I just heard on the radio there is two feet of water from hurricane Rita in parts of New Orleans as water over-topped one of the levees.

They really need to give it up.  Let it be an archaeological site for future generations.  New Orleans might recover from this battle and the next, but the war will be lost along with resources that would be better invested in a new city.

See also:

Another shot at New Orleans
Now do you believe me?
New Orleans was most vulnerable major city to hurricanes
More levee info

From the Sunday Times (London):

SCIENTISTS have created a “miracle mouse” that can regenerate amputated limbs or badly damaged organs, making it able to recover from injuries that would kill or permanently disable normal animals

…

The researchers have also found that when cells from the test mouse are injected into ordinary mice, they too acquire the ability to regenerate.

The discoveries raise the prospect that humans could one day be given the ability to regenerate lost or damaged organs, opening up a new era in medicine.

Details of the research will be presented next week at a scientific conference on ageing, Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, at Cambridge University. Ellen Heber-Katz, professor of immunology at the Wistar Institute, an American biomedical research centre, says that the ability of mice at her laboratory to regenerate appears to be controlled by about a dozen genes.

She is still researching their exact functions, but it seems almost certain that humans have comparable genes.

…

The researchers suspect that the same genes could confer greater longevity and are measuring the animals’ survival rate. The mice are, however, only 18 months old and the normal lifespan is two years so it is too early to reach conclusions.

The implications are mind-boggling.

Other articles on the same topic from:

• China Daily
• Times of India
• Better Humans (Canada)
• Australian

My brother was one of the people that helped catch the guy shooting up the logging equipment.  Here is his story:

From: Doug Huffman
Sent: Thursday, September 01, 2005 10:31 PM
To: Joe Huffman
Subject: Re: Were you and Nick one of the teams?

Hi Joe,

Yes,  Nick and I were there when he was arrested.  Also, it was tear gas
(CS) not pepper spray.  If you look at his picture, you will see his
left arm is in a sling.  He was on his hands and knees coming out of his
shelter, his right hand lifted off the floor and revealed his MAK-90 on
the floor, he moved his hand out, leaving the rifle on the ground.  Then
for some unexplained reason, he started to back up, his right hand moved
back towards the rifle.  Guy Cordle very nearly shot him in the back
with a 12 ga at that point, in a split second decision, he decided he
could stop the subject with a hard kick to the left arm right where it
connects to the shoulder.  That knocked him flat on his face and removed
his hand from the proximity of the rifle.  They took him to the ER and
they apparently put his arm in a sling.

I went with two deputies on Monday afternoon after he stole the coffee
with my GPS and compass.  We stopped at various points around the canyon
where he was and took GPS points and compass reading from the
directional antenna on a fish and game locator.  When you get too close,
the receiver would receive signal from any direction, so we had to be
back a ways and didn’t take the receiver into the woods with us the next
morning.  I went home and plotted it out on graph paper, determined the
most likely point and programmed it into my GPS and set it to take us to
that location.  We went in the next morning at day break, Nick and I in
the middle with 5 others.  Nick was there to alert us if he was hiding
in the bushes, or behind a log.  Moving very slowly, we moved about 1/2
mile in 2 hours before he was located.  My GPS point was about 200 yards
off.  Nick was some help, but wasn’t the one who made the find.  He kept
wanting to go east and the closer we got, the more intent and excited he
got.  We were probably 50 yards away from his shelter when we spotted a
platic bag hanging from a tree up on the  hillside to our right, that
was beside his shelter.  I am writing up a complete story, but it will
probably be weeks before I finish it.  The other dog team was the blood
hound we got from South Carolina.  Bruce Hanson and the bloodhound were
on the North side of the canyon, watching in case the subject made a run
for it that way.  There were  “snipers” on all sides of the canyon with
high powered scoped rifles.  They didn’t have the authority to shoot on
sight, but would try to challenge and stop the subject if we drove him
out of the canyon.

… [unrelated material deleted] …

Doug

The Miami Herald has the story:

Floods unavoidable, Army engineers say

The Army Corp of Engineers said recent studies on strengthening New Orleans’ levee system, designed decades ago, had not made much progress.

BY PETER CAREY

Knight Ridder News Service

The levee system that protected New Orleans from hurricane-spawned surges along Lake Pontchartrain was never designed to survive a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers said Thursday.

The levees were built to withstand only a Category 3 storm, something projections suggested would strike New Orleans only once every two or three centuries, the commander of the corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, told reporters during a conference call. Katrina was a Category 4 storm.

”Unfortunately, that occurred in this case,” Strock said.

OLD TECHNOLOGY

Strock said the levee system’s design was settled on a quarter of a century ago, before the current numerical system of classifying storms was in widespread use. He said studies had begun recently on strengthening the system to protect against Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, but hadn’t progressed very far.

Strock said that despite a May report by the Corps’ Louisiana district that a lack of federal funding had slowed construction of hurricane protection, nothing the Corps could have done recently would have prevented Katrina from flooding New Orleans.

”The levee projects that failed were at full project design and were not really going to be improved,” Strock said.

`EVERYBODY KNEW’

Strock’s comments drew immediate criticism from flood-protection advocates, who said that the Corps’ May report was a call for action and a complaint about insufficient funding, and that no action took place.

”The Corps knew, everybody knew, that the levees had limited capability,” said Joseph Suhayda, a retired director of the Louisiana State University’s Water Resources and Research Institute.

”Because of exercises and simulations, we knew that the consequences of overtopping [water coming over the levees] would be disastrous. People were playing with matches in the fireworks factory and it went off,” he said.

Suhayda, an expert in coastal oceanography, said, “the fact the levee failed is not according to design. If it was overtopped, it’s because it was lower in that spot than other spots. The fact that it was only designed for a Category 3 meant it was going to get overtopped. I knew that. They knew that. There were limits.”

NO SECURITY?

Some critics Thursday questioned the usefulness of levees, saying that all of them fail eventually.

”There are lots of ways for levees to fail. Overtopping is just one of them,” said Michael Lindell, of Texas A&M University’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. ‘There’s a lot of smoke screen about `low probabilities.’ Low probabilities just means ‘Takes a long time.’ ”

Strock said stopping the flow of water over the levees has proved to be ”a very challenging effort.” Engineers have been unable to reach the levees and have had to draw up plans based only on observations from the air. ”We, too, are victims in this situation,” he said.

In Louisiana, Army Corps officials said they hoped that one break, in what’s known as the 17th Street Canal, might be closed by the end of Thursday, but that a second break in the London Avenue canal is proving more intractable.

Short sections of the walls that protected the city from Lake Pontchartrain caved in under storm surges, including an area that recently had been strengthened.

A fact sheet issued by the Corps in May said that seven construction projects in New Orleans had been stalled for lack of funding. It noted that the budget proposed by President Bush for 2005 was $3 million and called that amount insufficient to fund new construction contracts.

MONEY CRUNCH

”We could spend $20 million if the funds were provided,” the fact sheet said. Two major pump stations needed to be protected against hurricane storm surges, the fact sheet said, but the budgets for 2005 and 2006 “will prevent the corps from addressing these pressing needs.”

Acknowledging delays in construction, Corps officials in Louisiana said that those projects weren’t where the failures occurred. ”They did not contribute to the flooding of the city,” said Al Naomi, a senior project manager.

”The design was not adequate to protect against a storm of this nature,” he said. “We were not authorized to provide protection to Category 4 or 5 design.”

No matter where or how you live you have risks.  It could be a natural disaster such as tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, forest fires, earthquakes, mudslides, volcanoes, etc.  Or it could be man related such as crime, traffic accidents, air pollution, water pollution, etc.  New Orleans didn’t just have a risk of some random future event that would affect a small percentage of the people.  They were actively fighting the water on a daily basis that threatened catastrophe for the majority of people living there.  They had no hope of holding things off for more than a few decades.  Read my post from a year ago.  They could not sustain the fight for much longer.  The Mississippi was/is depositing silt far, far faster than they could deal with it.  It was a huge expensive gamble either way.  To move the port to the natural location 100+ miles to the west or to stay.  Long term they have to move.  It might have been 20 or even 50 years before the wisdom of that decision would have been confirmed beyond any doubt.  But it would have been confirmed eventually.  

I said a year ago they should have quit the “game”.  They should have packed up their stuff and left the playing field.  They should have dealt with reality on their own rather than having Mother Nature swat them out of the park with a clue-by-category-four.

Update: Michelle Malkin has another story on the levees from 1999 plus a fair amount of history on the topic.

The title of this post is a near exact quote from the May 2005 Popular Science article.  I changed the quote slightly.  They said ‘is’ instead of ‘was’.  At this point in time I figure New Orleans doesn’t exist.  More quotes from the article:

It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. “New Orleans,” says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. “Because the city is below sea level—with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other—it is a hydrologic nightmare.” The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane’s leading edge. In New Orleans, a big enough surge would quickly drown the entire city.

…

Today, parts of New Orleans lie up to 20 feet below sea level, and the city is sinking at a rate of about nine millimeters a year. “This makes New Orleans the most vulnerable major city to hurricanes,” says John Hall of the Army Corps of Engineers. “That’s because the water has to go down, not up, to reach it.”

…

New Orleans has nearly completed its Hurricane Protection Project, a $740-million plan led by Naomi to ring the city with levees that could shield residents from up to category-3 storm surges. Meanwhile, Winer and others at the Army Corps are considering a new levee system capable of holding back a surge from a category-5 hurricane like Ivan, which threatened the city last year.

…

The category-5 levee idea, though, is still in the early planning stages; it may be decades before the new barriers are completed. Until then, locals had better keep praying to Helios.

Katrina was a category 4/5 storm.  I guess the locals didn’t do enough praying and else figure out how to get out of town permanently months or years ago.  This wasn’t any big surprise to the locals or anyone with a room temperature I.Q. that had studied the problem for more than a few minutes.

Barb and I will be donating some money to the relief effort and if someone knows of a volunteer organization helping with the Katrina mess that wants a middle aged guy with heavy equipment, computer, firearms, explosives, and/or farm-boy type skills–let me know.  I have some spare time on my hands right now.