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Many people, including former high school wrestling coach Denny Hastert, seem to think New Orleans is nothing more than Mardi-gras, tourism, and a bunch of folks on welfare. It is the most critical port and transportation center in the U.S., far more important than Long Beach. Imports and exports from every area served by the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers and tributaries flow through it. It's also a major rail and trucking center and has one of the few terminals able to directly unload supertankers. Saying it shouldn't be rebuilt would be the rail equivalent of saying we shouldn't run ANY trains through Chicago in order to solve the congestion problem. I suspect a lot of Illinois farmers will take issue with Hastert. It's relatively easy to patch the levees and get the industrial infrastructure, the refineries, chemical plants, and docks fixed, but the problem is who's going to operate them and where will they live. Many of these jobs don't pay that well so there's a lot of working poor. These people need services - food, garbage, police, fire, and these jobs don't pay really well either. The problem with re-developed high-tech cities is the service people can't afford to live there. This is already happening in Colorado as well as many areas re-discovered for redevelopment in other older cities. Whether one buys into the theories on Global Warming, it is a fact that sea levels are rising and other critical coastal cities are also in danger. One example that was destroyed by a Hurricane in the past is Galveston. And a major Hurricane almost hit NYC a few years back, another city very close to sea level. I don't want to get into all the finger pointing as to who should have done what, rather what's disturbing to me is that 5 years after 9-11 and billions spent on Homeland Security, things are more disorganized than before with many of the exact same problems. My understanding of the Hurricane models for NO is that a Cat 5 storm surge would over-top the levees and result in some flooding, but nothing near what resulted from a levee breach. Maybe what's needed is a much faster way to fix a levee, similar to the railroads use of panel track. And rather than a Mega-Engineering project to raise the city, perhaps there's a way to reduce the storm surge of a Cat-5 hurricane on Lake Ponchatrain down to Cat 3 levels the levees can handle. This would spare other parts of LA as well.
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