Posted on 09/13/2005 4:06:32 AM PDT by NickatNite2003
NEW ORLEANS -- Water levels dropped precipitously Monday in the worst of the flooded neighborhoods in and around New Orleans. Areas that had been under 6 to 8 feet of water less than two days earlier were dry at dawn, with ooze now smearing the streets and water collecting at low, marshy spots.
For the first time in the 8th and 9th wards in East New Orleans and Mid-City neighborhoods, search and rescue crews were able to patrol on foot. By midday, National Guardsmen and Marines said they had found several corpses inside homes that had been inaccessible until today.
ADVERTISEMENT In the city's lower 9th Ward, thousands of once-flooded homes bore brown watermarks that documented the systematic dropping of water levels. Marines, who on Saturday had patrolled neighborhoods in amphibious vehicles that floated atop floodwaters up to 8 feet deep, were patrolling on foot today, the slick mud sucking at the bottoms of their rubber boots.
"The water's gone down so fast, we can't keep up with it," a Guard staff sergeant said on North Claiborne Avenue in the lower 9th Ward. "It's like the whole place dried up overnight."
National Guardsman manned checkpoints as Marines wearing long green rubber gloves went house to house, knocking on doors and shouting for survivors. No one has been found alive in three days in the ward, said Lt. Col. Kent Ralston, whose Humvee was able to negotiate streets that had required amphibious vehicles two days earlier.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
agreed. and what of the homes, tear up, tear down new sheet rock or new top to bottom, or garden and park space? No one is talking yet that I have heard.
How about a public aquarium? :)
Well, whatever happens, those buildings can't
be lived in again. It would be like living in
a hospitals Hazardous Materials dumpster.
The wals are literally soaked through with
disease causing elements, and then there's
the mold...<ight as well ghave somebody with AIDS
spit in your face each day..eventually you're
gonna get ubfected.
BTW..did yoou hear that a large number of the
rescuees/transportees, *had* AIDS?
Yeh. I never bought into the dire predictions of it taking a couple of months to get the water out of NO but I gotta' admit to being a bit surprised at the speed things are going.
If the house wasn't totally submerged, I would think a new load of sheet rock might make them habitable. Just not sure who is going to have the final say on what ought to be and what will be. Then again, how many of the old homes were sheetrock, and how many were plaster or perhaps something else less easy to tear out and redo.
In the week after the flood, contractors were being contacted by the government about bulldozing most of the flooded homes and dredging the Lake/River to put in fill to bring the bottom of the bowl of the area around the French Quarter up above sea level before rebuilding any homes.
I don't know if these discussions went beyond the information seeking stage. It was the mood of many in Congress at that time to do that. I don't know how they feel now.
Lets see...rice paddies, catfish farm, crawfish farm. Then if they adopt Dutch technology they could raise tulips.
Man if only Bush hadn't of dynamited those levee's ;)
You know that Jesse et Al are going to demand that the rebuild include the same number of "low income" homes that were there before. I can just hear it in the wind...
This is so sickening, especially the later part of this article about the hospital staff that were stranded with so many patients, and having to be with so many patients who died because intensive care was not possible....45 in all stacked in the chapel when the morgue filled up.
It was so not necessary. Just because a female Democrat Governor didn't want to appear that she couldn't handle it and refused to turn over the helm to the President of the United States.
And even still, the Marines there aren't allowed to do more than peer in windows looking for dead, etc. because Governor POS Blanco won't allow them to have any law enforcement powers, like breaking into the houses to check for corpses or possibly survivors.
The Marines are totally disgusted with being forced to spend so much time trying to see in mud smeared windows...it's so inefficient for the kind of work they are trying to do.
If the gov and mayor were a couple of straight white males, this story would have a whole different spin.
If you don't want something killed, the Marines are the wrong people for the job. We have plenty of National Guard troops available. The Marines should not be doing this work.
If the house wasn't totally submerged, I would think a new load of sheet rock might make them habitable
IMO, in most cases, it will require a lot more than that. A lot of the houses will have to be stripped down to the frame and that's IF the foundations are in OK shape. Floorboards will be buckled, insulation saturated... Rehabbing is extremely labor intensive. In a lot of cases, it will be more cost efficient to bulldoze & start over.
I know one thing for sure..if i lived in
one of the lower (poor) districts, and i got
*out* of New Orleans...I'd *never* go back...
certainly not to live there.
It's a death trap waiting to happen again.
If not by anoyjer Hurricane in this new cycle
of strong Hurrixane seasons, then by disease
that will allways be right rgere, under the
surgaces, if not on them..even a year from now...
would you let one of *your* children play on
the floor of one of these houses?
However, always keep in mind that New Orleans continues to sink around 1 inch per year and eventually, the Atchafalaya River will become the new course for the mighty Mississippi leaving New Orleans and its ports in a bayou. Such an even will occur when a flood similar to that of 1927.
So, IMHO, billions more will be wasted trying to protect New Orleans from economic disaster in a fruitless attempt to control Mother Nature, and in the meantime, the Mississippi delta continues to vanish along with its fisheries as the fight of man against nature, or better yet, commerce dollars versus common sense continues to wage on. I too have yet heard or read from anyone of authority at the city, state or federal level even address the long term issue of the future of 'The Toilet Bowl of the South'.
Over the centuries, the same attitude would direct development of the rest of the lower Mississippi. Earthen levees rose ever higher to corral the river in its channel. But they have come at a price: The same volume of water just moves faster through a smaller space, scouring the channel and weakening the levees from below.
When the rains broke records in April 1927, the Gulf of Mexico was full and worked as a stopper to the Mississippi. The Mississippi was full, too, pushing its own waters up tributaries, breaking levees and causing flooding as far as Ohio and Texas. All that water had to go somewhere.
It couldn't go to New Orleans, panicky city fathers told the Army Corps of Engineers; it would devastate the regional economy.
To save New Orleans, the leaders proposed a radical plan. South of the city, the population was mostly rural and poor. The leaders appealed to the federal government to essentially sacrifice those parishes by blowing up an earthen levee and diverting the water to marshland. They promised restitution to people who would lose their homes. Government officials, including Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, signed off.
On April 29, the levee at Caernarvon, 13 miles south of New Orleans, succumbed to 39 tons of dynamite. The river rushed through at 250,000 cubic feet per second. New Orleans was saved, but the misery of the flooded parishes had only started. The city fathers took years to make good on their promises, and very few residents ever saw any compensation at all.
The water, which had started rising on Good Friday, would not recede until July. Many victims would never return to their homes. Hoover, who won support for leading relief efforts, went on to win the presidential election. And the Corps of Engineers, who had said the levees would hold, was humbled. Says Daniel: "People complained about the corps . . . but they never blamed the river. They understood: 'That's the river. That's nature. That's what it's supposed to be doing.' " -Judd Slivka
Source:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/timeline/timeline2.html
The MSM hype coupled with the lies of local politicans created this erroneous image. NO has been through many floods. Once the levees were repaired and the pumps operable, the water will go down quickly. NO has the means and experience to cope with flooding. In contrast, the great 1993 Midwest flood left parts of Jefferson City and St. Louis underwater for up to three months. NO will be essentially dry in one month.
They don't anymore? How'd they get cured?
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