New Orleans is dead; time to bury it!!

Forum posts

• 7 September 2005, 04:37

  I disagree with everything that this article said. He may not want to rebuild, but I and many other americans would like to see New Orleans rise up again to celebrate Mardi Gras. The fact that New Orleans lies on land several feet under water doesn’t mean anything, look at Holland, most of that country is underwater, but do you see the Dutch leaving their homes? New Orleans also has an important economic role when it comes to overseeing the Mississippi River shipping activity. Nobody should listen to this guy’s defeatist attitude.

  • 8 September 2005, 17:05

    Holland is not historically subject to this type of storm every hundred years or so. Yes, I too would like to see the City rise again, but maybe we should just build a mile high statue of Bush right downtown instead....My point is that some things just dont make sense...and where is the money going to come from??? Its not a defeatist attitude, and its imperitive that the hydrocarbon and port infrastructures get rebuilt as soon as possible, but the entire city should not be rebuilt as it is senseless in my opinion..

• 7 September 2005, 09:39

  So here’s a capitalist answer to your ignorance, the human example has been all over the TV and obvious to everyone. Failure to protect New Orleans is a treasonous disregard for US Citizens, from those murdered by the lack of federal response to those living and working anywhere else in this country:

  http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090605R.shtml

  Go to Original <http://www.stratfor.com/news/archiv...>

  New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
  By George Friedman
  STRATFOR

  Thursday 01 September 2005

  The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

  But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography - the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one - the Mississippi - and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

  For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn’t have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

  During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn’t come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn’t flow out. Alternative routes really weren’t available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

  Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina’s geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson’s days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

  The ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, the Port of South Louisiana is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products - corn, soybeans and so on. A larger proportion of US agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 57 million tons, comes in through the port - including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

  A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the US auto industry if steel doesn’t come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if US corn and soybeans don’t get to the markets.

  The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The US transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren’t enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities - assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can’t be.

  The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of US-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.

  There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial - is manageable.

  The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

  What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.

  The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it - and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.

  It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite - and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then - whatever emotional connections they may have to their home - their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.

  A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don’t simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone - and they are not coming back anytime soon.

  It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside - and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.

  The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city’s population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

  Let’s go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can’t be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

  Katrina has taken out the port - not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system - the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.

  It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

  New Orleans is not optional for the United States’ commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

  Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city’s resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.

  • 8 September 2005, 05:28

    Very interesting paper, thank you. Now I wonder: it seems your administration was fully unaware of the strategic importance of New Orleans since they cut funding for (inadequate cat 3 force hurricane) levees. Seen from here (I am a French man living in Taiwan), it also seems the big difference with
    9/11 is that there is nobody to blame (read bomb out) but oneself. If you add the obvious lack of interest for the people suffering there, what does it says politically? As for the future of the city itself,
    I do not hold my breath: read the comments and one will understand the people living there are of a different kind. New Orleans will indeed rise up again.

  • 25 September 2005, 23:29

    Stay out of this discussion. You have no right to inject your French opinion on these matters.

  • 26 September 2005, 00:03

    there really wasn’t an actual "campaign" centered off the coast of New Orleans during WWII by German U-boats. Yes, they were active in the Gulf of Mexico, but only during the Summer of 1942. The first U-boat victory was in May of that year with the last being in Sept. The major action took place on the Eastern seaboard. In comparison, most U-boat victories were scored on the Eastern coast from North Carolina to New York and Cape Hatteras. Very few U-boats ventured into the Gulf of Mexico because the approaches were very well defended and the better targets (convoys) were out in the Atlantic cruising up the coast. In fact, only two are known to have been sunk in the Gulf (U-166, recently discovered off the coast of Louisiana and, U-157 lying at the bottom North/Northwest of Havana).

• 7 September 2005, 16:50

  We’re not talking about the collapse of a sports arena. We’re talking about a major American city that also happens to have the second busiest port in the country. If only for this reason, New Orleans must be rebuilt. The Dutch have learned to cope with holding back water from their below sea level land, and so should we.

• 7 September 2005, 19:21

  New Orleans will NEVER be dead. And the Federal Government had every obligation to help this city and the fellow americans experiencing the most devastating event of their lives.

  So, I guess, in your little mind, the Federal Government had no obligation to help with the destruction of 9-11. So why go to war? You are really a stupid idiot.

  New Orleans is my hometown, and we welcome people from all over the world with open arms. A little compassion at this time would be the LEAST anyone could show.

  Kiss my coonass!

  • 8 September 2005, 17:17

    Actually the Federal government has no legal obligation to help, its the States job, although the State can call for National Gaurd aid, under command of the Governor, which she has done. There is only a moral obligation. Read the Constitution, push to amend it if you dont like it, its just the way it is...
    Ive been to your hometown, and as far as compassion you might note that I have offered a spare bedroom free of charge, and hopefully by this evening will add air fare to the offer by a donation thru my church. I live in Oregon, and you might note that Oregon is also under a state of emergency due to the large number of victims we are accepting. Other than declaring a state of emergency, the State is not involved in this, its all citizens, churches, and charities.
    I dont think you see the scope of this tradegy. Every building that is sewage contaminated will be bulldozed, even if there is no structural damage. Every building. Ive know, Ive been thru it myself. Im sorry for your loss, its far greater than you suspect

• 7 September 2005, 19:28

  BULLSHIT MY HOME IS THERE MY FAMILY HAS BEEN THERE SINCE The French arrived it hold countless memories of my family so fuck you i’m moving back to my home town asap

  • 8 September 2005, 17:26

    I can understand your connection with the land, but its going to be a rough pound. Every home that got contaminated will be bulldozed and if you cant do it yourself you will be charged for it. Check out the FEMA fllod rebuilding guidelines. The money just isnt going to be there to help you, you are on your own, except for aid from the private sector. You will never be able to insure your new structure... The Gulf is warming, its going to happen again... Many if not most of the homes will never be rebuilt, and due to insurance even the land itself will be extremely devalued. Its your choice of course, but it would be easier to relocate, trust me, Ive lost a house to a flood...

  • 26 September 2005, 00:08

    that residents are going to play hell trying to get their insurance carriers to pay for a rebuild because most policies state that the homeowner is covered by rising water that comes from "...streams, creeks, rivers and tributaries." It doesn’t say anything about rising water from an ocean.

• 7 September 2005, 23:20

  Easy for you to say because you didn’t live in New Orleans

• 8 September 2005, 20:08

  Shame on you! OF COURSE we will rebuild. It wasn’t just about mardi gras and gumbo. New Orleans is a MAJOR port of this country. Many refinerys are here. Peoples lives and livelihoods are here.

  Do you every hear us (Louisiana and the Gulf Coast) saying that we shouldn’t have rebuild the Bay area in CA when earthquakes struck it, because "it’ll just happen again"?! certainly not! The same with any other natural disasters.

  May you and your loved ones never know this level of destruction. But, if they do, the truth is Louisiana would be right there to respond to the needs of those same loved ones. And to help them rebuild thier lives WITHOUT asking "why bother???"

  Earthquakes and Hurricanes are not things that governments can easily prepare for...if you can not be a part of the solution at least keep your foolishness to yourself and not make it worse for those of us dealing with this disaster.

  • 9 September 2005, 05:21

    I agree that the port and infrastructure that supports it and the hydrocarbon refining and transporting infrastructure is vital to the nation and should and will get rebuilt as a high priority.
    Note that I and my loved ones have experienced this firsthand and note my earlier post, I am doing what I can.
    The fact is that it will happen again. I also suggest you are clueless to the real scope of the tradegy. EVERY structure that has been contaminated will be LEVELED. If the owner of the land cant do it (and with the sheer scope of this disaster its unlikely) FEMA will do it for you and hand you the bill. Ive been thru this myself... Now you find yourself with a vacant lot that will be uninsurable, and no bank will loan to rebuild. Furthermore, if you can get the money to rebuild you are going to have to scrape the topsoil, lime it, let it sit, then cover it with clean topsoil. Basically, once the contaminated water went over the floor, your house is condemned as a safety hazard by FEMA. No buts, no ifs, dosnt matter that there is little or no structural damage.
    Given this, wouldnt it be wise to move on and start over some where else?? Where is all this money to rebuild going to come from?? Is it fair to have the government act as an insurance agency?? Its unconstitutional, should we really amend the constitution?? Insurance is a whole other issue. Back to contaminated water; if it wet your home, it caused the condemnation, and is "flood damage"; which, unless you have expensive flood insurance means no help there....
    The fact is the city will be razed and leveled. Its gone, its dead. Peoples lives and livelihoods are gone. The dirt WILL be covered and limed to "decontaminate it". The city will be buried..... Is it really that big of a stretch to consider not rebuilding it??
    It is basically a far bigger tradegy, clusterfuck, hell, there just aint words to describe the true extent of this. I think you might still be in denial of how truly ugly and huge (no words!!) this is.
    It could collapse our entire economy, its surely going to hurt us all, if I was you I would abandon sentiment and get to more tenable land as if my life depended on it, and I think yours just might...

• 23 November 2005, 05:13

  FINALLY....someone talking some sense and accuracy. It was indeed the state’s duty....and their screw up. Along with states’ rights come states’ responsibilities. I don’t want to pay to rebuild it either just to see it happen again and again in the future. Good way to get rid of all the corruption down there too!

• 30 August 2006, 06:08

  Rite WRITE RIGHT How about living next to a volcano and demanding others to help with there own lives and dollars every time it erupts.