:( This just breaks my heart....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=361980

I read a livejournal entry that echoed my thoughts.

I think New Orleans should not be rebuilt.

It is not a city that can be maintained without great cost. Add that to the fact that their water system is going to be a toxic mix of who knows what for probably years to come---and that to make it the most minimally liveable, they have to pump who knows how many litres of toxic mix....somewhere else, effectively doubling the damage of New Orlean's destruction.

Also, consider the fact that this could happen AGAIN, despite the great costs that will eventually stop being made to prevent this from happening again.

Raven

I disagree, I think they should rebuild new orleans. Although those are some good points, on a human level they all pale to the people who lost their homes compared to this: They want their homes back. In all the news footage I've seen of the survivors, the people who want to go back to their homes/businesses in new orleans as soon as they can outnumber those who want to never look back about 10:1.

The only way you can STOP people returning to new orleans is either to put a permanent military blockade around the city or to bulldoze the whole thing flat. Neither looks particularly good in the eyes of the press.

Anyway, I'm fairly sure it will get rebuilt, on a political level Bush cannot do ANYTHING else. Hes already taken a load of flak for his (IMHO fairly weak) response to the tragedy, and his advisors will tell him there is NO WAY he can be seen to not give these people back their homes. Can you IMAGINE the political hay hes opponents could make out of that? ("When a plane takes out a building of mostly white people, we talk about rebuilding. When a storm takes out the homes of thousands of black people, we force them to move..." "If this had been a city in texas, you BET bush would have rebuilt" and so on.)

Yeah, it will be expensive, but if you prevent people from returning you have to pay them compensation for the homes and possessions you are essentially forcing them to abandon, and that ends up being expensive too. So they will opt to spend the extra and rebuild new orleans, especially as bush knows he will be out of office before the financial implications REALLY hit (a project like this inevitabvly goes waaaaay over budget, but that wont be felt for a few years, or so I reckon).

Besides, though it MIGHT happen again, put in some decent levies, pay for their upkeep, and the risk is greatly reduced. New Orleans has been there for quite a while, and this is the first I remember of it having to be evactuated, so really the odds are good. Plus, if you start abandoning citys based on natural disasters that might happen, they really should start by evacuating LA before the big one slides it into the ocean.

I agree,
What will they do when another one hits? only a year away for the next season.
-John

The pumps have to be at the bottom of the system. You can only suck water up 33 feet. Basic physics. At 33 feet, the weight of the water equals the pressure of the air pushing it up.

But if you put the pump at the bottom, it can push the water up.

But they don't have to change the fundamental geometry of the pumping action to make them more reliable, do they? Just put the non-waterproof bits (ie the motor) above and leave the impellers or whatever is doing the work down below -- ie they need a longer drive shaft, I figure.

Nope. Doesn't matter what the diameter is. The amount of absolute pull the pump can produce depends on the surface area of the cross section of the water column, which will increase in the same proportion as the weight of the water column, so you'll end up with the same maximum height. If the tube was as thin as a hypodermic needle you might get some extra height due to surface tension, but that's about it.

someone better tell all those multi-hundred foot tall trees that they should be all dried out. They'll be relieved to know ;-)

yeah.. I knew that from my HS biology classes.. just sorta poking fun.

Still. It seems to me that they just need to move the pump motors above sea level and they'd be laughing. Am I missing something?

I suggest using alot of Dutch windmills and waterwheels to get it all dry.

Worked for us, still does.

So you'd have a Hurricane with a Greek name devastating a city with a French name filled with people of African origin, (with a river running through it with an Indian name) and you'll unflood it with Dutch windmills. Oh, and you've got Brits commentating on it as well.
Is this what you get for being part of the world community?

Seriously though, I think the USA needs to look at the safety of its cities in the light of Katrina. Los Angeles is situated on one of the most dangerous geological faults in the world. Washington DC is built on an enormous marsh. Seattle is under a hundred miles away from an active volcano. At least half a dozen states could be next in line for the next hurricane to come your way, and with climate change the way it is (and which country is the largest emittor of greenhouse gases? And is the only major country not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol?) happenings like this are going to get more common

Now I'm not suggesting the US government move everybody out of LA or anything like this. But maybe a policy to try and reduce the size of cities like LA, or at least reduce the rate it grows at, to limit the damage that the earthquake (hurricane, tsunami, volcanic eruption, etc) that we all know will happen sometime will do.

I realise I'm looking at this from a high horse, and I apologise. The UK has had only one hurricane in living memory, and that was when I was 5 months old. But I stick to what I'm saying. It's strange that such a huge country as the USA, with (compared to us tiny Brits) such an obscenely large amount of land, should have most of its population concentrated in huge cities like New Orleans, but that's another issue. I apologise for any rubbish above.

Capreolus

Actually, the supervolcano ELE is a really interesting one. Perhaps because it hasn't bee discovered by Hollywood.

What happens in a supervolcano is this: There is basically a small sea (or large lake) of subterranean lava, not underneath a mountain. This is called a caldera, or a magma chamber. It "breathes" in such a way that the ground above it rises and falls with the relative pressures in the chamber. For instance, we're currently in an upswell at Yellowstone, with the ground rising constantly for the last 50 years or so.

Apparently these events happen every 600K years or so, which (of course) means that we're overdue for one, which is just the scientist's way of pre-getting credit should something actually happen, and a great way to inspire interest in the field in the meantime, as nothing quite gets people's attention like gut-wrenching fear.

Anyway, every 600K years, what happens is that the pressure gets too much for the chamber to contain, and it begins to vent. This could be something innocuous, but chances are much more likely that it will kill us all :)

The thing with a supervolcano, as with all volcanoes, is not the lava, though of course anyone in the immediate vicinity would beg to differ, but it's actually the ash and gas.

The ash cloud from Pinatubo a decade back or something like that affected weather patterns globally. It was something around 5-10 cubic kilometres of ash spewed into the sky.

Yellowstone has the capacity to pour about 600 cubic kilometres into the atmosphere.

Ash would fall over a large area, possible North America, covering it quite rapidly in ash---however, as much as that's scary, it's not the blanket effect that's the danger to us, but the ash in the air. Ash is actually microparticles of jagged rock. Breathing this stuff in is, to say the least, bad.

When it doesn't tear up your internal organs much like eating glass would, it combines with the liquids in your body to form a nice, thick cement, effectively asphyxiating you.

Fun stuff eh?

And add to the fact that roughly 60-120x the amount of dust in the air would basically turn this place into a winter wonderland where it doesn't turn the area into a kind of scorched earth due to the heavily acidic rains (forgot the sulfur gas, didn't you?), well you can begin to imagine what kind of fun we're going to have.

Of course it will likely be at that point that influenza decides to strike, to see if it can get dibs before the meteor hits us causing supertsunamis, which will be nicely complimented, like white wine to roasted rosemary cornish hen, by the super storms brought about by the climate change and *GASP* oil runs out.

But at least harmful UV rays would no longer be an issue :)

And how would you suggest we do this?
I see only 3 basic ways to accomplish this:

1) Not allow people to move in: An economic disaster. Companies would only be allowed to hire those people born and educated in that city, leaving some of the "best and the brightest" out of the mix.

2) Not allow people to have children: Yeah. Won't even get into the problems with that one.

3) Relocate people: I think the implications of this are quite obvious.

Yes, the US has a large amount of land compared to the UK. However, a lot of that land is unusable. Mountains, deserts, swamps, and other geographic features make it inhospitable in any practical sense. The Great Plains and much of the Mid-West (all that "unused" land in the middle of the country) is covered in crops. Crops needed to feed our citizens--and those of of a lot of other nations.

The other major factor is one I've already brought up in this thread: Cities are where they are for very good reasons. Take a look at the US and where the cities are. There's a very clear pattern: they're almost all on major bodies of water--oceans, rivers, and the Great Lakes. Cities form around ports--ports needed for the transport of goods and materials. If you want a city in the middle of Kansas, you need a way to get the stuff there. That stuff comes via ships.

Companies need to ship their products out to other countries. Companies need to get raw materials from other countries. Or from elsewhere in the US. That means ships. Ships mean ports. Ports mean people to work there. Workers from the ports and the companies shipping materials need places to eat, shop, recreate, and go about all the business that people go about. That means stores, restaurants, services, roads, housing, etc., etc., etc.

You can't stop a city from forming, and you can't stop it from growing. If you're really really lucky, you'll be able to formulate and enforce a plan on how it grows--through zoning laws and other municipal codes--but you can't stop it from growing.

Conversely, you can't make people move to the "unused" parts of the country, because there's nothing there for them to move to. The demographic and geographic forces at work are unstoppable.

Cities like NO, LA, and NYC will grow where they are regardless of the risks. If they are destroyed (Great Chicago Fire, Great San Francisco Fire, LA earthquakes, flooding of New Orleans), they will be rebuilt. People will continue to live there, and continue to move there. And nothing short of a Berlin Wall will stop them.

This already exists in the form of city sales taxes, city taxes, parking stickers, etc.

Most state capitals aren't located in coastal cities or even in the largest cities in each state. Albany, NY (not NYC) and Springfield, IL (not Chigago) come to mind right off the bat.

The only government functions that could be moved would be municipal government. And that would be like moving the government functions of London to Belfast or Nice. Not quite an ideal (nor even practical) solution.

The only way to make smaller cities more attractive to those living in the big cities is to make them just like the big cities. People live in big cities because they *like* big cities (for all the reasons I outlined in my last post).

And this works on all levels of scale. I live in a small city--3,000 people. Yes, it's a city. It's incorporated. This rural city is 30 miles from the state capital. Like all the other small cities in the area, it's growing to accomodate the people moving out of the "big" city. They want a "quiet rural atmosphere". And then they need a coffee shop. And an all-night gas station. And an antique mall. And another grocery store. And.. and... and..

And pretty soon the suburbs become the cities, and the small towns become the suburbs, and it just keeps going.

And all those people moving into my small city? They work in the big city. If there's any net effect, it's that there are just fewer houses in the city, but just as many (if not more) people there at any given time.

Demographic and geographic forces. You can't defeat them.