The levees holding the lake back have 2 breeches, 6 inches per hour flooding into NO.

 

The city looks like Venice in aerial photos.

The most fucked-up photos are the ones of the twin I-10 bridges leading into Kenner and Metarie, where the flooding is the worst.

 

 

Those bridges used to be about 20-30 feet above relatively low-water marshes. Fuckers are UNDER WATER now and supposedly broken in pieces.

 

I'll find that photo from brendanloy.com and link it here.

 

 

Shamelessly stolen from WWL TV New Orleans:

 

Before pictures:

 

 

 

After pictures:

 

I-10 looks like I-880 after the San Francisco Earthquake. The damage to that bridge is incredible.

Technically, I don't think that the damage I'm showing is 100% collapse... I think a LARGE part of it is submsersion of the bridge and exits due to high water.

 

 

There's going to be some big chunks missing when the water leaves, though.

The problem is getting the water to leave since NOLA is sitting in a bowl.

They've got the pumps to do it.

 

However, those pumps are only good for about 2 inches in the first hour and .5 inch per additional hour IF they're all functioning.

 

 

At that rate, the city will be water-free in about 120 days or more, give or take evaporation and additional rainfall.

Watching the news tonight, it's like watching something out of a big-time disaster flick. The amount of theft that's taken place after the fact, is absolutely disgusting. They've got people with arms full of merchandise posing for the camera, even. It's like, they were just part of the biggest natural disaster to ever take place in this country and what are they doing? Stealing as much as their damn arms will allow them to run with.

Basically they are going to vacate the entire city because there is no power or fresh drinking water. The govenor said that people could spend the rest of their careers working on the damage caused by the hurricane.

They've got the pumps to do it.

 

However, those pumps are only good for about 2 inches in the first hour and .5 inch per additional hour IF they're all functioning.

 

 

At that rate, the city will be water-free in about 120 days or more, give or take evaporation and additional rainfall.

Those pumps themselves are now under feet of water, 3 of them quit working yesterday.

Just in from Mayor Nagin:   

 

Pumps near breech are about to fail. Water level will be rising.

 

I hate to sound like Chicken Little, but it's starting to look like NO is seriously fucked.

The Army Corps Of Engineers also had a few "doomsday" scenarios in mind, at least one of which involved BLOWING a hole in the levee system if it meant draining water from the city back into Lake Ponchatrain, which would bring the water level low enough to re-start the pumps.

 

However, I'd say were at least a week or more away from that possibility considering how much water is in the lake and river right now.

The ACOE can work some friggin wonders, they helped when Pittsburgh got flooded by Ivan last year. If anyone can salvage this, it's them.

Problem being that I'd been told, indirectly, by the ARCoE in 1998, when Georges was about to hit, that New Orleans was COMPLETELY fucked if it hit there and that was only a 2 or 3, IIRC.

 

Somehow, I don't think they've pulled a lot of doomsday scenarios out of their ass since then, despite having a Category 5 hitting New Orleans as the big FEMA test-disaster in the past year or so.

A lot of the Army Corps funding for projects on the levees were cut out of the budget and diverted to Iraq.

 

Oops.

 

I don't want to drag politics into this, but it's going to become hard to ignore that had the funding not been cut, perhaps NO wouldn't be under water now.

And if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass hopping.

 

New Orleans knew it was in danger for YEARS, at least since the last years of the Clinton administration (late 1998) when Georges was a near-miss.

 

That pre-dates Iraq by at least 4.5 years.

Right. And Bush's tax cuts and warmania diverted needed funds.

 

 

 

When the levee breaks   

 

 

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.   

 

-- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.   

 

This picture is an aerial view of New Orleans today, more than 14 months later. Even though Hurricane Katrina has moved well north of the city and the sun is out, the waters continue to rise in New Orleans as we write this. That's because Lake Pontchartrain continues to pour through a two-block-long break in the main levee, near the city's 17th Street Canal. With much of the Crescent City some 10 feet below sea level, the rising tide may not stop until until it's level with the massive lake.

 

There have been numerous reports of bodies floating in the poorest neighborhoods of this poverty-plagued city, but the truth is that the death toll may not be known for days, because the conditions continue to frustrate rescue efforts.

 

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

 

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. (Much of the research here is from Nexis, which is why some articles aren't linked.)

 

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness:

 

The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes.

 

The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed.

 

"The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest."

 

That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune: "The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them."

 

The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

 

The 2004 hurricane season, as you probably recall, was the worst in decades. In spite of that, the federal government came back this spring with the steepest reduction in hurricane- and flood-control funding for New Orleans in history. Because of the proposed cuts, the Corps office there imposed a hiring freeze. Officials said that money targeted for the SELA project -- $10.4 million, down from $36.5 million -- was not enough to start any new jobs.

 

According to New Orleans CityBusiness this June 5: The district has identified $35 million in projects to build and improve levees, floodwalls and pumping stations in St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson and St. Charles parishes. Those projects are included in a Corps line item called Lake Pontchartrain, where funding is scheduled to be cut from $5.7 million this year to $2.9 million in 2006. Naomi said it's enough to pay salaries but little else. "We'll do some design work. We'll design the contracts and get them ready to go if we get the money. But we don't have the money to put the work in the field, and that's the problem," Naomi said.

 

There was, at the same time, a growing recognition that more research was needed to see what New Orleans must do to protect itself from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. But once again, the money was not there. As the Times-Picayune reported last Sept. 22:

 

That second study would take about four years to complete and would cost about $4 million, said Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi. About $300,000 in federal money was proposed for the 2005 fiscal-year budget, and the state had agreed to match that amount.

 

But the cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans district office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money, he said.

 

The Senate was seeking to restore some of the SELA funding cuts for 2006. But now it's too late. One project that a contractor had been racing to finish this summer was a bridge and levee job right at the 17th Street Canal, site of the main breach. The levee failure appears to be causing a human tragedy of epic proportions: "We probably have 80 percent of our city under water; with some sections of our city the water is as deep as 20 feet. Both airports are underwater," Mayor Ray Nagin told a radio interviewer.

 

Washington knew that this day could come at any time, and it knew the things that needed to be done to protect the citizens of New Orleans. But in the tradition of the riverboat gambler, the Bush administration decided to roll the dice on its fool's errand in Iraq, and on a tax cut that mainly benefitted the rich.

 

And now Bush has lost that gamble, big time. We hope that Congress will investigate what went wrong here. The president told us that we needed to fight in Iraq to save lives here at home, and yet -- after moving billions of domestic dollars to the Persian Gulf -- there are bodies floating through the streets of Louisiana. What does George W. Bush have to say for himself now?

 

 

It was known at least since Georges in 1998, and earlier by anyone with junior high level of geography, but funding was cut from 2003 on up. There's no frog ass-bumping involved here: the government somehow thought it was worth taking the risk to not fund projects that could save people's lives.

$3.19 for unleaded. This hurricane is now truly a tragedy. Something just doesn't seem on the up and up that the gas prices could jump 60 cents in less than 24 hours.

 

Katrina forced operators to close more than a tenth of the country's refining capacity and a quarter of its oil production, which sent gasoline prices surging and prompted the White House to tap the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

 

But some analysts say that gas prices are still likely to climb to more than $4 a gallon. (Full story)

 

 

No gas = stations charging as much as they can for what they have left.

Actually, it's that the refineries in LA provide probably 20% or more of the gas processing in the US.

 

 

Considering that the Chalmette, Meraux, Norco, etc. refineries are offline because they're flooded and that it's very hard to transport a lot of the REMAINING refined gas out of the other plants due to infrastructure problems, it means that the distributors are cutting the amount of gas they're sending out to the gas stations.

 

Because of that, it has an immediate effect on the price at the pump because the gas stations have to be able to raise the money needed to buy their next shipment.

I just bought regular unleaded YESTERDAY for 2.78 (which is already ridiculous) but I drive by stations today and see 87 octane is going for 2.91 and up. Premium (91 octane) is over $3.

 

I don't know what they did with all the POWs and hostages from our "war on terrorism" but they need to start giving them out to American citizens so that I can strap two or three of them together and ride them into work because it's getting to the point where I'm not even gonna be able to afford to drive.

Looks like the Superdome refugees will be moved to the Houston Astrodome.

The Houston Texans offered to share their stadium with the Saints until NO is habitable again, since the city's going to need all the money it can get.

This is why I don't understand why anyone would ever want to live in one of these areas.  It's not like possibilities of hurricanes are unknown.  I can't envision myself wanting to move to an area where dealing with hurricanes every year would be in the cards.  Who wants to rebuild their fucking house every 12 months?

Why live in Kansas, where you have tornadoes for three months every year?

Why live on the West coast, where you have unpredictable earthqaukes?

 

The only place in the US that's even remotely safe from natural disasters, is the South West, but they have droughts and fires.

 

 

 

It has been bad the last two years, but major Hurricanes hitting the US isn't as common as you make it seem.

The Northeast has been pretty calm lately, save for the annual major snowstorm in the winter. We're probably due for a hurricane soon because we haven't gotten one in about 10 years (Bob), and that was just a Category 1 storm. We were able to take a drive afterwards and most of the damage was just tree limbs and powerlines down.