Gizmodo 
Enter your username and password.
Tip your editors:
tips@gizmodo.com
Editorial Director:
Brian Lam | Email | Twitter
Editor:
Jason Chen
Email | AIM | Twitter
Features Editor:
Wilson Rothman
Email | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editor:
Jesus Diaz
Email | AIM | Twitter
Mark Wilson, Reviews
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editors:
Matt Buchanan
Email | AIM | Twitter
Adam Frucci
Email | Twitter
Sean Fallon
Email | Twitter
Jack Loftus
Email | Twitter
John Herrman
Email | Twitter
Dan Nosowitz
Email
Chris Mascari
Email
Danny Allen
Email | Twitter
Columnist:
Brendan I. Koerner
Interns:
Don Nguyen
Email
Chris Jacob
Email
Comment Intern:
Nick Ellenoff | Email
Comment Account Questions:
Comments@gizmodo.com
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
Maybe this sort of thing is worth it - I don't know. However, the amount of money allocated to this, presumably inflated by the amount of press coverage that Katrina received, is just staggering.
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
@RyaninCalgary: That's true. However, you're assuming that people will not move into New Orleans without these fortifications. The post-Katrina population is already growing, and I doubt that much of that has anything to do with how much fortification is being built.
08/18/09
well... except for Dubai.
08/18/09
[www.taxfoundation.org]
For taxes paid out federally vs federal monies received Louisiana as a state has ranked in the bottom 10 contributors for 1986-2005. This means that they received more tax dollars than they paid out for almost 18 years pre Katrina.
At what point do we stop throwing money into a rathole instead of actually doing something about the rat problem itself.
As far as I can tell that entire state needs a pretty severe economic overhaul, and has needed it for quite some time. So his comment isn't stupid at all. The entire state, neve rmind the NO Metro area, is being subsidized by the rest of the country.
SO when you wonder why people get pissed off that people are being subsidized to live below sea level (And let's face it, the ports are not below sea level, otherwise they'd be under water.) this is why.
08/18/09
Last I knew New Orleans was a cesspool of crime, poverty, and corruption.
The general problem w/ NO is that it is sinking, and will continue to sink as it was built on a flood-plain of silt deposited by the river. When they built the levees to control flooding, they stopped all of that, the land is slowly drying up, and as a result it's sinking.
Parts of Seattle Pioneer Square in Seattle are currently doing the same. About 1/2" per year.
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
Yeah, but one thing Katrina taught us, if we don't do this the rest of the world will call us "racist" (rolls eyes).
We can't just abandon the city like we did to Galveston in 1900.
How much $ from this project will be siphoned off by NOLA corruption, like the pre-Katrina levies?
Plus the thing that bothered me most about Katrina is that the hurricane hit in Mississippi. Not one f'ing word about them. Of course they had a functioning state government that could respond to the problems whereas the only thing LAs government is good at is lining their personal pockets.
Also hate that the press got a pass on mis-reporting many things during Katrina.
08/18/09
And obviously you have NEVER lived in Mississippi. Functioning state government....wait I need to catch my breath. That was a good one
08/18/09
08/18/09
And blaming them for the State's demise (since prior to about 20 years ago LA was doing quite a bit better) Oh wait, can't talk about that, because that's Reagan era...
I'd say the state needs to do a better job of managing jobs programs and tax incentives. The royalties issue has existed since the mid 1940's.
08/18/09
However I appreciate their efforts to rebuild housing in the area.
08/18/09
Next you will be telling me a free market would solve the issue for less money.....
08/18/09
And while we're not above helping those in need, we are rather irritated to see people move right back into the same areas that flooded the last time. It's a bit like watching an abused spouse return to their abuser again and again.
Eventually you just have to wipe your hands clean, because you've given all that you can and you can't help them. Many of the cities that accepted refugees long-term to help learned after the fact that what they received were the chronically unemployed and increase in their crime rates for their efforts.
08/18/09
And, that's $50K on top of the billions, upon billions of dollars the Federal government has heaped upon the state year after year after year for over 20 years.
As in, billions more than the state pays in Federal taxes as a whole.
08/18/09
New Orleans is damn important to the economic stability of the region and most of the midwest. Just dont poo poo us away as a city of scum and villiany that's not worth the pots we piss in.
Respect Us!!
Yes there are segments of EVERY CULTURE who are slackers, moochers and looking for hand outs...let me point you to the foothills of TN, WV, KY, TX, and the Carolinas. Hell I have them in my family. I kicked their asses out as well when I saw that there were not about self improvement, but more about a sense of entitlement.
There is crime in New Orleans..no doubt. but its not freaking Baghdad or Kabul for God's sake. Most of the crime take place Uptown... where its all about drugs and turf. Anything else you hear is a lie. The city is not overrun by criminal activity, corruption hell yes. But who's city isn't. Because do not get me started on Houston,TX. Corruption here is a sport. And I have been here since '98. So I got to experience W the Gov. and Gov. Good Hair Perry, and my favorites Tom Delay and Shelia jackson lee (which I wish the dumb asses finally vote her ignant ass out of office)
08/18/09
What I'm talking about is the fact that there is a large population in that city of people who just don't work, don't want to work, and feel entitled. Now it isn't all, or most, or even many, but it was a sizable number.
And the government's response was abysmal. They could have airlifted generators to hospitals, and any number of things. But, the city did a poor job of convincing people to evacuate, and it did a poor job of emergency management as far as tracking what hospitals etc were still occupied by patients, etc.
It was a gigantic clusterfuck from the poorly engineered (and not built to spec Levee system) on down the line.
There is corruption, and then there is corruption on the level of cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New Orleans. Cities that are LEGENDARY beyond compare in the US for it.
Anyway, I'm not above helping the city, but the city needs to do a lot more for itself without fear of people screaming racism in a crowded theater. The areas that flooded were under sea level, and the ground sinks further each year there. Yadda. Hell, even in Iowa they stopped rebuilding several cities on floodplains.
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
But, to be quite honest. What good are the pumps if you have no place to actually put the water where it isn't going to come right back in?
I mean, you can pump rain water out of the under sea-level areas, but you're just tossing it back into the river/ocean/lake that is also taking on massive amounts of water from the watershed receiving rainfall.
It does no good in a levee breach, and from what I understand, they weren't properly maintaining the levees (IE: letting trees grow on them because it "looks prettier that way.") in the first place.
Now, I'm not talking about the humanitarian failure of Katrina here. Just the engineering ones that made the whole mess that much worse.
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
Which if they used this as a generating station instead, they could power multiple electric pumps and have even more redundancy.
08/18/09
I don't know, it still seems very futile to me. I wonder how much of NO we could raise above sea level via intelligent filling instead.
Build a nice big 30' thick steel re-inforced concrete retaining wall around the areas (as a road) to prevent erosion of those areas in a storm, and go.
Or, you know, put in a moratorium against building anything in that city below sea level period, and start buying people out now that real-estate prices are so low. There aren't all that many people in the city to begin with, and this is just one of the many muti-billion dollar projects we're throwing at the area.
08/18/09
1. Wasn't the Lake Levees. It was the Industrial Canal and the London Ave. Those canals link the river with the lake for marine transport and off loading a lot of cargo to be transported up north. The surge from the lake drove towards the river... then the river pushed back. If the damn levees would have been decent and held.... we wouldn't be having this thread.
2. The pumping stations actually work very well. They just couldn't handle the massive rush of water that came 'when the levees broke'. The amount of water was never the issue. It was that levees. Any Native New Orleanian worth their Danny and Clydes knows if the levees would have held we would have been fine. There would have been flooding, but the Pumping stations would have dried that up in hours.
Living in Gentilly and the East for the majority of my life, we used to ride on the lake right before a storm and you could see the water get up close to lakeshore dr and even lap onto it... but never into the neighborhoods.
WE NEED BETTER LEVEES.
This pump would help facilitate the moving of any floor water back into the river or lake. Its a supplement to the levees not a substitute.
08/18/09
The founders took tidal wetlands, dammed it all up with levees, and failed to consider that maybe this was a bad thing. The Federal government and Corps of Engineers stepped in to help prevent the problem from becoming a disaster, but for whatever reason they weren't built properly.
It didn't help that the city and its populace did something stupid and started building trees on levees to help further weaken them. This has been a known fact for a very long time, you don't allow trees on levees. Trees are bad mm'kay. When wind hits them and tears them out by the roots it takes the soil with it. Rather than say, grass.
I think the last thing I read was that they were closing MRGO canal completely?
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
08/18/09
@Cordfucious of Tech Clan: Well according to Chaos Theory you've just doomed New Orleans.
08/18/09