ToxiCity

I was perusing my favorite message board today, at urbanplanet.org, when I came across a discussion that I've had numerous times in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina's thrashing of the gulf coast. Should New Orleans be rebuilt?

Now, keep in mind that this website is for hardcore urban infrastructure and planning-types so it has some degree of legitimacy in my eyes. The consensus there reflected my own feelings on the matter.

No.

In order to truly engage in this discussion, in my humble opinion, it is necessary to put aside all the positive feelings you have for the city and its history. This is a matter of economics, first and foremost. Pouring untold billions of our money into a city that is by majority below sea level is illogical.

Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 per cent of the city of New Orleans leaving 1800 people dead and tens of thousands displaced. Hurricane Rita, just one month later, exacerbated further the condition of the city when parts of the Ninth Ward were again flooded. According to the newspaper of record in New Orleans, the Times Picayune, Katrina was responsible for the "worst civil engineering disaster in American history."

In order to save salvage what was left of the city's infrastructure from the clutches of the floodwater, the Army Corps of Engineers pumped billions of gallons of highly toxic water into the gulf of Mexico--water that, without doubt, would also finds its way into the Mississippi River as well as Lake Pontchartrain. The environmental affects of this disaster are still being investigated.

In the ten months since the disaster the Army Corps of Engineers have been trying to restore the floodwalls and levees in the city to where they were pre-Katrina.

Does anyone else find fault with this?

If, indeed, there is a connection between the proliferation of powerful tropic storms in the hemisphere and global warming, the chances of another Katrina bearing down on the gulf coast would seem to be pretty good. So, restoring the levee system in New Orlean back to pre-Katrina levels reflects the Federal Government's unwillingess to rebuild New Orleans for the long-term.

It is band-aid bureaucracy at its best.

And that is why it should not be rebuilt at all; it is far too expensive to do it right. As of right now, the Feds have allotted 12 billion dollars to the state of Louisiana, the majority of which will be earmarked for the redevelopment of New Orleans.

12 billion is not enough; not even close.

To do it right would require an almost unfathomable amount of money and at least a decade's worth of renovation. Couple that with the specter of more potentially disastrous storms, not to mention other natural disasters, that are looming on the horizon and we have the emergency management version of "The Money Pit."

In economic terms, the city of New Orleans is a sunk cost. The money that is being put back into New Orleans WILL NEVER be recouped.

Only by looking at this issue in a dispassionate manner, as my friends on Urban Planet have, can we truly come to a consensus as a country. It is a bitter pill to swallow for many to forsake the Crescent City but it is the rational thing to do.

Katrina was not, in my opinion, a "hundred years storm" as we used to say. These types of storms are becoming all too common and it is high time we recognize that changes in the global climate must be accounted for--and not just in the short-term.

Oh, and New Orleans wasn't nice to begin with.