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Old 12-27-2005, 06:02 PM
tylerdurden tylerdurden is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: actually pvn
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Default update: new orleans

I've spent the last week in the New Orleans area (New Orleans, Metairie, Mandeville, Baton Rouge) visiting the in-laws. From reading the papers and talking with people that are actually dealing with the aftermath, I'm pretty confident that the city itself is doomed. On top of that, I give the outlying areas about a 50/50 chance of building a viable economy (vs. getting dragged down with New Orleans into a detroit-esque decay).

The basic problem is that everyone wants to tell everyone else what to do, but doesn't want to listen to anyone else. The newspapers are full of people complaining that local governments aren't coming up with rebuilding plans fast enough, but everytime one is advanced, it's immediately shouted down, and any politico connected to it is threatened with lynching. And if you actually try to start rebuilding your own property (anything more involved than interior gutting/remodeling) without waiting for the "big plan" you're ostracized and labeled a "troublemaker" (there was a huge article in the Christmas day Times-Picayune about these meances to society).

NIMBYism has paralized efforts to get utility and constuction workers housed in the city - FEMA has over 17,000 trailers in the area, but is unable to deploy them because nobody wants them near their property (of course, there's the unspoken undertone of "we don't want poor people warehoused near us). The people that are opposing them are basically retarded; they should be pushing to get the FIRST batches of trailers near their property, because the first batches will be housing people that work for the sewage and water board, FEMA, and other agencies. The public housing residents won't be brought in until later (and apparently many of them have decided not to come back). It's funny to hear someone moan about trailers lowering her property value when her property is already basically worthless.

The mayor claims to have exclusive authority over such temporary housing decisions based on the declaration of the state of emergency, but the NO city council went ahead and passed a resolution giving themselves final say over trailer placement. When the mayor vetoed it, the council unanimously overrode him.

The two biggest concerns seem to be mardi gras and "levee board unification". I'm not sure why this unification is so important, as having one group of incompetent, politically-connected cronies doesn't seem to have any significant advantage over having multiple groups of incompetent, politically-connected cronies.

In the two months since my last visit, nothing in the flood zone has significantly changed, except that the endless mountains of debris piled up in the middle of Ponchatrain Blvd have been removed. Everyone is waiting on the "big plan."

My father-in-law can't get a building inspector to approve his electricity being turned back on, depsite several contractors who all say the wiring is fine. Apparently the storm has not lessened the importance of palm greasing. Rather than capitulate, he's decided to move out of town. Apparently a lot of people feel the same way, because the number of for sale signs in his neighborhood has gone up about 1000% in the last two months. Houses that were not flooded seem to be up for sale in approximately equal proportion to houses that were flooded (it's easy to tell, because the flooded houses say "rock-bottom price, as-is" and the non-flooded ones say "NO FLOODING!!!").

More evidence has surfaced that the levee breaches that flooded lakeview were really political failures. Even though the breach was caused by a engineering flaw, the Army Corps of Engineers had recommended back in 1985 that the 17th street canal be gated at it's mouth dumping into the lake and drained. Then the city could drain into the empty canal and a pump at the mouth could dump that water into the lake. Had that system been in place, the breach would not have occurred. The local, crony-dominated levee board overrode the Corps recommendation and went with the convoluted system of higher levees capped with concrete walls, probably so that some favored contractor could get some over-inflated contracts. the London avenue canal failed in a similar fashion, and had a similar fix proposed back in the 80s.

The Corps doesn't escape criticism, though. Several federal agencies browbeat small mississippi communities such as Bay St. Louis into hiring the Corps to do their cleanup and debris removal. Larger cities such as Biloxi used private contractors. The Corps has been more expensive and orders of magnitude slower. They are currently removing debris at a rate 16% of what they were removing at the beginning of the project.

My prediction is that the city itself is going to be left with a group of hardcore nutjobs in the quarter and uptown, while everyone else that actually wants to move on with their lives and their businesses will either set up shop in the suburbs or move away altogether. The old-money crew will continue doing what they've always done, thinking they are running the show while the remnants of the city fall apart around them.
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