Who's gonna do all the rebuilding? You republicans are already thinking of ways to help bush's construction business cronies take advantage of this tragedy and make more money. Shame on all of you.

This is so cool, first time to be the first to post a comment, I'm so proud of myself.

or maybe we just want you to get out of the way so we can fix the problem.

Or maybe I wasn't being sarcastic enough. Damn my crappy sense of humor, I blame it on being Canadian.

I don't want the construction gig. Too much competition.

I just want the water taxi and boat rental concessions.

Sorry if I offended - the comment + the Canuckian signature gave me a Type II discrimination error (false identification of the foe).

You republicans are already thinking of ways to help bush's construction business cronies take advantage of this tragedy and make more money

True enough - nobody works for free.

SOoooo, given canuck's apparently commie proclivities I propose the following "solution" that will COMPLETELY ELIMINATE "corporate profiteering" by construction contractors.

We don't "rebuild" anything. In fact we get Rove to blow the hole in the dike even deeper! Flood ALL the low areas completely, then sit back and get rich with that crazy mosquito farming money and give all the displaced people jobs as tenders/collectors on the mosquito farm.

MosquitoBurgers™
MosquitoSlurpies™
MosquitoPopsl™
MosquitoTots™
MashedMosquitos™
MosquitoTaquitos™

This can be bigger than SOY BEANS. Naturally we lay in a good crop of dental floss too.

I think we can cut the cost of raising the level of NO dramatically by confiscating the egos of Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosie and the entire MSM and laying it down in NO. I figure the height , depth and width should be able to raise NO by about 80 feet. Of course we'd have to compensate their relatives because only corpses would be left. Shouldn't be much--$1.80 would be a generous sum.

Tony:

Come on - what you really want are MosquitoBurritos. All the internal rhyme with all the protein.

Come on - what you really want are MosquitoBurritos. All the internal rhyme with all the protein TONY: I will not join in your mosquito IPO unless you follow the sage advice of geoff.

OMG - pure effing marketing brilliance - with the MosquitoBurrito™ product we can BURY Taco Bell and send those running dog capitalists into backruptcy.

I bow to geoff's obviously superior marketing savvy.

*hangs head in shame* I am not worthy...

I am from the state. Lived in NO for years. All these ideas sound great. Elevating parts of the city, bridges, etc. If we basically demolish the lower,poorer parts wherea are they going to go? This is the projects we are talking about. All these ideas sound great on paper but the political reality on the ground is different. Let me explain. There is a very antagonistic realtionship between the city(proper) and the surounding communities. Yes, it's partly racial. For years the city government has wanted to build projects or low income housing outside ofthe city but the sorrounding local gov's don't let it happen. The point is that either the low income stuff gets built back where it was or no go. Sorry, this is the politcial reallity, like it or not.

Well, I imagine some of these other communities got destroyed, too. The govt can make it a condition of rebuilding funds that they get to build projects in certain areas (or the owners can take the cash, live elsewhere, and have the govt housing built on their ex-property.) I can think of lots of ways this can work.

Assuming that the same old La. politics will fly now is probably not the safest assumption. The rebuilding of New Orleans will cost billions of federal money, and people are paying attention right now to the stories about how Louisiana politicians misspent federal money on projects these last several decades. Federal oversight runs a little differently from state oversight, and the locally-connected folks may find they don't have sufficient connections in DC.

Federal Gonzo Bucks™ solve all the political challenges.

Unfortunately, rebuilding NO will have to include building those slums exactly where they were.

In a politically fearful America (fearful of offending anybody), the LLMSM would pillory Bush if those slums aren't built exactly where they were before using better materials for even bigger give-away homes.

Imagine the headlines otherwise? "New New Orleans Built Along Racial Lines: No Room For The Poor."

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson could retire off the political mess that would create. Hmmm... maybe that would be a good thing.

Does anyone remember Holland? They have dealt with this problem through engineering. They lost over 1800 people due to a storm in 1953. I just watched a program on the National Geographic channel about this and the thing I liked most was that new housing is built w/ a 15 foot basement because they are PLANNING to have floods in the future. Notice how all the homes in New Orleans are one floor only?

All new homes should be built with this in mind. We don't need to abandon rebuilding New Orleans. We rebuilt San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago and Kobe is still coming back.

As a native son of NOLA, I gotta weigh in. Greater NO is floating on what amounts to a sponge made of silt; no easily-accessed bedrock to anchor anything like a house to. Dumping tons by the billions of dirt on top of the floating silt sponge will not do the trick either, because the whole area is sinking due to the Corps of Engineers trying to keep the Mississippi from switching course to the Atchafalaya River and Morgan City. The silt it used to deposit at NOLA is being chuted down a deeper Mississippi channel and off the continental shelf; no new silt to keep up what is there; no new silt to form barrier islands out in the Gulf. Eroding coastline; sinking land. It's an engineering nightmare. That's part of the problem. The other part is people. It's just easier to steal the federal dollars that do come in than deal with the astronomical cost of doing what is needed to keep the land land, and the water water. That's the mindset. Plus the general belief that we can weather most storms; we have before, we will again. Except we never got hit directly by a Cat 4 or 5 before. So now everybody is scrambling.

I think the solution lies in doing it right, whatever we do to rebuild. I think it needs to start with the levee system -- in the best of times the levees constantly needs to be radically revamped and more closely remodeled according to the layered Dutch model, with our own modifications to deal with Lake, River, and Gulf, plus a floating water table depending on even a given thunderstorm. Pumps, plus independent power; more and better canals for drainage. And of course, better cooperation between rival city and parish governments -- a model not too unlike the NYC boroughs could be a thing that might help break down the distrust and bad feelings (but this may be the hardest of all to achieve). Building houses on pilings or higher levels can be accomplished and already is done in some of the floodier places of metro, but that won't do the trick by itself. It just needs to be part of the picture. It will take massive amounts of money, manpower, and cooperation to accomplish the rebuild. But when has America ever shied away from a big challenge? Allons! Let's Geaux!

So how do you build on waterlogged silt?

One solution is to follow the example of the Waterford Nuclear Power Plant just upstream from NOLA.

They circled the site with wellpoints and pumped in cryogenics to freeze the mud around the perimeter. They then dug out the muck and laid in a concrete matt that eventually became a concrete barge. As they built the topstructure, they defrosted the mud so that the watertable rose to float the plant.

In essence, the plant floats in the sea of mud along the Mississippi. It needs cooling water from the river for power production but in case the river drys up or switches course, emergency cooling is with roof-mounted water-to-air heat exchangers.

I have a feeling few of the poor people displaced from their drowned slums are going to go back. Many of them now have a chance to build a life for themselves instead of being stuck in a slum. To be "poor" is not to be part of a race, and a slum is not a homeland. Whether you like it or not, Mother Nature has solved a large part of the problem of the poor people in New Orleans, one way or another.

So how do you build on waterlogged silt

Caissons. You float the building's foundation on a caissons. In the Netherlands, they have extreme examples where buildings are built on caissons and attached to an anchorage like the slips at a boat dock. When water comes in the building floats up, but is held in place by the anchorage.

If anyone knows what the name of the pole the fingers of a slip go up and down on, that's what these buildings have.

Just as a side note, the original downtown area of Sacramento, which is now Old Town, was raised up one story also. The way they did it, given the limitations of 19th Century technology,was interesting. They actually jacked up the buildings. There's a great pic that I don't know where to find of the sidewalks during the project. You'd be walking along on the new level, and then come to a building that wasn't finished. You climbed down a long ladder, walked across the 10-12 foot pit, climbed up another ladder, and continued on your merry way.

"Just me and the pygmy pony, over by the dental floss bush."

Damn my crappy sense of humor, I blame it on being Canadian.

I find Candian's humor too dry and too absurdist at the same time, like British humor, only not funny.

To let people know they're tryint to be funny, I think Canadians should always talk like the MacKenzie brothers.

Like so:

You republican hoseheads are already thinking of ways to help bush's construction business cronies take advantage of this tragedy and make more money. Shame on all of you, eh? Take off.

See, then I'd get what you were going for there, Canuck.

Why not use trash/broken concrete/downedtrees/ discarded appliances for landfill? It could be brought to NO by barge. It could come from all over the country as well as from the immediate area during the cleanup. Then put soil on top.

You can't use it because its too loose.
Anything that's built on it will sink. Which is the problem they've got now.

Andrea, where, after losing everything, are those people going to go except slums in other cities? That is the big problem facing the towns housing most of the evacuees. If there is money offered to restore their homes back in NO, and there almost certainly will be, many of them will gravitate back there because it is simply Home. Not just the real estate but the family, friends and neighbors.

Some may find better opportunities and never go back but all too many of them will be looking at job markets with little to offer them as unskilled workers. I somehow doubt Houston was lacking for such already. If the evacuees were evenly distributed across the country it might work out in terms of finding jobs and accommodations but that is the exact opposite what is happening. I suspect 20 years from now there will be a poor neighborhood in Houston called Little New Orleans or something like that because most of the inhabitants are those who were evacuated there and never left the familiar company of other evacuees. Those people will have traded one slum for another.

Of course, all of these rebuilding theoriesare overlooking one teensy-weensy little fact: an area of marsh the size of Manhattan is disappearing from the Mississippi Delta each year, and teh Delta itslef has been receeding for 8,000 years.

No matter what we do, New Orleans will be in the Gulf of Mexico by 2090 at the very latest, providing no more hurricanes hit Louisiana in the next 85 years. Each additional hurricane shares years off that estimate; Katrina may have shaved of a decade by herself.

Rebuild as much of New Orleans as you like, but don't take a dime of my tax dollars to do it. You cannot beat the ocean. Rebuilding New Orleans is a fools game.

epobirs, you know the poor don't all live in urban slums in this country. Some live in small towns and rural areas -- these are the poor I'm most familiar with, because some are my relatives. Remember trailer parks? The usual victims of hurricanes in the Southeast?

And yes, both white and black folks live in these situations. It is possible that some refugees don't budge from Texas, but also some might take up offers from small towns across the U.S. to live there. For example, at the end of the Vietnam war many churches offered homes for Vietnamese refugees, which is why you find some Vietnamese families in the South (who seem to have picked tailoring or manicures as their preferred business). Yeah, the small-town South is very different from New Orleans, but some people who have lost everything might find it attractive.