How long will it take to rebuild New Orleans? And should it be done?
According to some estimates, New Orleans will be shut down for at least a month or two. I suspect it is far worse than that. Rebuilding the levees and pumping out the water will only reveal the problems, not solve them.
All those poor frame houses, and many of the fine frame houses, will be essentially ruined after several days under water. Walls will be too weak for safety, and plumbing and wiring ruined. Large buildings may be unsafe due to water damage or weakened foundations.
Civic services such as power lines, phone lines and sewers may well be so damaged as to require complete replacement. Traffic light systems will be so waterlogged they will require complete overhaul or replacement. City water lines will be contaminated, weakened or cracked in so many places that they will have to be replaced.
My guess, as an amateur engineer, is that many or most of the buildings there will not be useable or even repairable when dried out. I suspect the only things that will still be good once the city dries out are trees and pavement.
Four years on and the new World Trade Center is only a pile of incomplete building plans. I expect much of same thing will happen in New Orleans. Simply leveling the ruined buildings and houses and hauling the debris away will be a huge task.
New Orleans is still standing, but it is a ghost, an empty shell of a city, a stage prop that looks something like New Orleans once did. It actually is gone, as if a tsunami had passed over it and left nothing behind.
Stuart Wier, Boulder
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Geological, meteorological and oceanographic studies cover every possible natural disaster. Such studies are, though readily available, seldom used to determine the efficacy of building homes, businesses, etc., in the variety of natural settings in our country.
We can ask questions about what we do without entertaining why we do certain things. Why do we build on Mount Rainier’s lava and mud flows, the San Andreas Fault, Gulf Coast and East coast barrier islands, low coastal areas, other hurricane- and tornado-susceptible areas, tsunami-prone West Coast areas, river flood plains, crumbling Malibu sea cliffs, unstable Green Mountain slopes, river deltas and other areas of subsidence, areas with insufficient water for development, ad nauseam?
Unable to answer these questions, we can ask the topical question: How could anybody build a city below sea level, in a hurricane-prone alligator swamp full of mosquitoes, and call it New Orleans? To rebuild the levees and drain and repair the city will require huge expenditures of nearly every national asset. To then possibly repeat the process by moving back into a known hazardous environment belies rational thought.
Cities have been destroyed, in history, and residents, recognizing the dangerous futility, have not moved back in. New Orleans, when repaired, will continue to sink, and require that levees will be built ever higher.
Something about diminishing returns?
Peter K. Link, Evergreen
Killing two birds with one stone: The benefits of hybrid vehicles
Re: “When the oil market speaks,” Aug. 31 Al Knight column.
Al Knight is the confused one, not the Sierra Club, regarding gasoline prices and the environment. For years, we have been consistent in our calls for better fuel economy not only to reduce our ever-growing dependence on imported oil, but to reduce carbon-dioxide contribution to global warning.
Applying known conservation technology, including hybrid vehicles, to the transportation sector of our economy offers the most immediate antidote to both of these problems. And we are always willing to work with environmentally conscious corporations, as we are doing with Ford, the U.S. leader in hybrid vehicles.
If our approach were widely adopted, the good results for both reducing air pollution and improving national security would far eclipse any benefit from the trickle of increased production that might result from drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Knight advocates.
Edward Stewart Wright, Denver
The writer is the Rocky Mountain Sierra Club’s chair pro tem for transportation.
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