Why new orleans should not be rebuilt

In the past decade, New Orleans has remained a popular destination for Habitat for Humanity volunteers, especially students like myself.

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Habitat for Humanity was averaging homes a year. However, due to the large number of volunteers who still come to the area, the organization has completed homes post-Katrina, around homes a year.

Not only does Habitat for Humanity continue to play a crucial role in the New Orleans area, but many nonprofit organizations have also sprung up over the years to try and rebuild its communities.

Another organization that I had the opportunity to work with was The Green Project , a nonprofit focused on the reuse of building materials and on educating the community about proper recycling practices. Upon noticing that the rebuilding of New Orleans involved many wasteful practices, the founders decided to create an organization that valued sustainable building while also providing materials at an affordable cost to community members.

Some of their projects included refurbishing old wood and furniture while also promoting their reuse. In addition, the organization has a paint recycling program which diverts 40, gallons of paint a year from being thrown in the trash improper paint disposal can often run off into water sources or contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead, The Green Project either mixes the old paint to create new colors or recycles the liquids properly. If we didn't do that, we'd have very little land left to live on. The residents of New Orleans want their town rebuilt.

Many have been born and grew up there and they love their city. I think that if the engineers would do their job properly, there would be less danger to the area, in the long run. New Orleans was a city long before the United States came into existence and therefore should be restored and rebuilt. Natural disasters occur everywhere and there hasn't been anywhere else the United States hasn't rebuilt- Florida for example.

New Orleans is also the historical site for unique foods and music so it should be preserved as a world heritage site. The destruction of New Orleans was to much more than just the architecture there. What may be a building to an outsider could mean years of history, endless stories, and cultural meaning to the residents who live there. If my town was destroyed by flooding or any other disaster, I would want it rebuilt, and I'm sure the New Orleanians feel the same way.

I don't see why the city of New Orleans should not be rebuilt. I don't think that federal tax dollars should be used though. It seems to me that we have spent enough federal money on the city.

Now we should let the free market take over and see what happens. Yes the city should have an opportunity to rebuild. In light of the recent flood of donations and aid to Haiti, I am left wondering why New Orleans has been nearly forgotten, years after Hurricane Katrina devastated parts of the city.

Are the people of the Big Easy any less deserving of aid and assistance? If we can help people in a country just off the coast, we can also rebuild, re-house and repopulate the city of New Orleans--which has been a part of our history since the time our country began. New Orleans has been rebuilt at least a half dozen times in my life. The fact that it needs the levees to exist and that the regular hurricane and tropical storm events cannot be stopped says it all.

Plus the impact of rebuilding on our taxes, Our insurance, Etc. Would stop the rebuilding if the people that live there had to pay the entire bill.

The sentiment and "soul" people claim is the reason to rebuild goes against all logic and common sense given that there is no real industry there. Look, Would people fight to rebuild Las Vegas if that disappeared every few years due to a natural event? Not on our tax dollar. Close the city down and stop wasting the billions of dollars on a losing battle. At the very least, No more federal funding and no insurance for those that want to live there. Is it not evident that worsening storms will continue to destroy that city over, And over taking lives, And destroying properties?

All the monies used to rebuild from Katrina gone plus much more. Would you live right next to a volcano that erupts every years? I'm from Louisiana and much loved hunting on it's land as a child, But that time has long passed.

The world has changed, Weather patterns are getting worse and worse. My opinion; pack it up move out, And give it back to mother nature to do with what she will. At some point, New Orleans will be beyond repairing. What do you tell those residents, many of them longing to return home? There were other issues, of course, starting with property rights. The solution devised by Canizaro was borrowed from the outside planners in plentiful supply in New Orleans in those first months after Katrina: Arm communities with the same elevation data the government had been using when it considered turning large parts of the city into green space.

Give them access to the same range of planners and demographers and geologists that were advising Canizaro. Each neighborhood would then have four months to submit a plan that proves its long-term viability. Seventy percent? The impracticality of making these choices helped doom the plan, which was immediately unpopular in the city. Nagin rejected the proposal because he was in the middle of a tough re-election campaign.

In the end, no neighborhoods were declared off-limits. The widths of the rivers in the diagram are proportional to the estimated or measured — suspended sediment loads in millions of metric tons per year. Geological Survey Millions of metric tons of Circular , fig.

Of course, the vegetation has its limits: Hurricanes uproot trees and the surge of salt or brackish water can kill salt-intolerant vegetation.

Barrier islands, dunes, and shorelines can all be leveled or completely washed away by waves and currents, leaving no place for vegetation to grow. The canals cut into the Delta for navigation and to float oil-drilling platforms out to the Gulf disrupted the native vegetation by enabling salt or brackish water to penetrate deep into freshwater marshes.

The initial cuts have widened as vegetation dies back and shorelines erode without the plant roots to hold the soil and plant leaves to dampen wind- or boat-generated waves. The ecological and geological sciences can help determine to what extent the natural system can be put back together, perhaps by selective filling of some of the canals and by controlled flooding and sediment deposition on portions of the Delta through gates inserted in the levees.

The Mississippi River typically floods once a year, when snowmelt and runoff from spring rains are delivered to the mainstem river by the major tributaries. Before extensive human alterations of the watersheds and the rivers, these moderate seasonal floods had many beneficial effects, including providing access to floodplain resources for fishes that spawned and reared their young on the floodplains and supporting migratory waterfowl that fed in flooded forests and marshes.

The deposition of nutrient-rich sediments on the floodplain encouraged the growth of valuable bottomland hardwood trees, and the floodwaters dispersed their seeds.

Human developments in the tributary watersheds and regulation of the rivers have altered the natural flood patterns. Impervious surfaces in cities and suburbs likewise speed water into storm drains that empty into channelized streams. The end result is unnaturally rapid delivery of water into the Upper Mississippi and more frequent small and moderate floods than in the past. In the arid western lands drained by the Missouri River, the problem is shortage of water; it is this phenomenon that led to the construction of the huge reservoirs to store floodwaters and use them for irrigating crops in the Dakotas, while also lowering flood crest levels in the downstream states of Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri.

In all of the tributaries of the Mississippi, the floodplains have been leveed to various degrees, so there is less capacity to store or convey floods as well as less fish and wildlife habitat , and the same volume of water in the rivers now causes higher floods than in the past.

On tributaries with flood storage reservoirs, the heights of the moderate floods that occur can be controlled. Ironically, levees in some critical areas back up water on other levees. In the Delta, the additional weight of higher, thicker levees themselves can cause further compaction and subsidence of the underlying sediments. The occasional great floods on the Mississippi are on a different scale than the more regular moderate floods.

It takes exceptional amounts of rain and snowmelt occurring simultaneously in several or all of the major tributary basins of the Mississippi the Missouri, upper Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, and Red Rivers to produce an extreme flood, such as the one that occurred in That flood broke levees from Illinois south to the Gulf of Mexico, flooding an area equal in size to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined, and forcing nearly a million people from their homes.

With so much rain and snowmelt, wetlands, urban detention ponds, and even the flood control reservoirs are likely to fill up before the rains stop. In order to protect New Orleans from such great floods, the Corps of Engineers plans to divert some floodwater upstream of the city.

But what is the risk that an even greater flood might occur? How does one assess the risk of flooding and determine whether it makes more sense to move away than to rebuild? The Corps of Engineers estimates flood frequencies based on existing river-gauging networks and specifies levee designs placement, height, thickness accordingly.

The resulting estimates and flood protection designs are therefore based on hydrologic records that cover only one to two centuries, at most. Because floods, unlike trains, do not arrive on a schedule, these terms are better understood as estimates of probabilities. A year levee is designed to protect against a flood that would occur, if averaged over a sufficiently long period say 1, years , once in years. In contrast to other natural hazards, such as earthquakes, the probability of occurrence does not increase with time since the last event.

Earthquakes that release strain that builds gradually along fault lines do have an increased probability of occurrence as time passes and strain increases. In essence, engineers assume that the climate in the future will be the same as in the recently observed past. This may be the only approach possible until scientists learn more about global and regional climate mechanisms and can make better predictions about precipitation, runoff, and river flows. However, the period of record can be greatly extended, thereby making estimates of the frequency of major floods much more accurate than by extrapolating from year records of daily river levels.

These megafloods were equivalent to what today are regarded as year or greater floods, but they recurred much more frequently during the flood-prone episodes recorded in the sediment cores. The two most recent episodes occurred at approximately BC and from about to AD. There is independent archeological evidence that floods during these episodes caused disruptions in the cultures of people living along the Mississippi, according to archeologist T.

These flood episodes occurred much more recently than the recession of the last ice sheet, and therefore they were not caused by melting of the ice or by catastrophic failures of the glacial moraines that acted as natural dams for meltwater.