What if Gustav Hits New Orleans?
Hurricane Katrina could not sink New Orleans three years ago. The Big Easy is slowly rebounding once more. But on the horizon is a new hurricane called Gustav, which threatens to drown New Orleans after all the sinning and debauchery that is Southern Decadence. I am praying it hits Texas or Mexico.
If Gustav does hit New Orleans, can we find any meaning from it? Will it be a coincidence? An act from God? Or something else?! Please vote in my poll:
posted by Brettcajun at Tuesday, August 26, 2008
17 Comments:
I didn't see any voting option for "anyone stupid enough to build an entire city below sea level ON the gulf coast deserves what they get".
have fun at Decadence. It may be the last one.
I figure it will hit because you threatened to vote Republican.
or maybe because you are so hateful?
or whiney?
or pretending to be a boi, when you're almost 40!!
The list could go on for ever....
I hope it his Crawford, Texas. Right square on target.
With a hope and prayer and maybe a cross of the fingers New Orleans will be spared, but go find your waders just in case the waters start rising.
Ouch TonkaMan, retract the claws please. I like bust Brett's balls as much as the next guy that smarts!
Mother nature isn't after New Orleans, Republicans, or Southern Decadence. She wants to destroy the oil refineries on the gulf coast so we stop polluting the fucking atmosphere with our fossil fuel consumption
Brett: The Divine Majesty directs the paths of all storms. While New Orleans isn't known for moral purity; without Scriptural input, there is no way of knowing what the Divine Pupose for sending the storm where it goes!
Judging by the results so far it looks like respondants are actually taking the results seriously. Come on, we know the real reason, but doesn't it just sound better that the whole area needs a good hosing after all that spilt beer and baby-batter? Okay, maybe thats just me
Please send any hurricanes up the Chesapeake Bay, then up the Potomac to DC. We need like 3 days of rain badly. This city smells like pee and rat poop and needs a bath.
Thanks.
I sure hope not mr, I know that had to be the worst thing you guys had to go through! Praying it just dies down. I thought Fay scared me, don't want to mess with no Gusav, unless he's European.
It is the curse on the PUMAs (Part Unity My Ass) for screwing up the Dems. You of Clinton-faith need a good colonic.
I think I agree with kezza. If it in fact does hit New Orleans, consider it a post-decadence 'clean-up' as opposed to an attack on the people. :-)
Here are a couple of novel ideas:
First, instead of praying that the storm hits Texas or Mexico, how about praying that it breaks up and doesn't hit anyone? Why feel compelled to wish misfortune to fall on someone else?
Second, cb, regarding the comments on the location of New Orleans: You're right. Of course, by that reasoning, anyone stupid enough to build a city on an earthquake fault (San Francisco, Los Angeles), in a tornado alley (everything in the great plains--Dallas, Chicago, the entire states of Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and others), other hurricane zones (everything from New York south along the Atlantic through Florida) plus the entire Gulf Coast (including Houston), hill/mountain regions with landslides and mudslides (the entire west coast). Let's also not forget places where snowstorms can cause considerable destruction or loss of life (I think that includes the northern 2/3 of the country).
Weather is a fact of life.
Yes, Kevin. Weather is a fact of life. And so are earthquakes, vocanoes, etc.
I think building a major city right on top of a known fault is insanely stupid-- almost as stupid as choosing to live there.
I think building a city on the slopes of an active volcano is stupid too. After Pompeii got obliterated, people didn't ask Rome to sink a ton of money into rebuilding it though, did they?
And yes, there are plenty of other coastal cities built in hurricane prone zones. But not many others rely HEAVILY on levees and pumps to keep their city dry EVERY DAY.
Weather is random and it happens. But that doesn't mean you have to live in a place that invites catastrophy every time it rains hard.
kevin m: thank you for suggesting that it just wither away! I live in Houston and really don't want to deal with rain and high winds.
lewis: you made me LOL. However, for it to get to Crawford, it would have to hit me first on it's way to Crawford.
Interesting points, CB. Let's look at a few other examples.
Rotterdam, for instance, is largely below sea level. It's considerably older than New Orleans, and it, too, is kept dry by a combination of levees and pumps, and in fact one of the finest engineering feats in the world was the building of the Delta Works, the system which protects the Dutch coast from the kind of floods that devastated the region in 1953.
Nobody suggested they move the city or not rebuild; it's where it is for a reason, namely it's one of the busiest ports in the world. Unfortunately, port cities are often at or near sea level - it's a hazard of being located on the water.
New Orleans is located near the confluence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. Enormous amounts of cargo travel upriver on barges after being offloaded from ocean-going ships in New Orleans (or elsewhere along the Gulf Coast). Where, precisely, is all that commerce going to go?
Bear in mind that most of the Mississippi coast was also ripped apart by Katrina. The logic that says "don't do anything for New Orleans" also says we shouldn't do anything there. Or, presumably, anywhere else on the Gulf Coast that could be in the path of a hurricane - Houston, for instance.
And for the record, just over half of New Orleans is above sea level. In fact, the original settlement of New Orleans was precisely because the earlier settlements, in the Biloxi-Gulfport-Mobile corridor, were far more impacted by hurricanes, and an inland site on the river, on the first high ground, was chosen.
Unfortunately, every fucking soccer mom in America had to have a Chevy Suburban or similar vehicle, and every prissy queen whose most exotic driving consists of going to the tanning salon on the OTHER side of the city had to have an 4Runner or Jeep or Pathfinder or whatever, and every redneck from California to Georgia had to have at least an F250. So the oil companies sliced up hundreds of square miles of our wetlands to move their oil equipment in and out, and surprise! it all washed away, so New Orleans is now about 50 miles closer to the coast than it was 80 years ago.
Even so, New Orleans has a high-quality system for keeping dry - and it bears repeating, New Orleans would NOT have flooded in Katrina if it weren't for the fact that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under-designed the levee system and then proceeded to under-build even for the inadequate specifications they had drafted. There was no standing water in New Orleans until AFTER the canal levees broke, hours after the storm passed.
If we're going to abandon New Orleans because it was built in a location that only recently has been seriously at risk for devastation from a hurricane (it survived plenty of direct hits in the past), then we need to abandon Los Angeles because of fire risk. We need to abandon San Francisco and most of coastal California for earthquake risk. The entirety of the midwest, from the Rockies to the Smokies, should be abandoned because of tornado risk.
Got any ideas where we can move everyone?
Maybe it's good I've been out of the blog loop for a while. There's some serious anger in the comments. WTF? It's not pleasant seeing people damn others with hopes of disaster because they disagree with something they said.
Just proves the point I learned this past year. When online, people show their true colors. If they're nasty and ill-minded, online it'll come out in spades.
As for the city being in a bad spot (not what I was referring to above), that is a fair comment except for this: there's a bucket of such cities around the world. They were founded centuries - or millennia- ago, on flood plains and earthquake zones (HELLO, SF and LA!!!) and no one knew any better, I guess, and now there's hundreds of thousands in such cities all there is too it.
Period.
Two options: protect the centuries old cites in spite of the bad initial choice or evacuate. That's it.
And the first orderly evacuation of a world city incited purely due to the fact that it was founded in a bad spot will, while being quite wise, will be a major turning point in humanity.
Anyone who has a plan of how to carry it out, start lobbying for it in Congress RIGHT NOW.
It hasn't happened yet on Earth. The only way it has ever happened in the past is with the death of tens or hundreds of thousands when a city is wiped off the face of the Earth.
And those who think that would be fine because it would prove a point... well, nuff said.
Brett, I hope you guys are spared this time round! Be well.
Texas? Damn you to the depths of the sea. You, you gorgeous swamp thang.
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