by John Horgan, The Scientific Curmudgeon
On Monday, August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. As the scale of the devastation became apparent, George Bush and Michael Chertoff, head of homeland security, insisted that no one could have foreseen such catastrophic failure of the levees. Actually, in 2001 the veteran science journalist Mark Fischetti predicted precisely such a catastrophe in a Scientific American article titled “Drowning New Orleans.”
By September 1, 2005, the media had discovered Fischetti and his article. Within a week, Fischetti had written an oped piece for the New York Times and appeared on CNN, CNBC, the History Channel and Meet the Press with Tim Russert. Yesterday, Fischetti—a friend and former colleague at IEEE Spectrum in the early 1980s and now an editor at Scientific American–spoke at Stevens about what New Orleans and other coastal regions can do to protect themselves against big storms. The solutions are grand in scale and extremely expensive; they involve building hundreds of miles of walls around the Mississippi delta. Fischetti argues that such measures are necessary for environmental, economic, cultural and humanitarian reasons, but he acknowledges that the measures raise all sorts of questions. We have posted “Drowning New Orleans”; “Protecting New Orleans,” a followup article published in Scientific American last February; and a short item on levees. We welcome your feedback.
September 21st, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Saving New Orleans:
1) Cart away anything of historic value
2) Bulldoze New Orleans flat.
3) Lay down power, copper and fiberoptic communication, gas, sewage, water… utilities lines.
4) Build a subway system atop.
5) Dredge the continental shelf and fill in New Orleans to a height of 40 feet above sea level.
6) Return the stuff of historic value.
7) Build New New Orleans atop its 40-foot monadnock using Mexican daylaborers.
8) Who gets to live in New New Orleans?
8a) Assemble a vast conclave of social activist, political, and religious leaders.
8b) Kill them.
8c) Get on with building and repopulating New New Orleans unimpeded.
September 21st, 2006 at 8:10 pm
Another article worth citing, precisely one year before Katrina:
http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/
Ignore the date as you read the first four paragraphs ….