Direct Hit by Ivan Could Sink New Orleans

[JME2]

Here

[JME2]

The words of the Oracle come to mind.

"Everything that has a beginning has an end..."

[Xenophobe3691]

Right now, I'm thanking Providence that I've been to that city already...

Off the more morbid stuff, maybe this'll make the people in New Orleans wake up and realize just what the hell Global Warming and rising sea levels will do to their city...

[Joe]

That link isn't working. Lots of traffic, maybe?

[Datana]

That link isn't working. Lots of traffic, maybe?

Try this link. It's an AP story, so several sites have it.

[Col. Crackpot]

holy fuck!

Besides collecting standard household and business garbage and chemicals, the flood would flow through chemical plants in the area, "so there's the potential of pretty severe contamination," van Heerden said.
evere flooding in area bayous also forces out wildlife, including poisonous snakes and stinging fire ants, which sometimes gather in floating balls carried by the current.

A rescue of people who stayed behind would be among the world's biggest since 1940, when Allied forces and civilian volunteers during World War II rescued mostly British soldiers from Dunkirk, France, and carried them across the English Channel, van Heerden predicted.

Much of the city would be under water for weeks. And even after the river and Lake Pontchartrain receded, the levees could trap water above sea level, meaning the Army Corps of Engineers would have to cut the levees to let the water out.

[Shinova]

We have people living near New Orleans, do we?

[salm]

That link isn't working. Lots of traffic, maybe?

works for me:

U.S. National - AP


Direct Hit by Ivan Could Sink New Orleans

39 minutes ago Add U.S. National - AP to My Yahoo!


By BRETT MARTEL, Associated Press Writer

NEW ORLEANS - The worst-case scenario for New Orleans — a direct strike by a full-strength Hurricane Ivan — could submerge much of this historic city treetop-deep in a stew of sewage, industrial chemicals and fire ants, and the inundation could last for weeks, experts say.


AP Photo


Reuters
Slideshow: Hurricanes & Tropical Storms




If the storm were strong enough, Ivan could drive water over the tops of the levees that protect the city from the Mississippi River and vast Lake Pontchartrain. And with the city sitting in a saucer-shaped depression that dips as much as 9 feet below sea level, there would be nowhere for all that water to drain.


Even in the best of times, New Orleans depends on a network of canals and huge pumps to keep water from accumulating inside the basin.


"Those folks who remain, should the city flood, would be exposed to all kinds of nightmares from buildings falling apart to floating in the water having nowhere to go," Ivor van Heerden, director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Public Health Center, said Tuesday.


LSU's hurricane experts have spent years developing computer models and taking surveys to predict what might happen.


The surveys predict that about 300,000 of the 1.6 million people living in the metropolitan area would risk staying.


The computer models show a hurricane with a wind speed of around 120 mph or more — hitting just west of New Orleans so its counterclockwise rotation could hurl the strongest surf and wind directly into the city — would push a storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain over the city's levees. Ivan had sustained wind of 140 mph Tuesday.


New Orleans would be under about 20 feet of water, higher than the roofs of many of the city's homes.


Besides collecting standard household and business garbage and chemicals, the flood would flow through chemical plants in the area, "so there's the potential of pretty severe contamination," van Heerden said.


Severe flooding in area bayous also forces out wildlife, including poisonous snakes and stinging fire ants, which sometimes gather in floating balls carried by the current.


A rescue of people who stayed behind would be among the world's biggest since 1940, when Allied forces and civilian volunteers during World War II rescued mostly British soldiers from Dunkirk, France, and carried them across the English Channel, van Heerden predicted.


Much of the city would be under water for weeks. And even after the river and Lake Pontchartrain receded, the levees could trap water above sea level, meaning the Army Corps of Engineers would have to cut the levees to let the water out.


"The real big problem is the water from sea level on down because it will have to be pumped and restoring the pumps and getting them back into action could take a considerable amount of time," said John Hall, the Corps' spokesman in New Orleans.


Hall spoke from his home — 6 feet below sea level — as he prepared to flee the city himself. The Corps' local staff was being relocated 166 miles north to Vicksburg, Miss.


New Orleans was on the far western edge of the Gulf Coast region threatened by Ivan, and forecasters said Tuesday that the hurricane appeared to moving toward a track farther east, along the Mississippi coast.


If the eye came ashore east of the city, van Heerden said, New Orleans would be on the low side of the storm surge and would not likely have catastrophic flooding.


The worst storm in recent decades to hit New Orleans was Hurricane Betsy in 1965, which submerged parts of the city in water 7-feet deep and was blamed for 74 deaths in Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. That storm was a Category 3, weaker than Ivan is expected to be.





Even if New Orleans escapes this time, van Heerden said, it will remain vulnerable until the federal and state governments act to restore the coastal wetlands that should act as a buffer against storms coming in from the Gulf.

Louisiana has lost about a half million acres of coast to erosion since 1930 because the Mississippi River is so corralled by levees that it can dump sediment only at its mouth, and that allows waves from the Gulf to chop away at the rest of the coastline.

"My fear is, if this storm passes (without a major disaster), everybody forgets about it until next year, when it could be even worse because we'll have even less wetlands," van Heerden said.

[CJvR]

A rescue of people who stayed behind would be among the world's biggest since 1940, when Allied forces and civilian volunteers during World War II rescued mostly British soldiers from Dunkirk, France, and carried them across the English Channel, van Heerden predicted.

The evacuation of East-Prussia dwarfed the Dunkirk operation several times over and caused some of the bloodiest marine disasters in human history.

[Col. Crackpot]

We have people living near New Orleans, do we?

Einhander Snoman, Patrick Deagan, Capitan Lennox and Wicked Pilot to name a few.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

We have people living near New Orleans, do we?

Einhander Snoman, Patrick Deagan, Capitan Lennox and Wicked Pilot to name a few.

Ayup. Dave, Marquis, and I are going to a hospital six stories tall, so if Worst comes to Worst and we actually do get the Cat 4's eye, we should be okay. We'll probably be an island for a few weeks though. If that happens, don't expect to hear from me for a long while...

[KrauserKrauser]

I'm waiting for the likes of Jerry Falwell to decry it as the fall of Babylon in a few years.

[J]

On the bright side the surf will be pretty good all along the gulf coast, the wind will make windsurfing really fun too. If you're not in the direct path of the storm you could have a rare opportunity for catching waves on the beaches.

Too bad anything in its path is pretty screwed.

[fgalkin]

We have people living near New Orleans, do we?

Einy.

And damnit, I haven't visited the city yet. Would be a real shame if it goes.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Rogue 9]

Man. I hope that I don't wind up having to play "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans" as a more permanent lament in a few days.

[Sea Skimmer]

The evacuation of East-Prussia dwarfed the Dunkirk operation several times over and caused some of the bloodiest marine disasters in human history.

And more people where moved off Manhattan by ferries and other watercraft on September 11th then at Dunkirk. The evacuation of Odessa likely also beats Dunkirk, though by a much smaller margin at 350,000. However none of these other operations generally faced the intensity of air attacks the British and French fought at Dunkirk, and in the case of Odessa and East Prussia the evacuations could make much greater use of port facilities and large freighters and liners. Gustloff might be among the worst maritime losses ever, but she was also one of only a handful of ships lost during that operation, Soviet planes rarely attacked except when the ships where in port and the Soviet navy basically sank Gustloff and 3 other ships, one of which the Goya, might have had as many as 7,000 people onboard who died, though that figure apparently is likely an exaggeration.

Interestingly though all the lives lost in Gustloff, the British sinking of Cap Arcona and Thielbek in Lubeck Bay when laden with concentration camp prisoners and refuges, and when British ground forces would arrive within the same day, likely killed more at least 7,000, though some estimates are as high as 15,000. The true figure is rather hard to agree upon, since both ships sank with vast numbers of bodies entombed within, though thousands washed up on shore. That basically goes for all these cases, at best one of the ships officers did a headcount as people came aboard, and in most cases they stopped after a few thousand. Most estimates seem to vary by at least 100%, Gustloff goes as low as 5,400 and as high as 10,614.

Pacific combat, also provides several examples of massive losses of life on single ships. The sinking of the Junyo Maru by a British submarine in 1945 killed around 5,500 Allied POW's (mostly Dutch but also American and British) and Indonesian forced laborers out of a total load of 6,300 (100 of them the Japanese crew). 880 where picked out of water by a Japanese warship, but only to allow them to continue there journey to Sumatra to build another railway of death. later, during the Chinese civil war, a nationalist troop transport blew up for reasons unknown, killing 4000-6000 troops.

Suffice to say, these sinking, along with a great many others both in war and in peacetime, make the likes of the Titanic a joke.

[Sea Skimmer]

Just as a note, the details concerning the sinking of Cap Arcona, Thielbek and in a separate incident in 1940 the loss of the unescorted liner Lancastria with 3000-4000 British troops onboard leaving Brest all have been classified and sealed by the British goverment for 100 years.

[Edi]

While we're talking naval evacuations, one of the biggest disasters in WW2 was the Soviet evacuation of the Baltic fleet to St. Petersburg during the beginning of the Continuation War in 1941. They lost thousands of troops and dozens of ships to Finnish minefields off the coast of Estonia, anywhere from 7000 to 10000 people killed, I think, as well as having their entire Baltic fleet shut out of the war.

Edi

[Sea Skimmer]

10,000 killed total would seem quite possibul, the Soviets lost 42 merchant ships and a dozen escorts during that operation, out of a total of 170 merchant and warships. But the shear number of ships sunk makes it much less of a loss then the individually massive sinking I mentioned. 10,000 into 54 would be only 185 dead per ship. It's still a huge loss though, but when you begin to count wider combined death tolls from operations, well it's not that big for WW2 when bombers routinely leveled cities and killed tens of thousands.

Anyway, I just dislike all the attention the Titanic gets (Skimmer no like repetitive documentaries and museum exhibits) for being some horribly unprecedented loss, when in the same year a Japanese ship disappeared in a storm with 1,000 people onboard, a ferry burned with a thousand deaths within the confines of New York Harbor, Halifax killed even more and in the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history the Philippines ferry Dona Paz went down in 1987with over four thousand three hundred people onboard, with many drowning in a sea of burning oil as the ship sank after being rammed by an oil tanker.

[Edi]

10,000 killed total would seem quite possibul, the Soviets lost 42 merchant ships and a dozen escorts during that operation, out of a total of 170 merchant and warships. But the shear number of ships sunk makes it much less of a loss then the individually massive sinking I mentioned. 10,000 into 54 would be only 185 dead per ship.

Thing is, a lot of the deaths came from a relatively small number of troop transport ships, so there were some big individual sinkings, while the rest of the support ships didn't have big crews. I'd have to look the details up in an excellent book my dad has on the war operations in the Baltic (Finnish, no translations available, I'm afraid).

Edi

[Col. Crackpot]

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2796077

Walter Maestri, an emergency manager in New Orleans, America's most vulnerable metropolitan area, has 10,000 body bags ready in case a major hurricane hits. As Hurricane Ivan's expected path shifted uncomfortably close to the low-lying urban soup bowl, Maestri said Tuesday he might need a lot more.

If a strong Category 4 storm such as Ivan made a direct hit, he warned, 50,000 people could drown, and the city could cease to exist.

"This could be The One," Maestri said. "You're talking about the potential loss of a major metropolitan area."

[Gandalf]

Wow, has anything ever happened on this scale before?

And Crackpot, that article is rather unnerving...

[Col. Crackpot]

Wow, has anything ever happened on this scale before?

And Crackpot, that article is rather unnerving...

Galveston Texas in 1900. Over 6000 died. The bodies started to rot in the heat faster than they could be buried so they had to burn them in bonfires. They had to give the men whiskey to numb them as they tossed their family and friends into the flames.

[Edi]

Holy crap, I hope that thing dies down, this is starting to look like majorly bad juju.

Edi

[Zac Naloen]

Anyone else thinking that theres gonna be a movie about this?