the saints come marching in
I have a morbid fascination with watching natural disasters unfold. I admit it. After calling Jen Sunday I was glued to the computer looking for updates. Yesterday it looked like Katrina might not be as bad for New Orleans as feared, but today it seems worse.
A massive hurricane is only the start for New Orleans. In most places floods recede over time as water travels downhill. New Orleans, though, is the downhill. Katrina not only flooded New Orleans directly, it also damaged levees enough that both Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi are draining into it. Recovery doesn't start until the water subsides, and it will have to be pumped out. In the mean time, a city has no electricity and no potable water, and detritus from oil refineries, chemical plants and, grimly, cemeteries is sifting through the Mississippi delta.
SoI keep watching, spellbound. It's a lotfiller in real life. And much like the last American disaster I think about the planning implications. Will this push the country into a recession? Will they valmeyer New Orleans onto higher ground?
A massive hurricane is only the start for New Orleans. In most places floods recede over time as water travels downhill. New Orleans, though, is the downhill. Katrina not only flooded New Orleans directly, it also damaged levees enough that both Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi are draining into it. Recovery doesn't start until the water subsides, and it will have to be pumped out. In the mean time, a city has no electricity and no potable water, and detritus from oil refineries, chemical plants and, grimly, cemeteries is sifting through the Mississippi delta.
SoI keep watching, spellbound. It's a lotfiller in real life. And much like the last American disaster I think about the planning implications. Will this push the country into a recession? Will they valmeyer New Orleans onto higher ground?
posted by Jason at 9:28 PM
2 Comments:
So, okay, not that the Today show should be the source of all my economy forecasting information... but they suggested this morning that the rebuilding of the region will actually create jobs all over the country. Which I could see being true... you're going to need a lot of everything that was destroyed. So, while the local economies will no doubt take years to recover, the rest of the country will need to produce more goods and services to help those places rebuild.
I'm fascinated too, but already annoyed with questions like, "When do you think New Orleans will be rebuilt?" Uh, hello? Can we get all the water and bodies out of the city first, and then worry about rebuilding it? How about concentrating on questions that actually have an answer, or will shortly?
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