Rusted Sky

Quite literally...

Aaron over at Free Will has a good summation of the problems going on in NOLA. He finishes, before touching on the evacuation of NOLA and Mayor Nagin with this...

"Hindsight is 20/20, and we've never done this before. It's an absolutely unreasonable standard to see every obstacle as some kind of damning "failure". Everyone who gets out of that city alive is a victory. We can learn from this and try to plan better in the future, but it will happen again to another city somewhere in the world, someday and the situation will be just as helpless and desperate then, too. This, folks, is as good as it's going to get. It's an absolutely horrible situation, but that's why it's called a "disaster". It sucks."

The wierd thing is, if anyone had proposed putting mechanisms in place BEFORE something like this happened, they'd likely have been roundly criticized for wasting government money on preparations for an unlikely scenario. For instance, let's look at setting a tent city up for 50,000 people. Find the land, appropriate the land, put in the necessary sanitation and water infrastructure and security structure - and you'd have people screaming at the top of their lungs that this was actually an internment camp that the administration was getting ready to pull a Dachau.

NOLA is a disaster area. You can only do so much preplanning for any particular disaster. Plans for levee breaks? Sure. Plans for hurricanes? Sure. Plans for power outages and pumping station failures? Sure. Plans for breakdowns of civil and civic structures? Sure. Plans for evacuating the city if need be? Sure.

But as a city, you only have a finite amount of resources that you can allocate to preparations for any one disaster. Cover them all, and your resources get stretched mighty thin.

He also posted:

Years ago, when I was in school, I was invited to participate in a think-tank type of workshop at SIU on a similar scenario for Southern Illinois if the New Madrid were to blow and turn this joint into a sandbox. You know what we found? That we were screwed. There was no way to plan ourselves out of the worst-case-scenario. That, as it turned out, was the point of the exercise: To impress upon us that there was no Batman, there was no Superman, and that if the earthquake hit, with hundreds of thousands of people spread out across dozens of devastated towns, it would take days, at a bare minimum, before anyone could reach us, and that we had to take this threat seriously and convey to others the importance of preparing for the disaster, having a bugout kit, being at least moderately prepared for a survival situation. Same rule applies here:

New Orleans is not going to be "saved". It's not possible. It's Atlantis. This is a disaster on an unprecedented scale, the kind of comic-book catastrophe like a major shift in the New Madrid, the La Palma tsunami, the Yellowstone caldera, or a significant meteor shattering over a major city and creating a firestorm that no society has the resources to really "shield" a city from and that no society has the technology to magically "fix" in the aftermath. For all intents and purposes, this may as well have been a nuclear meltdown. Nature is history's greatest monster, and when it decides to go on a killing spree, even the most powerful superpower in human history is simply incapable of fighting back. Nothing within the scope of our imagination can make New Orleans a habitable place right now.

Well, I can imagine a way to make New Orleans habitable again. It involves a hell of a lot of concrete, though - enough to raise the entire city some 30 feet. And this doesn't even begin to address the devastation in Mississippi. New Orleans is just very accessable and visible. The rest of that area... we don't even really know about yet.

I expect it to get a LOT worse.

J.