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| Yes | 38% | 40 votes | Total: 104 votes | |
| No | 62% | 64 votes |
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Add to FavoritesNew Orleans is still stricken from Katrina three years ago. But are they prepared for Gustav? ... yes, as prepared as they can be.
This time, there are no illusions about what will happen if a hurricane strikes New Orleans. Their levees are still being rebuilt, and will not be finished until 2011. When it became confirmed that Gustav would likely hit New Orleans, evacuations of the poor and the infirm began Saturday. State and federal officials aren't going to leave them stranded like they did with Katrina. Hotels plan to close on Saturday as a way to force all tourists to leave. Likely, word will come to evacuate the entire city early Sunday.
People who have been rebuilding are now boarding up homes and businesses to protect against looters.
People who are still living in the small trailers provided after Katrina are urged to evacuate early, because trailers are unsafe in high wind conditions.
Louisiana has activated 3000 guardsmen and ordered 1500 of them to be in New Orleans by Friday. This is to deter the looting and crime that soared after Katrina.
The ceremonies that were being held to commemorate the third anniversary of Katrina were suspended as officials rushed to prepare for Gustav, which is being seen as the return of the nightmare. Some people are saying that if their new homes are destroyed this time, they probably won't move back to New Orleans. Other people say that they lost everything in Katrina, and three years later, they might lose it all again ... it's very discouraging.
Hurrica ne Katrina was a disaster, but the disaster was compounded government failures, like poor response time, poor planning, and poorly engineered flood levees. This time, officials have had three years to prepare for another blow, and they are cautiously optimistic that things will be better this time. Instead of providing shelter within the city, (which turned into the disaster like the Superdome, where thousands of people were stranded for days without food or sanitation facilities), they plan to evacuate everyone, whether by bus, plane, or train.
Officials are also providing shelter for pets, so people can be persuaded to evacuate, rather than stay with Fido and Fluffy and become stranded or killed.
As of this writing (Saturday), Gustav is nearing Cuba and has not yet reached the Gulf. But the projected path anticipates that the storm will move northwest across the Gulf, picking up more energy from the warm, moist air as it goes, and slam into the central Gulf Coast on Monday or Tuesday. Rain and thunderstorms from Gustav's outer rain bands could begin hitting the Gulf Coast as early as Sunday. Wave height will grow, reaching its worst point Monday night. Gustav will produce heavy rain and flooding all along the south-central US coast. The question is, how hard will it hit New Orleans?
They are as prepared as they can be ... we can only hope that they complete the evacuations in time, or that the hurricane changes its track.
Sources:
http:/ /www.usatoday.com/we ather/hurricane/2008 -08-28-Gustav_N.htm? csp=34
http://www.nyt imes.com/2008/08/29/ us/29gustav.html?par tner=rssnyt&emc=rss
h ttp://voices.washing tonpost.com/washingt onpostinvestigations /2008/08/deja_vu_new _orleans_braces_for. html
http://news.yaho o.com/s/afp/20080828 /ts_alt_afp/usweathe rstorm
http://www.wea ther.com/newscenter/ hurricanecentral/upd ate/index.html?from= hurricane_welcome
Learn more about this author, Kessie Carroll.
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No
Gustav has been and gone now. On August 31, the National Hurricane Centre gave it an 81 percent chance of remaining at a Category 3 hurricane or higher. The Saffir-Simpson scale rates hurricanes according to wind speed and storm surge on a scale of 1 to 5 (with 5 the worst). A category 3 hurricane brings with it sustained winds of between 111 and 130 mph and while it's in the middle of the scale, it still packs a punch. The destructive winds associated with a Category 3 can cause significant structural damage and anything lacking a solid foundation is usually destroyed. For a city like New Orleans, with almost half its area below sea level, it is not the winds that cause the damage; it is the associated storm surge. Gustav was expected to bring with it a 9-12 foot storm surge. Given that the levees protecting New Orleans are around 23 feet high, there weren't expected to be problems. At a minimum, there should have been an 11 foot margin of safety. Wishful thinking.
You just need to look at a side-elevation of the New Orleans levee system to appreciate what a precarious position the city is in. A report by the American Society of Civil Engineers in the wake of Katrina found that the city is built on an unstable mixture of soft sand, silt and clay. Worse still, the flood control structures keeping out the Mississippi are causing subsidence, not allowing the river's natural silt deposits to replenish those that are continually being washed away. On top of this, the Mississippi is not at sea level and the average annual high water level is 14 feet. It doesn't take much of a calculation to work out that a couple of unfortunate coincidences are going to cause a lot of trouble for New Orleans. High water plus a hurricane above Category 2 is likely to breach a levee that has already been structurally weakened as a result of the damage sustained during Katrina.
So, what happened with Gustav?
Despite the doomsday predictions of Mayor Nagin, Gustav was thankfully not the storm of the century and the city managed to escape without major damage. For once, Mother Nature smiled on New Orleans. Two days earlier, Gustav was a Category 4 monster (the same as Katrina) bearing down on Cuba. Two landfalls in Cuba seemed to knock the stuffing out of Gustav and some cooler air over the Gulf of Mexico saw the wind speed decrease from 135 mph to 115 mph as it came ashore near Grand Island, Louisiana. This further weakened Gustav to a Category 2 hurricane and about six hours after making landfall it had dissipated into tropical depression.
Despite this, the storm surge was sufficient to cause extensive flooding and went very close to breaching the New Orleans levee system. 110 deaths have been attributed to Gustav in the Caribbean and the US (compared to about 1,800 for Katrina) and the risk modelling firm Equecat Inc has estimated that it could cost the US insurance industry around $9 billion. This puts it among the ten costliest storms in US history. And this was only a Category 2 hurricane.
There is little doubt that the current levee is inadequate to protect New Orleans in the event of a major hurricane (classified as category 3 and above). A category 4 hurricane will bring a storm surge over the top of the levees and cause the widespread devastation that we saw with Katrina. Katrina cost nearly $70 billion in damage and this is likely to be a minimum cost for similar storms in the future. The only saving grace is that the advance warning systems and appropriately coordinated and managed evacuation plans should ensure that we do not see a repeat of the loss of life that we saw with Katrina.
Personally, I consider New Orleans an unsustainable location for a city. Subsiding foundations, the erosion of the natural defensive barrier of the offshore islands and a substantial chunk of coastline, a weakened levee system combined with a city that is substantially below sea level are a recipe for disaster in themselves, but combining that with a city in what is effectively hurricane alley means that it is not a question of if', but when'.
A ringing endorsement of this view is the fact that as of July 2007, New Orleans only had around 60 percent of the population it had before Katrina. Perhaps it is time to stop fighting Mother Nature and look at a more viable location for the city.
Learn more about this author, Jimmy Nightingale.
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