October 1, 2001
The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”
New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh–an area the size of Manhattan–will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn’t go very far.
Disrupting the Borg is expensive and time consuming!
Recent Comments
saveenergy on 65 Years Of Progress! Jeff L. on Analyzing The Western Water Cr… Morgan Wright on Great Lakes Approaching 100% I… Morgan Wright on Great Lakes Set Another Spring… gelcarrion0t on New Visitech Features saveenergy on Ice-Free Arctic By 2014 gelcarrion0t on Ice-Free Arctic By 2014 gelcarrion0t on Debt-Free US Treasury Forecast gelcarrion0t on Seventeen Years Of Fun Barbara Stockwell on Nuclear Safety In The US
” An acre disappears every 24 minutes.”
Really? Where does it go? Rio?
I just tried to find the source of this quote. I did find a website, http://www.uvm.edu/~jbartlet/nr260/, that also quotes this ‘fact’, and gives sources. The problem is that most of the pages are ‘not found’ and nowhere is this figure verifiable. Circular quotations, the trademark of leftist ‘science’.
34 square miles a year just vanish? I suppose they think it goes where Trenberth says missing heat goes – the oceans. Or maybe it goes where Trenberth’s missing heat really goes – space. Or maybe they are just FOS.
That still holds true today! They should turn it into a large fish farm.
Since “more than 100,000” did not die per the prediction of LSU should Bush now get credit for saving tens of thousands of lives?
Would that be defined as lives ‘saved or created’?
GG, i generally find your comments both agreeable and amusing, but before anyone starts off on a “let’s abandon NOLA and its idiot inhabitnats thread,” see my comments in this WUWT link http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/29/katrina-5-years-later/a .
They sure went out on a limb there.
Someone should check and see if four years later whether they blamed Bush 43 for Katrina.
Again with the “Manhatten” references……wait a sec….Hansen et al are at GISS and that is in (wait for it) MANHATTEN!
It is all becoming much clearer.