I just added to this blog [an email that I sent about New Orleans](http://davidernst.net/blog/2005/08/31/too-many-words-about-new-orleans/) that I sent a couple of days after Katrina hit. In it I reference this [Scientific American article from 2001](http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000&ref=sciam&chanID=sa006)
that talks about the uniquely bad situation that New Orleans is in, and how something like what just happened was pretty much inevitable. As I say in that post, ever since reading the article, I’ve felt that New Orleans was a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Of all the things that President Bush has said that sound stupid to me, there is presently a clear leader in my mind: “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it and will”. I’ve never even been there, and I anticipated it. I anticipated it because I read practically irrefutable evidence that it was bound to happen, by people who REALLY anticipated it. People devoted their lives to the anticiptation of this disaster. I’ve heard that FEMA considered a major hurricane hitting New Orleans to be one of the three most likely disasters it would have to deal with (here’s a [nice piece about
FEMA’s awareness of the issue](http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2005/09/did_fema_really.html)) . I can only hope that Mr. Bush feels foolish for having said this. Obviously, *he* had not aniticipated the levees being breached. And that is embarrassing.

Anyway, in the previous piece that I wrote, I said that I didn’t know what I thought about rebuilding New Orleans. But now I have a decided opinion: We should build New Orleans again, with full recognition of it’s unique and precarious situation, and make a city that therefore looks completely different than any other American city.

I had pretty much already arrived to this decision when I heard [this interview with Bruce Babbitt](http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=05-P13-00038&segmentID=3), the Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton administration. His rallying cry is that we should build New Orleans as an “American Venice”. While I don’t know if it’s the cry I would choose, I can definitely sign up for that rally.

What we *can’t* do is just build it the same as it was. I mean… duh, right? I fear that the word about this maybe hasn’t gotten out enough. I fear that most Americans are thinking “wow, what a huge storm, I’m glad those don’t happen very often”. Katrina was a huge storm, but it wasn’t the size of the storm that cause the size of the disaster in New Orleans. I hope that people are aware of why there’s all this talk about whether or not the pumps are working in New Orleans. In all likelihood, whatever city you live in does not have pumps. Most of New Orleans would have been part of the lake long ago if it weren’t for the fact that they pump the water out of it. Indeed, you might just call New Orleans a lake that is continuously be drained. From that point of view, Katrina just put water into it faster than they could pump it out.

The situation is bad. Hurricanes are not new. Whether or not they are worse now than they used to be, they have been happening for ages, and they will continue to happen. Another storm of comparable size will hit New Orleans again. It *will* happen. Furthermore, the land area of the delta *is* shrinking. The geography of this place is totally different than where most of us live. The city should be engineered with respect for these indisputable facts.

Really, I’d rather just give up on the city than rebuild it the way that it was. But what I’m proclaiming in this post is that I realize that I’d rather that we do rebuild it, but smartly.

They are talking a federal bill of $200 billion to rebuild after Katrina. I don’t know what portion of that is about New Orleans per se. Let’s just be conservative and say $100 billion. With the US population at about 300 million, that would mean that on average, every man, woman, and child is spending about $333 on this place where almost all of them don’t live. Even as one who’s never been to the place, I still agree with the President and others who talk of the importance of New Orleans to our national character. I wouldn’t go as far as Bush did when he said “there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans”, but while I can imagine the nation without that city, I don’t want to. I’m willing to have a few hundred dollars of my tax dollars spent on this city. No problem. *As long as it’s done right*.

So, I’m trying to build support for the idea. Talk it up with your friends. Let’s build the public conception. I want New Orleans to be built with the idea that it *will* flood again, and that that won’t cause the kind of devastation it did this time. The rebuilt New Orleans should represent human knowledge not just in the brilliance of its engineering, but also human knowledge of the geology and natural forces of the area. I personally know practically nothing about *how* to build it as it should be. I can’t say exactly how to do it right. But there are many people who, as I’ve said, have devoted most of their professional lives to thinking about this problem. Don’t just go in there and build the same old city. New Orleans is not just another city. The land there is nothing like the bedrock that my house rests on. I challenge the federal government, the City of New Orleans, and the people of New Orleans, to impress me and the rest of the world with the rebuilding of the city. Make it in such a way that the city fully respects the natural dangers of its location, so that *when* the next huge hurricane hits, it is not a major disaster. I believe we can take New Orleans off of the short list of most probable disasters.

Let’s do it.