New Orleans: I Hardly Knew You
The Corps of Engineers, et al, is going to make a valiant attempt to fill the levee breaches which are flooding the New Orleans basin. Best case, the catastrophe we now have. Worst case, Atlantis.
The huge pumps which we’ve all heard so much about can pump one inch of water per hour from the basin. Assuming an average depth of two feet, it would take them an entire day to drain the current flooding. It’s not at all clear which pumps, if any, are working and which are not. If the water gets to an average depth of five feet, that’s 2.5 days to drain. And so on.
The pumps will be up and down a lot. The water which they’re pumping is full of all sorts of debris. Screens will stop most of it, though they’ll need to be unplugged often. The rest will do some damage to the pumps, so they’ll be in and out of service.
The number of homeless is huge, maybe a million people along the coast. New Orleans isn’t even attempting to release a total number of dead at this point. Mississippi is saying 80 plus.
This will be a tsunami-style relief effort, with assistance needed for years to come. We’ll need to build new homes, new businesses, new roads, new utilities. It’s going to be a long pull.
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