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WELL, thought onetime home N'Awlins dodged a bullet- only got 96mph winds (just barely Cat 2)- eyewall sort of broke after hit land and was 30 miles to east. Yowza- delayed breech of Lake levees- 2pm Teus- and NO is flooding!!! Instead of rescueing people one by one, rescue the city- PLUG the BREECH!! Ponchartrain is 8 ft higher, so must add those numbers onto below sea level to get depth of flooding (29 ft max in northern zones by Lake). Incredible, had 100 years to (huge Times-Picayune series) prepare for this, but FEMA and Corp. of Engineers don't have sinkable barges and long metal or concrete panels to immediately be slapped onto levee ruptures!! They just watched dumbly for 27 hours as city filled with water, then encouragingly said water level isn't rising any more. BECAUSE IT IS SAME AS THE LAKE. $100,000 to stop breeches or $100 billion to rebuild city. (NO's historic battle between land and water:
http://www.southbear.com/New_Orleans/Geography.html
Now (9/2) levees are breeched in four places. Water is higher in city than Lake, and Corp. of Engineer head was talking of opening (BBC) more levee walls to allow water to escape. Ruptured canals on east and west usually drain pumped water north from 22 pumping stations into the Lake, and were protected by only 9" thick concrete slabs, instead of 3-4' of concrete. $10-20 million of 3 ft square 25 ft deep concrete pillars could have reinforced canals + prevented breeches, but these damn canals tripled or quadrupled levee exposure. Weren't there gates on the Lake that could have been closed????? 3 explosive charges by terrorists could have achieved all the same results, since the power would have failed under flooding and there was no capability to repair breeches.
Need huge self-powered water pumps- Navy dredging barges, ship bilge pumps- they needed 22 before to keep swamp from flooding and probably 2 times more to actually remove the 60-100 square miles of water MORE: http://hammernews.blogspot.com/