If anyone has been to New Orleans lately, there are still areas that have not been rebuilt after Katrina...
How can this be?
John
I was in NO a few years after the disaster, my cousin had a FEMA contract doing construction/salvage and I went down and helped him out for a while. I also lived in Slidell, very close to NO, for almost a year the year before Katrina.
Devastation was pretty mind boggling. As most are are, the majority of NO is built on a natural flood plain, and the only thing that makes it habitable is a complex series of levies.
This system obviously proved far from fool proof, and it was my understanding that some of the lowest areas were written off as too much of a hazard to consider rebuilding, which makes perfect sense to me. The city is surrounded by water and swamp land, and there are really only 2 ways in and out. The year I was there I rode out a hurricane, Ivan I think, which at the last moment turned towards the FLA panhandle, so we avoided a direct hit, but that was bad enough.
Lived about 20 ft from lake Pontchartrain, damn lake rose up at least 8 ft during the systems approach. Gets mighty personal when you can look up and see those spiral cloud bands that you usually see on radar shots on TV 1,000 miles away.
I went to a walmarts the day before it hit to stock up on batteries, tape, radios, water ect, some of which were very hard to find. They were out of water at most places, I found a stock of it at an office depots of all places. Heading back, I was literally the only person on the highway going that way, and there was a non stop miles long traffic jam of folks headed the other way.
Not being native to the area, that got me to thinking that maybe we should head out too [I was there working on a hot job right in the middle of NO with 5 other guys, and we commuted to work from Slidell, about a 80 mile round trip every day]. We took a vote, and all decided to ride it out - Good thing it wasn't the next year, when Katrina hit. The condos we were staying at didn't fare too well.
But yeah, NO is a poor location for a city. The water table is so low that they don't even bury the dead, all cemeteries there have crypts right on the ground.
