Inside the Current Issue

Suggestions for a New New Orleans

Michael Westbrook

Foreboding best described the general feeling during my past discussions of potential major hurricane effects on New Orleans. But, in the end, imagination proved to be a mediocre preparation for reality.

I am hesitant to criticize the Mayor, Governor or President for their reactions. Factors such as the expense of preparing a modern city's infrastructure to withstand a Category Five hurricane, the commitment of the National Guard and other US assets over seas, and non-compliance with evacuation instructions by many citizens may all offset the shortcomings assigned to city, state, and federal officials.

Nonetheless, tens of thousands are now government wards, requiring water, food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and hope.

For want of proper levies, port activities have been disrupted along the Central Gulf Coast, which will affect commercial agricultural, chemical, and skilled manufacturing from the Rockies to the Appalachians (the American Heartland). National assets impacted by this hurricane include the human population, emergency services, homeland security, energy infrastructure, heartland commerce, and national health.

On August 29, 2005 over a million Americans woke up in a third world country, without drinkable water, food, power, a residence, or a place to migrate. Global TV showed them wading through mixed salt and fresh water, rich with eroded sediment, inherent biomes, human waste, petroleum, chemicals, dead animals and living reptiles.

'Down south' standing water promotes mosquito populations that spread diseases.

Putrefaction of food, untreated human waste, and animal carcasses will soon yield noxious odors and dangerous conditions as disease vectors dispersed by decomposers (greenflies, maggots, and others).

But for a lack of funding how much of this disaster was preventable? CUNY's own courses have shown this to be the case.

Based on CCNY's "Wind Effects on Structures" course, window failure in the northern face of the crescent shaped New Orleans Hyatt Hotel was predictable based on the low pressure gradient formed by 140 mph winds off the Gulf to the south.

CCNY EAS oceanography predicted the combined height of storm surge and tide, on the basis of air pressure and tide tables.

Cooper Union's ME (Masters of Engineering) training allows building design and construction to resist dynamic forces equivalent to a thirty-foot wall of water moving at 20 mph.

And Hunter College's 'coastal processes' study supported building a levee system around New Orleans capable of resisting the strongest known storm winds, 200 mph.

On a positive note, actual benefits may accrue from reconstruction efforts. I challenge "Homeland Security" planners to consider the follow measures.

FEMA should help communities prepare for at least one week of emergency self sufficiency. New Orleans levees should be rebuilt to withstand Category 6 storms. Coastal building codes for large residential and commercial occupancy buildings should be amended to include alternative power and sustainable sewage treatment options for emergencies.FEMA should also maintain mobile rapid response facilities for all critical needs areas highlighted by Katrina, like communications, power, medical treatment, mass decontamination, inoculation, and corpse management.

A last thought on looters, extrapolated from life as well as from material studied at BrighamYoung University Rexburg in Anthropology, and at Hunter College in limnology class. To Matt Lauer, morning co-host of the Today Show: "Lighten Up!" Consider the disenfranchised desperate hungry people whose nefarious activities you vilify as agents of sustainability; rising water will destroy food in powerless stores anyway.

As for manufactured goods, allow as justification for such acts the faulty logic encoded in the statement "it's covered by insurance." In truth we might assign this short-lived bounty historic significance as reparations for: slavery, the Hayes/Tilden betrayal, unleashing the KKK, "Jim Crow" police brutality, Farm Bureau loan discrimination, and a host of other institutionalized and socialized forms of pandemic discrimination both overt and covert.

Michael Westbrook is a DSC Communications Representative and PhD student in the Earth and Environmental Sciences program. He was born before Hurricane Camille about 90 miles north of Memphis on the Mississippi River.