Whole City Gone

[quasigeostrophy]

Louisiana Governor says entire city (of New Orleans) needs to be evacuated.

Eep. They'd have had a chance after the actual storm passed if the levees had only held.

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if. It wasn't as if this wasn't predicted.

As one of my friends said on Saturday (locked post, can't link, so I'll paraphrase): delaying the evacuation of New Orleans until there wasn't time to get everybody out was a big mistake that will cost a lot of lives.

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Definitely. Although it's hard to imagine now, I think it still might have been even worse had they gotten the brunt of the winds on the east side of the eye - that could have torn up the levees during the most intese part of the storm passage.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It would have been more sudden, with more wind destruction. (Agreed: hard to imagine!) But once Lake Pontchartrain is draining into the city, the water level could end up just as high this way. I wonder how fast the Corps of Engineers can sandbag.

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Watching the live feed from WWL-TV's web site, they were talking about how they've opened some sort of "side levees" or something to try to let some water out into the marshy areas outside the city. Not sure what help that is, but yeah, I'd think the Corps of Engineers are going to have a challenge.