>>
>> What is well known is that you have a city, that is between a lake and
>> the ocean, and is in a potential hurricane zone, and is below both the
>> ocean and lake water levels. This may be a dumb question, but didn't
>> anybody think that at some point this might cause a problem?
>
> Yeah, it's old news. John McPhee wrote a book about it (really, about the
> hydrology of the lower Mississippi in general). Evidently, Men's Health
> magazine has a brief article about it in this/last month's issue. >
> If you want to vote in an unscientific poll, try
>formatting linkWhat should be done with New Orleans?> a.. Fix the levees, pump the city out, clean it up and build it back > right where it was.> b.. Allow it to remain the swampland that nature intends and spend all > that money to re-build elsewhere.> At last count, it's 21% fix, 79% swamp. But these aren't people in the > affected area, but mostly people located several hundred miles away who > are sick and tired of hearing other people wonder how they can stand the > Chicago winter.
>
> But as with most questions, the New Orleans question is not that simple.
> New Orleans evolved there over the last 400 years (just as it evolved to
> being below sea level -- it obviously didn't start there as a sort of
> Instant Atlantis). There are a lot of business and economic reasons to
> have a city in/near that spot that aren't obsolete. Does New Orleans make
> any less sense than boom cities in the West, where they don't have ENOUGH > water?
>
>>
>> Perhaps the best solution is to knock everything down, add in the rubble
>> from surrounding areas (like Biloxi), then add clean fill until the
>> ground is about level with the top of the levee, then build a new city
>> on-top of the now raised ground level.
>>
> A somewhat similar thing was done to Chicago. The city was raised to ease
> flooding and disease. Seeformatting link"Early Chicago was also plagued by sewer and water problems. Many people > described it as the filthiest city in America. To solve the problems, the > city initiated the creation of a massive sewer system. In the first phase > sewage pipes were laid across the city above-ground, with gravity moving > the waste. The second phase, executed in 1855, involved raising the level > of the city by four to seven feet (one to two meters); this was done by > jacking up buildings and placing fill in order to raise streets above the > swamp and the newly-laid sewer pipes.> By 1857 Chicago was the largest city in what was then known as the > Northwest. ... over 90,000 people."> To solve more disease/drainage/navigation problems, four rivers (Grand > Calumet, Stony Creek, Chicago, and Little Calumet; see >formatting link) had their flow reversed. This > probably won't work for the Mississippi ;)>
> The general point I'm trying to make here is that proper engineering is a
> wonderful thing, and if there is a good enough economic reason to have a
> port city near where a gigantic river system draining half a continent
> meets the second largest ocean in the world, we possess the engineering to
> allow this.
>
> If humanity had a pattern of abandoning cities after natural and
> man-inflicted disasters, how many would we have lost? Chicago for sure
> (1871 fire), San Francisco after the earthquake, London after the plague,
> large portions of the Netherlands, etc. It doesn't generally make
> economic sense to do things like this, and we usually don't do it. For
> sure, though, it makes sense to learn from the past and better engineer > the future.
>
>