What Did New Orleans Do to Us?

From MSNBC.com:

New Orleans Times-Picayune writer Jarvis DeBerry opened his column Tuesday morning asking, “I wonder what New Orleans did to the rest of the country that makes them hate us so?”

“It's very insulting and condescending,” says DeBerry, “to suggest that New Orleans, because of our geography, is somehow not worth the effort that would be put into San Francisco, Miami or Chicago or Boston or any other great city.”

This is a childish statement. A child breaks his toy and asks for a new one. When the parent says no he starts crying, "You don't love me."

New Orleans is broken and they want the rest of the country to buy them a new city. That gives us a lot of say in the process and that's what they did to us - they asked for our money.

If a city is knocked down by an earthquake then the building codes are amended before replacements go up making the new buildings less suseptable to future events. The same is true for most flood plains. Once your house is flooded out you can collect flood insurance but you have to rebuild elsewhere (this isn't enforced often enough but that's another post). But New Orleans wants to do it just the same. The only difference is that they want us to build a bigger wall around the city.

Rebuilding is expensive. It is also expensive to build a levee that can handle anything. This is why they under-built the existing levees - bigger ones cost too much. Then there is maintenance on the levees. That adds millions per year in upkeep costs.

Plus there are the floodwalls along the canals. In retrospect these were a collosal mistake but current proposals are to repalce them with ones that have deeper pilings. This may or may not help. Since one major breech was caused by a barge hitting the wall, deeper pilings may not be much of a guarentee.

And all of this so that new houses can be built 25 feet below the water level on land that is sinking.

As long as it is someone else's money, I don't care. They can assume the risk and take the loss if there is more flooding. Once my money is involved, though, I get a say.

I've only seen a small portion of New Orleans - mainly the French Quarter and the Garden District. I have no attachment to the 9th Ward so to me, it is an obvious choice - move to higher ground.

That's not hate. It's just common sense.