Posted
8/28/2005 02:15:00 PM
by Douglas
For anyone wondering what would happen to New Orleans in the event of a direct hit of a massive hurricane, they're about to find out. For the past 100 years or so, they've been building up dikes to keep out the water that surrounds it while the city itself sinks deeper and deeper into the silt of the Mississippi. It's not going to be a good day to be in New Orleans tomorrow.
A storm of this magnitude catastrophic for any city, but in New Orleans, it's cataclysmic. The city is about 20 feet under water, and if the dikes on the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain are broken, all the water pumps in the world aren't going to stand in the way of the river looking for a shorter route to the Gulf. Found this article after a bit of googling, and it's interesting in that it was written in 2002, not last night.
Why is New Orleans so vulnerable?
Sandwiched between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, most of the city lies below sea level. A flood that gushes over shielding levees (earthen walls built in the late 1800s to protect against river overflow) would submerge New Orleans underwater.
Hope everyone is getting the hell out of there. Sadly, the first thing I thought of when I saw Katrina headed for New Orleans was how much
more this was going to drive up the cost of gas.