DescentBB

Dial Up Warning!!



HUGE PIC!!

Wow you're not kidding when you say big pic. That's amazing though.

Woof! 4062 x 4544 x 24 BPP ... that, is big!

What a mess! Wish I could do more than scrap together a few donations...

What's really disturbing is that almost all of the area shown is flooded. Every little rectangular blip a home destroyed...some still containing a few people that stayed behind and died. When the city is finally drained it'll be a horrorscape of death and disease in the ruins. I don't think the areas under sea level should be rebuilt. Everything should be cleared and people move up on to higher land away from the water. Building any structure under sea level should be made illegal.

Barring under-sea-level construction is foolish. Common sense just dictates that you don't build a city on a floodplain 40 feet below sea level and expect to drain any water into the river that created the flooodplain.

New Orleans is far from unique in being built on a flood plane. My home is built on a flood plane: if the Waimakariri river bursts the levees in a flood, then only the second story of our home will remain above water, and over 80,000 homes will be swamped. It hasn't happened yet, but it could well do. The only advantage we have here is that the water would find its own way to the sea.

There are literally hundreds and probably thousands of cities worldwide which are built in similarly precarious locations.

The quadruple follies of New Orleans are being below sea level, ocean one side, river another side and a lake on the other. Surely that is just pushing the bounds a little in terms of inviting disaster.

I'm not sure what the plan is for NO, but logic might seem to dictate either abandoning the site all together, or filling the whole thing in and beginning again, which the USA is more than capable of doing, and doing rapidly.

However, I'm sure the outcome will be to reclaim the city, in its existing format, raising the levees an extra amount, and tempting fate once more.

Mobius, What side of NZ do you live on? the West or East?

Google Earth has some overlays of the devastation to plug into that program.

http://earth.google.com/katrina.html

Amazing...