninth, has no "rodent-infested wastelands". The reporter probably means the Lower Ninth, in which some blocks have lots covered with high weeds and rodents do reside thereon.
Then, there are the numbers. Population stats on the Katrina disaster are all over the place, but these are lulus.
Anderson is one of about 100,000 evacuees who have permanently settled in Houston. An additional 60,000 or so are in metropolitan Dallas, 60,000 are located around Austin and San Antonio, and 10,000 are sprinkled across this vast state, according to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission.
That would total up to 230,000 permanent New Orleans exiles in Texas alone. Not counting the known tens of thousands in Atlanta, and Baton Rouge, and other parts of the diaspora. New Orleans' population before the disaster was about 450,000. There are believed to be 300,000-plus citizens back now, depending on whose figures you use. The numbers in this story would suggest that the current population of New Orleans includes almost no African-American returnees, a conclusion easily rebutted by talking to some black people in the city, in Treme, Gentilly, New Orleans East, even in the Ninth Ward.
Finally, the story of Martin Jones and his wife. He's an evangelical pastor, who had a kidney transplant more than a decade ago. We learn that
... the couple longs for New Orleans, where they want to restart the growing inner-city ministry they led. But the stale air, rodents and slow recovery have made it impossible for them to go back.
In a week where everyone's yelping at the NYT for poor sourcing on its John McCain story, what's the source for "the stale air" characterization of a city? Apparently the fact that, while salvaging what they could from his house and church, he contracted a bad bacterial infection. Not to minimize that awfulness, but in most cases, such incidents occurred because of mold infestations of the flooded buildings. The city's "air" had nothing to do with it. As for the "rodents", earlier in the article we learned they infested "the Ninth Ward". But Jones' buildings, the piece reports, were
on the edge of the French Quarter
The French Quarter, it should be noted, is about a ten-minute drive from the Ninth Ward. For people.
Journalism, we're constantly told, is a matter of reporters reporting, and their editors pestering them with questions and requests to get facts right, before stories run. This piece, written about a city the reporter is clearly not in, based on what one individual may have said about the place he's left behind, seems never to have been graced by an editor's touch.
The Pulitzer still awaits....
This is a recent article in USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2007-12-19-wetlands_n.htm
And this is a short documentary which lays out the legal and scientific case about why the oil industry is responsible to repair the significant damage they caused to our hurricane protection system.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4694637694087008583
I would check these out or bookmark them quickly before these posts also get deleted.
find a large number of articles that predicted the disaster and discuss some or the remediation
solutions. I've not checked into it, but I suspect the American Society of Civil Engineers Journal
( I hope I have that right), might also have some very important contributions to make.
HARRY RESPONDS: I've checked the SciAm website, and read the pieces that aren't behind a subscription wall. None of them predicted the catastrophic failure of the Corps' "Hurricane Protection System", which was the cause of the flooding.
HARRY RESPONDS: One little difference: Mississippi was hit by a hurricane, it flattened and left. Louisiana was flooded thanks to more than fifty levee breaches, water standing for weeks, corrdoding sub-street infrastructure in NO. Two entirely different situations. Not to mention the per capita advantage in federal aid Mississippi enjoyed.
Global warming is causing rising ocean levels which will make keeping New Orleans dry harder and more expensive as the years go by. Why should ALL of America be taxed to save this particular piece of land BELOW SEA LEVEL.
The answer was, and still is, to move the French Quarter to Las Vegas, and abandon the city. Just as we will abandon a LOT of coastal cities in the coming 200 years.
Instead of getting angry, try a reasoned response.
http://blog.nola.com/chrisrose/2008/03/maine_teen_feels_debt_of_grati.html#more
It is New Orleans and it is an American Treasure.
Why put all your eggs in 2 baskets, esp when neither of those baskets will be functional anytime soon?
And folks wonder why so many across America are ready to simply abandon New Orleans and let it sink into the Gulf. Not that I agree with their reasoning...which I don't... but when so few Louisianians seem to be making logical sense based on reality, science, forces of nature, and even history and cultural authenticity regarding the rebuilding, can one blame them?
I read the Burdeau article, and re-read the Time (August 2007) and Nat'l Geographic (October 2004) articles, all linked below. I looked for placenames in all the articles. All are affected by wetland loss. I found about 10. One was Shell Beach on Lake Borgne; it's loss is almost exclusively due to MRGO. Two were Venice and Empire, both on the River; their loss must be due to reduced sediment from the River. The other 7 were all in the Terrebonne-Lafourche-Barataria esturary. They were all embedded in discussion of the oil and gas damage to the wetland. They are also all on the West Bank of the River. I'm sure you understand that none of the wetland loss that far south and west, and across the River, had any role in the Katrina flooding of New Orleans. I don't doubt that the wetlands to the east of the River are being lost at a terrible rate, and that their loss contributed to flooding in New Orleans East and St. Bernard, as I have stated before. I just don't see their role in flooding Lakeview and Gentilly.
I also re-visited the engineering reports about the flooding. They discussed levee subsidence of between 1 and 5 feet, and design/construction errors of up to 2 feet due to benchmark subsidence. I didn't really scour the reports to learn where those settlements occurred. "Urban Geographies" by Campanella (2006) includes a photo of the Jefferson-St. Charles levee. He explains that the wetland in St. Charles Parish is about 6-8 feet above sea level. The developed and drained Jefferson Parish side is about 5 feet below sea level. One could assume that the undeveloped Jefferson Parish was once at the level of its St. Charles neighbor. (And, these soils are virtually identical to those in Lakeview/Gentilly.) But the levee and canals and pumps went into action and the land sank. I don't know when that levee was built, but it's been there my entire life - almost 50 years. So, that's about 11-13 feet of subsidence in 50+ years.
I have never seen any reliable map showing an enclosed Lake Borgne, or the islands, etc. around the Rigolets. The British brought sailing ships, big three-masted warships, into Lake Borgne in 1815. There was no wetland loss prior to that time, certainly, wetlands were still being created. They did not portage them from the Gulf. They sailed them directly from the Gulf to the Shell Beach area. They walked to Chalmette and most of them died; the rest walked back to their ships and sailed back into the Gulf. Forts Pike and Manchac were built in the next few decades to prevent future invasions from sailing into Lake Ponchartrain. Calling them "lakes" has always been a misnomer; they have never been landlocked. Your doppler evidence is completely unreliable. Look for USGS Quadrangle maps of the area. Most were originally drawn in the 1950s. They should show most of the pre-subsidence wetlands pretty clearly.
The forts protecting the eastern entrances to Lake Ponchartrain are named Pike and McComb. Fort Pike faces the Rigolets and Fort McComb faces Chef Menteur Pass.
With that in the author's first sentence, he appears to not know about what he is writing.
It's a "Bush Moment" in time.
Why not encourage/incentivize/beat the drum for elevating all salvagable structures above the Katrina surge line? After all, it was not so much the wind, but the surge and the weeks of standing water which couldn't flow back out to the lack because of broken levees that did most of the damage.
Some have even argued that many if not most New Orleanians would have been better off hunkered down in well-stocked, emergency-supplied, properly elevated structures, with no levees and no evacuations at all.
Did I say not to restore wetlands? No, I didn't. Of course restoring wetlands is a primary priority.
Even if wetlands could be put back to their pre-MS River leveed state (which they can't), however, it still would not solve the problem of hurricane storm surge. The sea level is rising no matter what we do or don't do levee-wise or coastal restoration-wise.
If the N.O. area keeps building as if devastating storm surge is not a probability every 50 to 100 yrs OR MORE, we'll keep having to fish dead bodies out of attics because there is no way to evacuate an entire real city, with tens of thousands of pedestrians who don't have cars and for whom cars only get in the way.
Those who think gargantuan Dutch-style levees and that a few freshwater diversion and barrier-island restoration programs will allow the N.O. metro area to carry on as usual are the silly ones. Besides that, even if unlimited federal funding were deposited in coffers today, it would be YEARS before levees and wetlands were sufficient to protect against another Big One. Many structures can be elevated in a matter of months.
And as far as being a dead duck because one didn't evacuate...I beg to differ. Ask any one of a number of New Orleanians if they would have left at all if they'd been well-stocked
AND they knew their homes would not flood, and you will find lots and lots of silly people.
New Orleans Mayor Orders Barrack Built to Break Up Homeless Camp, but Epidemic Remains
http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/New_Orleans_homeless_pushed_into_ba_02272008.html
As for the Pulitzer being handed out, I believe that the person/s that can look honestly at Aug/Sept 2005 to the present and unravel the knots will earn the Pulitzer and a helluvalot of respect.
A good general idea of the situations that the people faced are documented by photos at the following website http://outhouserag.typepad.com/hurricane_watch/katrina_pictures/index.html Then follow up by looking at the photos from Hurricane Rita that hit the La/Tx coastline 3 weeks after Katrina http://outhouserag.typepad.com/hurricane_watch/rita_pictures/index.html
If anyone has captured the 'story', I haven't read it yet.
I sure am glad that you are the one nailing these pigs.
I posted you onto on the Ladder to counter the WP.
http://noladder.blogspot.com/
Thanks
This is just another example of how the insular worlds of big media in NY and LA (and even Houston which is a frickin' 8-hour drive from here) are completely out-of-touch with what is going on here in New Orleans. Can you imagine if the mayor of New York or Chicago said in a television interview that he'd "cold cock" anyone who tried to get close to him to do him harm? It'd be the first topic that night on The Situation Room or Hardball.
(note: for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, go check out the interview at wwltv.com)
Really enjoy your consistent coverage and opinions regarding our city. It's probably the only place in any media format where New Orleans is mentioned regularly.
YANGETY!