From the way the media are framing it, New Orleans is about to be wiped off the map. Some estimates I've heard say up to 80% of the structures in the city could be significantly damaged or destroyed. If this type of destruction is to occur I'm sure within the next few days we'll see politicians climbing atop piles of rubble vowing to do "whatever it takes to rebuild." I'm not really sure it's worth rebuilding, but I doubt anyone will have the courage to suggest that it may be time to take this great city off life support and say goodbye.
The media tends to blow things way out of proportion. I'm sure there will be a lot of damage and tragic stories, but the city will survive. I personally love New Orleans and hope things go well for the people there.
having lived in and loved new orleans, i'm afraid of what we would build back if the worst were to happen. there will be such a rush (and necessarily so) to get people sheltered, get services in place, and get the infrastructure working again that the quality of design and construction is likely to be bad. not for lack of trying, merely because of cost and time.
and it will be bad based on historicist schlock, because that will be the 'comfort' that a lot of people will demand.
and real stucco will be replaced by dryvit because who has time to do all that real stucco anymore?
the layering of hundreds of years of life has lent an integrity to what new orleans is now. what could rebuilding even 30% of new orleans in a year or two or three possibly yield? ick.
If you look at the aftermath of the chicago fire, which people like to say the chicago school of functional design arose from, you'll see the city actually rebuilt fast and cheap using the same techniques as before. The country was a also mired in economic stagnation following the Rail Boom Speculation hype. It wasnt until 10 years after the fire inovations in architecture and construction took hold.
somewhat ironic, ive been working on the new emergency op's center for new orleans which is designed specifically for these events...supposed to send out the DD drawings to the local firm today...
Crumpets, by saying that it was not necessarily worth rebuilding New Orleans, I was not trying to imply that it’s a place I dislike or that it’s worthless, and I feel like that’s how you interpreted what I said.
What I really mean is that in a city so full of historic structures if 80 percent of them are lost, it is almost impossible to truly rebuild. Along the lines of what Steven Ward said, the reconstruction would likely be cheap, fast, and dirty. If highly historic areas like the French Quarter are completely obliterated, their replacements will most likely be cheesy overly historicized (and incorrectly historicized as well) versions of what had been there.
To add insult to injury, it will probably take a major influx of corporate cash to revitalize touristy areas and the entire tourist industry as most of the government and private donations will have priority use for housing reconstruction. From my standpoint, it may be more of an act of love and respect for what New Orleans had been to leave the historic district as ruins than it would be to let Disney (and others) march in with their EIFS buildings, schlocky merchandise, and mediocre restaurants.
New Orleans is a major port for the rest of the country, in particular the mid west. There's no way the surrounding ports went unscathed. Nor all of the oil refineries, both mentioned on NPR this morning. This is going to have on going repercussions for quite sometime.
having lived in nola for some years. i can tell you this, it will survive, and it will still be new orleans. and for those who know the city, don't you think it's rather odd/convenient that it was the ninth ward whose pumps/levy broke first? it's the poorest area, the most crime ridden, and with the exception of the saturn bar, just damn frightening.....i smell a conspiracy...
My friends are reporting that the storm wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, even though it was pretty bad. Damage to buildings is impossible to quantify at this time, but it seems that the '80% of structures to be significantly damaged or destroyed' might have been an overstatement.
Whatever the circumstances, I'm glad that injuries and fatalities are much less than predicted.
Beyond talk of the storm, New Orleans is a city that has been building and re-building itself, layer on top of layer for hundreds of years, as Steven Ward mentioned. There is no fixed point in history that the entire city is trying to portray. It's not all tourist attractions - it's a real live working city. So, while NOLA is geographically situated to be prone to this type of event, I'm curious what other cities in other regions would say and do to demonstrate their own resilience to any number of other natural disasters.
And paper tiger, while maybe tongue in cheek, your suggestion that the 9th ward has somehow been denied storm protection is probably not going to be the last time I hear it, but I wish it were.
I gathered from tiger's response that it is simply unfortunate that once again, poor people may be the ones to suffer the most damage. I think Ddot is guilty of construing someone's words in order to elevate themselves on this website, an all too common occurrence. And, seeing that tiger has first hand experience with NOLA, I would show a little more respect if I were going to offer up an argument.
Oh, and Ddot, the 9th ward is yet another urban american neighborhood totally neglected by it's government/ city due to it's residents race. NOLA has lots of those.
shazam!! ODA!!
thanks mang, but i'mnot sure ddot was trying to elevate itself or be an asshole in any way, though i could be wrong, since i sometimes miss this kind of thing.... and trust me, it was not "tongue n cheek" in anyway. that's how it always goes down, look back at the past storms and hurricanes, the 9th ward is always the one to get flooded first....
you think they'd have fixed it by now...
on the bright side, katrina will probably help reduce the murder rate in new orleans for the month of september.....
i think we collectively need to understand that corporate cash (call it disney, whatever) is the only way a city like NOLA can rebuild itself in the wake of the recent incidents. Like it or not, its the way its going to happen, and maybe its going to be the fastest way. Romantic thoughts of leaving it as ruins may appeal to architects, but not people who need to feed their families
same old same old, i agree with you to an extent. but disney is already there, and she's called harrah's casino. along with the six flags out side of town and many other (more family friendly) businesses are making their way into town. however, i think, while fucked up, the local city government has noticed how important it is to keep what makes new orleans great, and i'm' not so sure the architecture to be coming in will be shit. in many ways, what makes the current architecture so fantastic is it's history, it's age, the appeal of the old barn, the romantic ruins, which will continue, though dimished, but that's simply time and nature, which flow rather than destroy... but look at the piazza d'italia, which has been recently renovated, the town is making deals, fix this, and we'll let you build there, give us money for this and we'll give you a tax break for that. it's a mixing bowl of ideas and architecture, and i'm hopeful that the end product will still be nola, my beautiful, gigantic, hole in the wall bar....
I don't believe there's any "corporate cash"in NOLA either. All of the big corporations abandoned their headquarters in the 80s. I left NOLA in 2001 and 75% of the business district was vacant at that time. It's going to have to rely on federal aide and old money that's been there generation after generation and not going anywhere.
george w. is a cold swimming pool cock. he'll give something, but for once it's not the goverment i'm worried about. i think they will help. what makes me sad is all the people without insurance and those who do have it waiting to see how those shits at the insurance companies are gonna screw them over....
I acknowledge that the 9th ward is often neglected. My statement was meant to convey that. Sadly, it is under terrible circumstances like this that any of the shortcomings in federal, state, and local government in working in that neighborhood and many just like it will ever get noticed. New Orleans DOES have many neglected neighborhoods. And they'll ALL be affected by this storm.
I did not intend to submit my comments as a personal attack at anyone, nor do I aim to elevate myself on this website in any way. It's a miscommunication, nothing else.
i knew it!!
see, i think ODA is just constipated today, or the complete opposite: a bad case of the shits. and it was probably spicy food. now where's rita.....
that f@ucking cookie....
thanks ddot
What happens in a month, a year or two years, when we have to repeat all this again?
What is being done to:
a-replenish the wetlands damaged by the oil industry and the major reason why NO and LA and the delta region in general is at greater threat than ever.
b-seek ways for those pumps and levees to withstand major hurricanes.
Global warming is gonna make this worse not better, more hurricanes, more powerful every year...
Damn, how do you get EVERYONE out of a city that large. Realizing the majority have left already, I lived there for two years and know first hand that people will not want to leave their homes (if the home still stands) once the water recedes.
Looks like the French Quarter may come out of this a little better, considering it, at least, is above sea level. Although the garden district has a great deal of character, the quarter is still the heart of NOLA.
There is a good book, "Rising Tide", that documents the army corps of engineers' battle with the Mississippi river and the surrounding deltas. 'man vs nature' all the way.
it's not the looting of the grocery stores.....but of the saks, walking away withsuits, tvs,...i mean what the hell is the point? you can't iron the damn suits, or watch t.v.!!
she'll survive, nola will survive.
so first the have to rebuild the levees, then they have to pump the city dry. then repare the buildings. i dont think anyones going to be living there for a while. i imagine we might see a major population decline due to the fact that people arent going to want to wait for all this to happen just to move back into the problem area (it could happen again) when they could take whatever insurance money they get and move. this might also include businesses. seems like the next months are crucial and the death of NO (at least as we know it) is not so unlikely.
In some cases, people may not even be allowed to rebuild in the areas below sea level. I believe if you recieve FEMA grants to rebuild a house considered a total loss you are not allwed to use the money to rebuild in flood prone areas. It is not unprecedented for the government to buy out entire towns and move them to higher ground in the wake of flooding. Except for the French Quarter and a few other points of interest, this may be a wise move. After a week or two underwater any housing that wasn't lost to the hurricane will be pretty unsalvagable.
looting saks--dry clothing, cash value
tv's--cash value
grocery--hunger, thirst
in a situation like this, daily wages are gone, no jobs, no checks from the social services, no nothing. saks who?
Does anyone know how the rebuilding will get paid for? I've heard that FEMA backs insurance in flood/coastal zones pretty liberally. I saw a report once that said you can have up to 18 total loss claims of a coastal/beachfront property & still have your homeowner's insurance backed up by FEMA.
I'll happily give to hurricane relief. But somebody please tell me I'm wrong about insurance that makes it easy to build crap in danger zones. I sure as heyll don't cherish the idea of paying for someone's vacation house just because Uncle Sam makes it easy to get taxpayer backed insurance.
I am unsure if this "hurricane-proof house" has been posted or not, but I find this fascinating in light of what all has happened. Perhaps there is something to learn from it.
hey kids....being a tulane thesis student NOW officially sucks...
one year away from graduation and here comes Katrina, a name normally associated with a mail order bride from a former russian state....sorry am a little D-RUNK right now...hey even if new orleans doesn't still exist you can still keep the spirit going...
hangover to come in the morning...when i get to watch another 10 hrs of news so as to see if my house shows up on thier updated coverage...cheers to all...i'll drink this round to new orleans, the new atlantis
architorture, are you kidding me. Time to put all that practice to use. Change your thesis, make yourself useful. A ton of communities could use your help. (see other thread)
creating real architecture is about the ability to adapt and change on the fly.
---
on a side note, Chennai airport has free wi-fi..... too bad it still stinks like an indian airport... hmm.
"and real stucco will be replaced by dryvit because who has time to do all that real stucco anymore?"
Exactly ,but would there be the craftmen the knowleage and skills afterall?
This maby is not the right fora, but following the events at CNN ,what you see are dikes where the water float in ,and nothing seem to be done ------ why is it that the main efford is not pointed to fill those holes, a fleet of old barges --- there must be plenty of these--- could be stranded and filled with sand or concrete to form a new wall, is it realy so difficult , a temp. shipyard could produce barge shaped huls to be placed and ballasted as soon as they could float shuld it realy be so difficult to move the production to the site in a hurry ?
Not living in Us. it is allway's sad to see the quality of torn houses ; can it be done cheaper I doubt. ------- I think it would be on time to go back to the drawing board and try, if it shuldn't be possible to build in a better way than with plywood and wood in a quality that would make better use , being made into paper ,it realy is sad to see how cheap and fragile build 90 pct of family houses are build, no wonder they are torn apart ------ still it realy ask a change if new houses shuld be build with a steel core cast into a cast foundation.
Ya ever try working w/ water? How 'bout lots of it? Now how 'bout lot's of it rolling @ you @ abt 185mph? Now compound this w/ the faactor of time.
The best defense would've been not to have created the City of New Orleans where it is. Once again, we can blame the French. Meanwhile, there has only been about 300+ yrs to prepare for this.
New Orleans will get back to normal in a few years & maybe better water control will be underway. maybe better bldg methods will save Gulfport's floating casinos from the next one.
Either way, those cities won't die, but I do agree w/ the comments abt. 'schlock' replacing real charm & EIFS will be king.
Sounds like the situation is getting worse and worse. I'm afraid we're going to watch the thousands who survive die before our eyes because nobody had the sense to give them water and food. I'm afraid what's left of the city is going to burn. There are reports of fires near the French Quarter.
"Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. "This is a desperate SOS," the mayor said."
I'd say from the discription above that worst has happened. Where is the UN when you need them. Nothing scares a looter more than a bunch of Euros in blue helmets.
And from Republican Denis Hastert...
WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city.
"It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.
But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.
Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.
New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.
Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.
So long, New Orleans
From the way the media are framing it, New Orleans is about to be wiped off the map. Some estimates I've heard say up to 80% of the structures in the city could be significantly damaged or destroyed. If this type of destruction is to occur I'm sure within the next few days we'll see politicians climbing atop piles of rubble vowing to do "whatever it takes to rebuild." I'm not really sure it's worth rebuilding, but I doubt anyone will have the courage to suggest that it may be time to take this great city off life support and say goodbye.
The media tends to blow things way out of proportion. I'm sure there will be a lot of damage and tragic stories, but the city will survive. I personally love New Orleans and hope things go well for the people there.
having lived in and loved new orleans, i'm afraid of what we would build back if the worst were to happen. there will be such a rush (and necessarily so) to get people sheltered, get services in place, and get the infrastructure working again that the quality of design and construction is likely to be bad. not for lack of trying, merely because of cost and time.
and it will be bad based on historicist schlock, because that will be the 'comfort' that a lot of people will demand.
and real stucco will be replaced by dryvit because who has time to do all that real stucco anymore?
the layering of hundreds of years of life has lent an integrity to what new orleans is now. what could rebuilding even 30% of new orleans in a year or two or three possibly yield? ick.
good luck, nola.
I think you missed the point of my post Crumpets.
they really still use EIFS in that environment?
If you look at the aftermath of the chicago fire, which people like to say the chicago school of functional design arose from, you'll see the city actually rebuilt fast and cheap using the same techniques as before. The country was a also mired in economic stagnation following the Rail Boom Speculation hype. It wasnt until 10 years after the fire inovations in architecture and construction took hold.
sorry, a little facetiousness, el jeffe.
somewhat ironic, ive been working on the new emergency op's center for new orleans which is designed specifically for these events...supposed to send out the DD drawings to the local firm today...
What point did I miss? You said New Orleans would be wiped off the map and perhaps not worth being rebuilt. I disagree.
Crumpets, by saying that it was not necessarily worth rebuilding New Orleans, I was not trying to imply that it’s a place I dislike or that it’s worthless, and I feel like that’s how you interpreted what I said.
What I really mean is that in a city so full of historic structures if 80 percent of them are lost, it is almost impossible to truly rebuild. Along the lines of what Steven Ward said, the reconstruction would likely be cheap, fast, and dirty. If highly historic areas like the French Quarter are completely obliterated, their replacements will most likely be cheesy overly historicized (and incorrectly historicized as well) versions of what had been there.
To add insult to injury, it will probably take a major influx of corporate cash to revitalize touristy areas and the entire tourist industry as most of the government and private donations will have priority use for housing reconstruction. From my standpoint, it may be more of an act of love and respect for what New Orleans had been to leave the historic district as ruins than it would be to let Disney (and others) march in with their EIFS buildings, schlocky merchandise, and mediocre restaurants.
That was my point.
new orleans will be fine... ok, maybe not fine, but it will still be there and it will be rebuilt.
also, i doubt there will be a proliferation of EIFS down there, as its quality as a cladding component is seriously under scrutiny.
New Orleans is a major port for the rest of the country, in particular the mid west. There's no way the surrounding ports went unscathed. Nor all of the oil refineries, both mentioned on NPR this morning. This is going to have on going repercussions for quite sometime.
having lived in nola for some years. i can tell you this, it will survive, and it will still be new orleans. and for those who know the city, don't you think it's rather odd/convenient that it was the ninth ward whose pumps/levy broke first? it's the poorest area, the most crime ridden, and with the exception of the saturn bar, just damn frightening.....i smell a conspiracy...
My friends are reporting that the storm wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, even though it was pretty bad. Damage to buildings is impossible to quantify at this time, but it seems that the '80% of structures to be significantly damaged or destroyed' might have been an overstatement.
Whatever the circumstances, I'm glad that injuries and fatalities are much less than predicted.
Beyond talk of the storm, New Orleans is a city that has been building and re-building itself, layer on top of layer for hundreds of years, as Steven Ward mentioned. There is no fixed point in history that the entire city is trying to portray. It's not all tourist attractions - it's a real live working city. So, while NOLA is geographically situated to be prone to this type of event, I'm curious what other cities in other regions would say and do to demonstrate their own resilience to any number of other natural disasters.
And paper tiger, while maybe tongue in cheek, your suggestion that the 9th ward has somehow been denied storm protection is probably not going to be the last time I hear it, but I wish it were.
I gathered from tiger's response that it is simply unfortunate that once again, poor people may be the ones to suffer the most damage. I think Ddot is guilty of construing someone's words in order to elevate themselves on this website, an all too common occurrence. And, seeing that tiger has first hand experience with NOLA, I would show a little more respect if I were going to offer up an argument.
Oh, and Ddot, the 9th ward is yet another urban american neighborhood totally neglected by it's government/ city due to it's residents race. NOLA has lots of those.
shazam!! ODA!!
thanks mang, but i'mnot sure ddot was trying to elevate itself or be an asshole in any way, though i could be wrong, since i sometimes miss this kind of thing.... and trust me, it was not "tongue n cheek" in anyway. that's how it always goes down, look back at the past storms and hurricanes, the 9th ward is always the one to get flooded first....
you think they'd have fixed it by now...
on the bright side, katrina will probably help reduce the murder rate in new orleans for the month of september.....
bryan4arch,
i think we collectively need to understand that corporate cash (call it disney, whatever) is the only way a city like NOLA can rebuild itself in the wake of the recent incidents. Like it or not, its the way its going to happen, and maybe its going to be the fastest way. Romantic thoughts of leaving it as ruins may appeal to architects, but not people who need to feed their families
I wonder if GW will give a lot of federal aide to Louisiana like he did for his brother's state???
same old same old, i agree with you to an extent. but disney is already there, and she's called harrah's casino. along with the six flags out side of town and many other (more family friendly) businesses are making their way into town. however, i think, while fucked up, the local city government has noticed how important it is to keep what makes new orleans great, and i'm' not so sure the architecture to be coming in will be shit. in many ways, what makes the current architecture so fantastic is it's history, it's age, the appeal of the old barn, the romantic ruins, which will continue, though dimished, but that's simply time and nature, which flow rather than destroy... but look at the piazza d'italia, which has been recently renovated, the town is making deals, fix this, and we'll let you build there, give us money for this and we'll give you a tax break for that. it's a mixing bowl of ideas and architecture, and i'm hopeful that the end product will still be nola, my beautiful, gigantic, hole in the wall bar....
I don't believe there's any "corporate cash"in NOLA either. All of the big corporations abandoned their headquarters in the 80s. I left NOLA in 2001 and 75% of the business district was vacant at that time. It's going to have to rely on federal aide and old money that's been there generation after generation and not going anywhere.
george w. is a cold swimming pool cock. he'll give something, but for once it's not the goverment i'm worried about. i think they will help. what makes me sad is all the people without insurance and those who do have it waiting to see how those shits at the insurance companies are gonna screw them over....
ODA? you lived in NOLA? i'll be damned. we probably know each other. do you, by any chance, have six fingers on your right hand?
yes, and I killed your father
i'm bored with this. where's rita? i'm gonna fuck with her....
ODA - I have first hand experience in NOLA, too.
I acknowledge that the 9th ward is often neglected. My statement was meant to convey that. Sadly, it is under terrible circumstances like this that any of the shortcomings in federal, state, and local government in working in that neighborhood and many just like it will ever get noticed. New Orleans DOES have many neglected neighborhoods. And they'll ALL be affected by this storm.
I did not intend to submit my comments as a personal attack at anyone, nor do I aim to elevate myself on this website in any way. It's a miscommunication, nothing else.
my apologies, fucking mondays....
i knew it!!
see, i think ODA is just constipated today, or the complete opposite: a bad case of the shits. and it was probably spicy food. now where's rita.....
that f@ucking cookie....
thanks ddot
how'd you know? Damn these machaca burritos!!! I can't stop eating them.
entire major city to be emptied. this is a bigger tragedy than everybody thought.
i have no problem with looting the grocery stores. i would.
What happens in a month, a year or two years, when we have to repeat all this again?
What is being done to:
a-replenish the wetlands damaged by the oil industry and the major reason why NO and LA and the delta region in general is at greater threat than ever.
b-seek ways for those pumps and levees to withstand major hurricanes.
Global warming is gonna make this worse not better, more hurricanes, more powerful every year...
I say leave the city to the fish and move it. batton Rouge seems like a good place for a little more urban density
Damn, how do you get EVERYONE out of a city that large. Realizing the majority have left already, I lived there for two years and know first hand that people will not want to leave their homes (if the home still stands) once the water recedes.
Looks like the French Quarter may come out of this a little better, considering it, at least, is above sea level. Although the garden district has a great deal of character, the quarter is still the heart of NOLA.
There is a good book, "Rising Tide", that documents the army corps of engineers' battle with the Mississippi river and the surrounding deltas. 'man vs nature' all the way.
it's not the looting of the grocery stores.....but of the saks, walking away withsuits, tvs,...i mean what the hell is the point? you can't iron the damn suits, or watch t.v.!!
she'll survive, nola will survive.
so first the have to rebuild the levees, then they have to pump the city dry. then repare the buildings. i dont think anyones going to be living there for a while. i imagine we might see a major population decline due to the fact that people arent going to want to wait for all this to happen just to move back into the problem area (it could happen again) when they could take whatever insurance money they get and move. this might also include businesses. seems like the next months are crucial and the death of NO (at least as we know it) is not so unlikely.
In some cases, people may not even be allowed to rebuild in the areas below sea level. I believe if you recieve FEMA grants to rebuild a house considered a total loss you are not allwed to use the money to rebuild in flood prone areas. It is not unprecedented for the government to buy out entire towns and move them to higher ground in the wake of flooding. Except for the French Quarter and a few other points of interest, this may be a wise move. After a week or two underwater any housing that wasn't lost to the hurricane will be pretty unsalvagable.
looting saks--dry clothing, cash value
tv's--cash value
grocery--hunger, thirst
in a situation like this, daily wages are gone, no jobs, no checks from the social services, no nothing. saks who?
Does anyone know how the rebuilding will get paid for? I've heard that FEMA backs insurance in flood/coastal zones pretty liberally. I saw a report once that said you can have up to 18 total loss claims of a coastal/beachfront property & still have your homeowner's insurance backed up by FEMA.
I'll happily give to hurricane relief. But somebody please tell me I'm wrong about insurance that makes it easy to build crap in danger zones. I sure as heyll don't cherish the idea of paying for someone's vacation house just because Uncle Sam makes it easy to get taxpayer backed insurance.
I am unsure if this "hurricane-proof house" has been posted or not, but I find this fascinating in light of what all has happened. Perhaps there is something to learn from it.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6011773/
http://domeofahome.com/default.asp
hey kids....being a tulane thesis student NOW officially sucks...
one year away from graduation and here comes Katrina, a name normally associated with a mail order bride from a former russian state....sorry am a little D-RUNK right now...hey even if new orleans doesn't still exist you can still keep the spirit going...
hangover to come in the morning...when i get to watch another 10 hrs of news so as to see if my house shows up on thier updated coverage...cheers to all...i'll drink this round to new orleans, the new atlantis
architorture, are you kidding me. Time to put all that practice to use. Change your thesis, make yourself useful. A ton of communities could use your help. (see other thread)
creating real architecture is about the ability to adapt and change on the fly.
---
on a side note, Chennai airport has free wi-fi..... too bad it still stinks like an indian airport... hmm.
Hi
Steven Ward;
"and real stucco will be replaced by dryvit because who has time to do all that real stucco anymore?"
Exactly ,but would there be the craftmen the knowleage and skills afterall?
This maby is not the right fora, but following the events at CNN ,what you see are dikes where the water float in ,and nothing seem to be done ------ why is it that the main efford is not pointed to fill those holes, a fleet of old barges --- there must be plenty of these--- could be stranded and filled with sand or concrete to form a new wall, is it realy so difficult , a temp. shipyard could produce barge shaped huls to be placed and ballasted as soon as they could float shuld it realy be so difficult to move the production to the site in a hurry ?
Not living in Us. it is allway's sad to see the quality of torn houses ; can it be done cheaper I doubt. ------- I think it would be on time to go back to the drawing board and try, if it shuldn't be possible to build in a better way than with plywood and wood in a quality that would make better use , being made into paper ,it realy is sad to see how cheap and fragile build 90 pct of family houses are build, no wonder they are torn apart ------ still it realy ask a change if new houses shuld be build with a steel core cast into a cast foundation.
Ya ever try working w/ water? How 'bout lots of it? Now how 'bout lot's of it rolling @ you @ abt 185mph? Now compound this w/ the faactor of time.
The best defense would've been not to have created the City of New Orleans where it is. Once again, we can blame the French. Meanwhile, there has only been about 300+ yrs to prepare for this.
New Orleans will get back to normal in a few years & maybe better water control will be underway. maybe better bldg methods will save Gulfport's floating casinos from the next one.
Either way, those cities won't die, but I do agree w/ the comments abt. 'schlock' replacing real charm & EIFS will be king.
Sounds like the situation is getting worse and worse. I'm afraid we're going to watch the thousands who survive die before our eyes because nobody had the sense to give them water and food. I'm afraid what's left of the city is going to burn. There are reports of fires near the French Quarter.
"Storm victims were raped and beaten, fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. "This is a desperate SOS," the mayor said."
I'd say from the discription above that worst has happened. Where is the UN when you need them. Nothing scares a looter more than a bunch of Euros in blue helmets.
And from Republican Denis Hastert...
WASHINGTON - House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city.
"It doesn't make sense to me," Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. "And it's a question that certainly we should ask."
SeanNOLA hasnt responded since the hurricane - hope everything is ok with him and other south coast archinecters.
www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLandingSignin.jsp?Uc=787ox3d.2epdxdb9&Uy=simujf&Up
ost_signin=Slideshow.jsp%3Fmode%3Dfromshare&Ux=0
no need to sign in, just click on the slide image on the left.
Thanks paper tiger,
Here is an interesting although long article.
New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.
But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.
Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.
New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.
Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.
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