Monday, September 05, 2005

Future Map of North America

The Inundation of New Orleans is making people nervous, in an End Times kinda way. Although I like Hubby's idea of leaving the Big Easy underwater, and recreating a tourist attraction on a giant bobbing barge that could be called The Floating French Quarter. I've been mentally reviewing the list of things which must be done in order to revive New Orleans. It is not a happy list. They need to: find, recover and bury the remaining dead bodies (including searches of every house still standing), temporarily rebuild the levees so they can pump out the water, raze damaged structures, detoxify everything, mobilize an army of insurance adjustors and building inspectors to assess damage, clean up the mold, rebuild the infrastructure...then and only then can they think about rebuilding. I think it's several years out, if it can be done at all. I think it will prove far too expensive to rebuild New Orleans where it was. I don't blame people for having an emotional attachment to What Once Was (WOW!), but that New Orleans is a memory. It may not be acceptable to declare the city dead (ask Dennis Hastert) but what they likely will do is pretend they plan to rebuild the city and then inform the public as each new obstacle is reached. It will eventually become conventional wisdom that it just can't be done. That's also assuming no more hurricanes will come along in the meantime, which is not a certainty either. I hope every other city is working on its disaster plan, whether it's Miami's hurricane plan, LA's earthquake plan, Seattle's volcano plan, New York's terrorism plan or Philadelphia's tsunami plan. We now know a certain percentage cannot evacuate without help, and another percentage will not evacuate without coercion. Let's work on that now before it's too late.

1 Comments:

Blogger Pernicious Panda said...

That is one scary -- I mean SCARY -- map.I'd better start stocking in canned food. And a rubber raft, by the looks of my part of the country...

9/07/2005 12:15:00 PM  

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