I just got home & turned on the television, and it looks like Doomsday in New Orleans. On MSNBC, one meteorologist said that by morning water could be up to the balconies on
Bourbon Street. It will be a shame to see buildings that survived the
War Of 1812 & the
Civil War, fall before our eyes.
After this is over with, the hard part comes. If & when the levees fail, New Orleans will be flooded. However, the levees then would act as a trap & keep the water in the city, and that water will be a cesspool of polution in which it will be mixed with Oil & Gasoline from the surrounding area. This means the cleanup will have an environmental impact.
In the few articles that I've read, none of them have talked about how long it will take for them to get the water out if the worst happens, then you would have the cleanup for the pollutants. Does anyone have any idea how long that would take?
Hurricane Katrina is at present a Category 5 Hurricane. The
Philadelphia Inquirer had a story
last year about the implications of a Category 4 Hurricane impact...
"The Red Cross has estimated 25,000 to 100,000 would drown, and I don't think that is unrealistic," said Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes. About 300,000 of the area's 1.2 million people would not evacuate, he predicted, and many of those would be the most vulnerable - elderly, disabled, homeless, carless.
"You'd have people on roofs, clinging to light poles, commandeering high-rises," he said. "And wherever they were, they would be competing with animals and fire ants for the high ground." And since the New Orleans area is home to many refineries and petrochemical plants, burning gasoline on the floodwaters would be an additional hazard, he said.
Rescuing 300,000 people trapped inside the flooded bowl would be a logistical nightmare, and officials have started enlisting private boat owners who could help a Dunkirk-style operation to ferry people out.
There are national implications, too, if New Orleans is hammered. About one-fourth of the nation's oil and natural-gas production is here, as is one-third of its seafood catch. Thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines snake through the bayous and marshes.
The region is home to the nation's largest port complex, moving 16 percent of its cargo.
"A week after a hurricane here, you wouldn't be able to find underwear at a Wal-Mart in Des Moines," Tullier said.