There have been a couple of diaries debating the idea of rebuilding New Orleans. Should they use federal money to rebuild in an area that's dangerous? However, there is a plan to make New Orleans a
"safer" place...
On last night's
Lou Dobbs Tonight,
Mike Tidwell (the author of "Bayou Farewell") talked about a plan to correct the damage to the wetlands by controlled divergence of the Mississippi River...
MIKE TIDWELL: As Governor Blanco of Louisiana said, we need to re- engineer the coast. We need to get the water -- assuming we rebuild New Orleans, which seems like an open question at this point. If we re-inhabit New Orleans, we need to get the water of the Mississippi River back into the marshes, and the barrier islands that have traditionally created a land buffer to protect New Orleans, and make it inhabitable.
Right now, even without the hurricane, 50 acres a day of land turn to water in south Louisiana, because the whole land platform is sinking, because there is no replenishment of nutrients from the river from natural flooding. There is an engineering plan to carefully fix that, through controlled divergence of the water into the barrier islands and the wetlands to create new land.
KITTY PILGRIM, CNN ANCHOR: Wouldn't you lose a lot of real estate in doing this?
TIDWELL: No. Because so much of south Louisiana is already behind levees, you can move these natural -- these man-made rivers, half the inhabited areas into the wetlands and barrier island areas, that need replenishment.
The other problem, of course, is global climate change. Scientists are predicting, even our own government is predicting three feet of sea level rise in this century because of global warming.
That's another problem on top of it. You had 90 degrees of sea surface temperatures in the Gulf, record temperatures, that I think contributed to this. And in my book, "Bayou Farewell," I mention that one of the ways we save New Orleans is the same way we save all of us, is we've got to get off of the fossil fuels that create the greenhouse gases and make everything worse.
PILGRIM: Let me just take you back to the sort of logistics of fixing this particular situation, though. Does this not cost enormous amounts of money? And have there been provisions to start phasing this in?
TIDWELL: What is happening in New Orleans right now has been predicted for a long time. The skyrocketing energy prices because of the pipelines have been predicted for a long time. There is a plan, a $14 billion plan, about the cost of the Big Dig in Boston, or two weeks of expenditures on military operations in Iraq, to replumb the coast, if you will, to build these man-made divergences -- $14 billion. The plan is on the table. You can Google Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Read all about it. It's been on the table for a long time, but people have ignored it, and now the catastrophe has come.
This is the plan that the Bush Administration DE-FUNDED to afford the costs of other things
(i.e. Iraq).
I said yesterday that they should rebuild New Orleans, because you can't just abandon a city to ruins. I advocated rebuilding the levees & make them stronger & higher, while doing something about the wetlands. Someone posted that this was a contradiction since the levees were causing the destruction of the wetlands.
Will this controlled divergence of the Mississippi River negate the effect of the levees that protect New Orleans? If the Democrats were smart they would start talking about this plan, and insist that full funding be part of any recovery package from the Congress...