I took my daughter on an air and ground tour of New Orleans yesterday to teach her about the largest man-made disaster in the United States since Richmond was destroyed by the Union Army in the 1860s. A lot has changed since August, but much is still to do.

In my tour, I saw that there were many blue tarps dotting the city's residential sections representing rooves that had not yet been repaired. Many swimming pools in flooded sections were still filled with filth and were completely black from the air. Some sections of town had huge trash piles in front of every house. Trash hauling continues, but my pilot said this generated 30 years worth of trash. One January estimate said extraordinary hauling will continue through Thanksgiving 2006.

Certain sections of town had indications of water levels on the walls that spoke of completely ruining first floors throughout the area. Demolition and gutting of savable structures is starting, but many buildings have not yet had their first floor material removed.

My driver told me an uncorroborated story about gang violence that was darker than the standard reports in the media. Rather than the disorganized food desperation and opportunistic looting that we were led to believe, there was a gang takeover of some buildings and some portions of the city. To stem the tide, there were mercenaries patrolling the streets that had been advised to use lethal force and had to.

The air tour company's, Southern Seaplane's, pilot said that they were one of very few companies doing air tours and that demand was only one or two tours a week and they spent most of their time ferrying petroleum employees. That suggests only a few hundred people have seen first hand the devastation of the wake of Hurricane Katrina and hubris. The pilot says he sees it every day and is numb to it.

For those that can't afford a $500 air tour, there is a Gray Line bus tour for $35 called "The Hurricane Katrina Tour: America's Worst Catastrophe". People have mixed feelings about the tour but the plusses are it brings revenue to the city and helps witness an event that we should not try to repeat.

One thing that was particularly poignant in the air tour was the closed Jazz Land Six Flags amusement park. After the tour, my seven-year-old daughter called her Mom on my cell phone and said, "we just saw hurricane devastation, but let me tell you about the oyster shell I found". It may take her and the nation decades to process this disaster. I am not so lucky and already get it.

Thanks, Rand. Good post.

That was Sam.

I was in Detroit the day after the 1967 riots started. I called my wife to tell her not to come down to pick me up. I made my way home via the suburban bus service.

Within days after the cessation, public figures from every important group came forward to tell how we would apply our great Detroit spirit and know-how to put the city back together. That was almost 40 years ago. In many ways, Detroit is in worse shape than it was before the riot. But we don't have bus tours to the burned hulks, to the large areas of decaying property, to fields that still look as if a war came through.

What happened is what I can see for New Orleans. The buses and helicopter tours will eventually cease, the nice areas will be rebuilt and protected, the poor will suffer - perhaps more badly than they did before the hurricane.

How does a hurricane qualify as a man made disaster?

How does a hurricane qualify as a man made disaster?

This is just my take. Most of the flooding was due to a levee that apparently shouldn't have failed and should have been plugged up when it did fail.

Previous hurricanes dropped 17 inches of rain and there was very little flooding. Hurricane Katrina damaged the rooves, but they would be habitable if it wasn't for the flooding. The flooding came in from the storm surge into the canals and over and through the levees. Hurricanes have happened many many times. Building in low lying areas and failing to maintain and design decent flood control systems is definitely an act of people.

There are stories of the pumps not getting turned on, of known design flaws, deferred maintenance failure to act promptly and failure to remediate or conduct secondary recovery. The people failure was the perfect storm. Katrina was only category 2 when it hit shore.

Thanks for blogging about New Orleans. I'm living and blogging from here, and it is both uplifting and depressing. Uplifting to see the human spirit, the willingness to go on and to rebuild. Depressing to hear people suggest that our city, which has been here since 1718, is not worth the effort. We really are a throw-away society.

Yes, there is much blame to go around for what happened. The recent report from Congress on what went wrong is titled, "Failure of Initiative."

Sam gets a little loose with the facts, however. I can tell you that 17 inches of rainfall would do a whole bunch of damage to this city. I don't know to which hurricane he refers, but I can tell you that we got 18 inches in May 1995 and thousands of homes and cars were flooded.

Also, Katrina may have been a Category 3 hurricane when it hit Louisiana, but it had been a Category 5 about a day before and was pushing a huge storm surge. Katrina now holds the record for highest storm surge in Louisiana and Mississippi, so that's what did the damage.

Thanks again, and peace,

Tim
Tim's Nameless Blog

"Thousands of homes and cars were flooded." Which is not the same as hundreds of thousands of homes and cars flooded for Katrina for a few inches of rain. New Orleans is absolutely worth rebuilding.

"New Orleans is absolutely worth rebuilding. ..."

... somewhere else. A little up hill, perhaps. *Especially* if the tax dollars of non-NOLAnites are going to be used (and they are).

Cut it out with the "rebuild it somewhere else if my tax dollars are paying for it" garbage. Besides the facts that there really isn't a suitable "uphill" location that would allow the large tanker ships necessary access, and almost no one would be interested in living in some FAKE New Orleans further upriver, *and* that no one would ever entertain the concept of somehow "relocating" such culturally important places as New York, Washington DC, or San Francisco, you're missing a critical point:

While the flooding of the eastern parts of N.O. and much of the outlying areas appear to have been caused by water coming over the tops of the levees and eroding them, the flooding of central New Orleans was not caused by hurricane Katrina's waters overtopping the levees. The levees simply FELL OVER when the water was at a level well below their tops.

That flooding was a DIRECT result of engineering incompetence and/or negligence on the part of the U.S. Government, through its agent and subsidiary, the Army Corps of Engineers. Had the levees been properly built to the specifications legally set forth by Congress, THIS NEVER WOULD HAVE HAPPENED. New Orleans can certainly be protected from future storms, as long as the job is done CORRECTLY this time.

I am not a lawyer, but my impression is that if I (or a company/agency I was a part of) was DIRECTLY responsible for billions of dollars in property damage and hundreds of needless deaths (whether on purpose or accidentally), I would expect to be held responsible for the full monetary cost of the damages I'd caused, and for that matter would also expect to face criminal charges for something along the lines of 1,000 counts of manslaughter/negligent homicide, etc.

IMHO, the citizens of New Orleans have been rather good-natured about the fact that the U.S. Government has, through its negligence and/or incompetence, destroyed our homes and killed many of our friends and family members. It does not reflect well on America to see the government (and many of its citizens) play "hot potato" with the problem and attempt to weasel out of giving just compensation to their victims.

Whether or not you were aware that YOU and every other American had agreed to take on the responsibility for New Orleans flood control (by proxy, through your elected representatives) does not excuse you (and your oh-so-precious tax dollars that are currently being drained into the Iraqi sand) of responsibility.

If you (and the rest of America) didn't want that responsibility, you shouldn't have accepted (or let your representatives accept) it in the first place. It's too late for that now. We're not going anywhere, and you're stuck with us. Feel lucky that it appears that we're going to end up settling for mere pennies on the dollar and simultaneously be forced to beg for every cent.
Feel lucky that for whatever reason, our elected representatives are too craven and cowardly to stand up for us and DEMAND justice (although I hope to do some housecleaning ASAP in that department, at the ballot box).

I seem to recall a fundamental principle of America being the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. If there was ever a moment in American history when the government had some serious "grievance-redressing" to do, it's now.

The "uphill" that is under discussion these days is raised up a few steps. It might make sense to turn the underpass between the airport and the city into an overpass. New Orleans is a good investment and it rates to be having a construction boom for a decade or more. Property values have not dropped and may have risen for houses still standing (albeit comparables are hard to come by). The Dutch seem to do OK with an even worse set of initial conditions.

Well, Sam, you're definitely right about that underpass between the airport & the city. Who on earth designed that? By the looks of it, it wouldn't surprise me if the railroad track was already in place when they put in the interstate, and somehow the railroad company refused to budge and so they dug out an underpass for the road to go through.

Property values have definitely risen somewhat for non-flooded homes. I know, I'm in the market for one myself. Unless I decide to go for the "Deal of the Century™" and buy a house that flooded with 2 or 3 feet of water for less than its previous value and then renovate it, move in, and be sure to have LOTS OF SHELVES to put valuables on in case of hurricane. Oh yeah, and invest in a pirogue and a shotgun as well.

For more on the latest nonsense out of FEMA and the flood insurance program, see:

http://wizbangblog.com/2006/04/13/feds-set-rebuilding-rules-in-new-orleans-and-theyre-a-mess.php