Posted 2/08/2007 05:44:00 PM by Douglas

No one is going to celebrate the destruction of any American City, and I'm not alone in thinking what happened to New Orleans was horrible. But you can't make water flow uphill forever, and apparently most residents are waking up to discover just how far below sea level they really are.

New Orleans is a city on a knife's edge. A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, an alarming number of residents are leaving or seriously thinking of getting out for good.

They have become fed up with the violence, the bureaucracy, the political finger-pointing, the sluggish rebuilding and the doubts about the safety of the levees.

"The mayor says, `Come back home. Every area should come back.' For what?" said Genevieve Bellow, who rebuilt her home in heavily damaged eastern New Orleans but has been unable to get anything done about the trash and abandoned apartment buildings in her neighborhood and may leave town. "I have no confidence in anything or anybody."

Nor should you. Levees protect a lot of people from a lot of water all over the world, but NOLA is different. It's below sea level and surrounded on all sides by water. If a pile of Army Corps of Engineer dirt is the only thing keeping water out of your house, well, Katrina showed what happens when it doesn't. Why stick around and build your new life on hope? Hope on a government that has already failed a losing battle? I know, what if they threw a huge amount of money at the problem? That would help, right?

Blanco's Road Home program, born 10 months after the storm, has been vilified by politicians and civic leaders as too slow to distribute $7.5 billion in federal aid to buy out homeowners or help them rebuild. As of Feb. 5, Road Home had taken 105,739 applications and resolved only 532 cases, granting $33.8 million. At the current rate, Road Home would take more than 13 years to complete.

They can't even give money that's already allocated to residents to rebuild, and they expect those same people to calm down and trust the levees?

Katrina was a symptom, not the cause, of NOLA's problems. All the government money in the world is not going to sway rational people to put themselves, their families or business back into a sinking ship. Literally.

Sadly, sometimes nature destroys entire cities, like Pompeii, Kalapana, Indianola. Sometimes it makes sense to rebuild and sometimes it doesn't. Take the hint, New Orleans.

Labels: New Orleans