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December 18, 2005

It wasn't a flood, it was multiple floods. . .

People talk of "Katrina fatigue", a sense that people are tired of talking about it, or want to deny it in the hopes it will all just go away or someone else will handle it. Unfortunately there is not magic fairy that will come by and restore New Orleans to its former somewhat dingy glory. Also unfortunate is that people simply have no real understanding of what happened to New Orleans and the Gulf Region with this storm. Nor do many people want to truly understand what happened; they instead want to live in a more comfortable state of being where they can blame events on human failings and grander schemes guilt and conspiracy. Whatever you think of that is fine, my opinions have been stated in the Katrina archives, but right now I want to address one particular issue that people don't seem to realize.

There wasn't ONE storm, there were TWO (or more in some areas), also there wasn't one flood that took down New Orleans, there were many. Perhaps the best illustration of this can be seen in this picture from my last trip.

Click to enlarge

Take a few minutes and look at the larger image, notice the water lines on the house. You may not be able to pick them out in the image, but there are no less than ten (10) standing water lines on that house. That represents ten different flood levels of STANDING WATER. Each flood level was the result of a particular event, whether it be localized flooding from rain, flash flooding from levee breaches, or multiple waves of flooding and standing waters generated by the storm surge. Also it's important to keep in mind that those are "STANDING WATER" lines, not "HIGH WATER LINES", judging from high water lines on two story structures and telephone poles, this little yellow house was completely under water at some point during the storms. (NOTE: This house in the West End/Lakeview area of the city. This photo was taken the first week of December.)

While the stories of human misery detailed in much false detail by our news media are certainly heart-breaking, the objective examination of the situation in New Orleans is even more devastating once you get close enough to wrap your head and heart around it.

There is very little left of New Orleans. That sentence hurts to write, but it's true. Certainly there were areas of the city that were spared, such as parts of Uptown and the French Quarter, and I guess it's a wonderful thing that many of the most important historical areas were saved, but the city itself, the areas that were the homes and businesses of the common people of New Orleans are almost completely destroyed. Hydraulic forces hammered and hammered and hammered away on the structures within the city, rising water and waves entered homes and then swirled furniture and other possessions around as if they were in a blender, then falling water did the same again, then another period of rising water, then falling, then rising again.

Imagine that you place a cup of milk, an egg, a wooden box and a roll of paper towels in the bottom of your bathtub, now take two five gallon buckets full of water and pour them both quickly into the tub. Chances are your egg is now cracked and yolk is flowing out, the milk is gone and there's a good chance that the glass is cracked, the wooden box is now careening around the tub in a circular motion, banging into the egg and the glass and the roll of paper towels has swollen up and weighs about 6 pounds or so.

Now imagine that 6 feet of water came rushing into your home in about a 15 to 25 minute timeframe, or event quicker, now drain out 3 feet, then add 4, drain 2, add six, drain 5 add 3 then let it all drain out. Were you able to picture the floodwaters coming in and throwing your belongings around haphazardly, could you imagine your mattresses swelling up with water and becoming 500 pound floating sledgehammers spinning around your bedroom? Were you able to imagine your refrigerator floating up slightly then falling over with a crash? How about the cleaners and chemicals under your kitchen sink mixing and reacting, producing poisonous slicks on the surface of the water and then coating everything? What about pictures floating off the wall, swirling around the house then days later the waterlogged frames swell and snap the glass sounding like a gunshot and sending shards of glass down into the piles of debris sunken under the water that's been standing for a week?

In a previous post I wrote about my visit into New Orleans one month after Katrina, I noted that there were no insects, no rodents, and hardly any birds at all in the city. Imagine if you will though, the scene during the floods themselves. Fire ants will form a ball of hundreds of thousands of ants that floats on the surface of the water until it touches something offering high ground, the millions of rats and rodents in the city came up out of the sewers and up into homes to escape rising water, along with dogs, cats and even humans, many were caught in attics as waters kept climbing eventually drowning en masse.

Now we can move on to the period after the waters receded, then the heat sets in, that famous New Orleans wet, sticky oppressive heat, cooking everything in the city (thank goodness Katrina didn't visit earlier in the season to add some 100 degree plus days to this period). Bacteria colonies flourish in the wet sticky debris piles, in the waterlogged carpet, in the mattresses and couches, and then the mold sets in. The evil and dreaded black mold of New Orleans, toxic by almost any standard begins to grow at each standing water line, then casting out spores with each heat wave, covering every wall and ceiling which in turn develop mold colonies of their own, the mold is literally covering everything now, having had 3 months to grow without much molestation.

The insects and rodents that survived the storm are coming back, with a vengeance. The debris fields which stand four stories tall and cover thousands of yards are the Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street of New Orleans rat population and breeding grounds for mosquitoes and other insects that notoriously infest the city. Biology is reclaiming New Orleans faster than intrepid human souls can reclaim it.

I write this to preface future posts I'm working on regarding New Orleans. I needed to my interpretation of what physically happened in the city down and out there because it's central to my position which will be outlined in future posts that simply holds that New Orleans cannot be repaired, but rather must be rebuilt, BUT not as its former self as Mayor Nagin is trying to do. The damage to the city is too great to repair; wholesale demolition must take place in areas like the Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and Lakeview. The current strategy of allowing people to willy-nilly come in and gut their homes and begin rebuilding without a plan is doomed to failure, and even making matters worse as resources are diverted and supplies misused.

People need to realize that this wasn't a flood like the mid-west experiences, this was salt and fresh water, this was wave action and successive periods of rising and falling water, then all rinsed and repeated again. Everyone knew this was coming one day and everyone knew that a Category 4 or 5 storm would effectively destroy the city, and effectively, it has. I support rebuilding the destroyed New Orleans, just not all of it, and not in the same way.

I see a future New Orleans very much similar to Manhattan or San Francisco where a small densely populated area is supported by outlying communities where Manhattan has Queens and The Bronx, and San Francisco has Oakland and Marin; New Orleans will have a West Bank and a North Shore. A smaller geographic footprint for New Orleans can be defended against storms easier than the sprawling city that built itself in a bowl and then expanded to build on the swamps around it.

The truly MASSIVE levees needed to protect the city (don't rely on just rock and concrete armor New Orleans) will require significant uses of eminent domain (the non-Kelo, "for public works" kind) to get the real estate needed for their footprint and should be high enough and strong enough to theoretically protect the city from a Level 5 storm (although I'm not sure that's even possible).

The devastated areas of the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East should not be rebuilt or redeveloped into residences at all in my opinion, New Orleans East simply has no real protection from the Lake along the route I-10 takes and using that real estate to construct a series of levees and breakwaters, coupled with allowing nature to reclaim that area (with a little help) would go a long way to protect the city from future storm surges by sucking energy out of the storm and sucking up water like the marshy sponge it was intended to by.

Rebuilding the Ninth Ward should be focused on supporting the port and industry of New Orleans, with huge container yards and light to medium industrial facilities that can provide fuel for the city's economic engine. Putting peoples homes in New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward just doesn't make sense, it's one thing to lose a business' inventory to a storm, putting individuals in that situation just doesn't make sense, it's an invitation for another disaster.

I'll examine most of these topics and suggestions later in more detail as I flesh out more details and organize my thoughts more. I'm sorry there aren't any links here and maybe I'll add some later, but right now this is a "stream of consciousness" piece that I want to develop more as time goes on, but I felt I owed it to some of you to write this up and get it posted. So there you go, my evolving sense of what's going on down there.

--Jason

Posted by JasonColeman at December 18, 2005 11:44 AM