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Originally Posted by KillerGremlin
I don't condemn the people that lived in the city before. It was all lovey dovey. But now that nature has taken its course and the city is destroyed, those people need to get out.
While roots, heritage, family and money all were issues before, the city is gone, families are scattered, and the donation money should be going to a new cause, reconstruction in a better location.
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The city isn't gone. And, yeah, relocating the city would be
much cheaper than simply upgrading the existing levees.
The fact is the levee system DID work for decades. To think we can't build better levees is ridiculous (just ask the Dutch about what modern engineering can do to protect against storm surges).
Professor S, you said the city is doomed. Hardly. Everyone's crowing about the city being gone just isn't true.
The poor parts, 9th ward, 7th ward, east New Orleans proper, the parts that got it worst -- those parts still haven't been rebuilt. A big reason for that is because they're in the (literally) lowest parts of New Orleans, and the local government wouldn't let them rebuild before they re-outlined the flood plains or whatever -- re-outlining where they would allow people to build. I think they finally got that done recently..
But anyway, everywhere else, uptown, Garden District, French Quarter and so on are up and doing relatively fine. I say relatively, because grocery stores aren't open all night anymore. Oh noes. The damage that happened in these places was more like the damage you get from a typical hurricane. If you're telling them to leave as well, should we also relocate everyone living across the Gulf Coast?
Not to mention all of metropolitan New Orleans, the outlying areas -- which doesn't have the same rich history but is where the majority of New Orleanians now live -- wasn't even affected by the levee breaks. Should they be told to leave? If you don't spend money to rebuild the levees, you're essentially telling all of these people who were hardly affected in the same way as New Orleans proper to move, too.
And how would we relocate the port of New Orleans? It's one of the biggest in the U.S. and the world (I think in the U.S. it's only second to NYC), and it's located at the mouth of the Mississippi for a reason. How do you relocate that?
New Orleans isn't gone. I thought all of you thinking it shouldn't be rebuilt were probably just letting out some steam. And I don't think one's a monster to suggest such a thing. But it doesn't make any sense to entirely give up on the city.
Anyway, I think if any city should be relocated, it's San Francisco. At least we have
some protection against storm surges. How do we protect a city built on a fault that's just waiting to cause another catastrophic earthquake? /kidding