Category: Katrina & Rita

Delta Is at Risk, Geologist Warns

From Thursday’s Los Angeles Times:

When UC Davis geology professor Jeffrey Mount looks at the images of broken levees and surging floodwaters in New Orleans, he sees the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“There is a natural tendency of Californians to look at what is going on in the Gulf Coast as as foreign to us as the tsunami in Indonesia — ‘That’s not something that could ever happen to us.’ — Oh, they couldn’t be more wrong,” Mount said Wednesday.

In a study published in a Bay Area scientific journal last March, Mount and another scientist concluded that over the next 50 years, there is a 2-in-3 chance that a major storm or earthquake will cause widespread levee failure in the Northern California delta, part of the West Coast’s largest estuary and the source of drinking water for more than 22 million Californians. Such a catastrophe would flood reclaimed marshlands that are sprouting housing developments and send seawater rushing into the delta, forcing a shutdown of the enormous pumps that send water south to Central Valley agriculture and Southern California cities.

A Can’t-Do Government

Paul Krugman begins his Friday column:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. “The New Orleans hurricane scenario,” The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, “may be the deadliest of all.” It described a potential catastrophe very much like the one now happening.

So why were New Orleans and the nation so unprepared?

Beats Per Minute

Beats Per Minute blogging from New Orleans.

(Actually, he’s in Birmingham for now, but lives in New Orleans.)

He begins Thursday’s entry:

For me, yesterday was the lowest point during this whole ordeal. I had such high hopes after hearing some news on Monday afternoon, after the hurricane had passed, that our part of town might have done really well. I imagined eventually going back, having to clean up, putting things back on shelves and on the walls, letting the dogs run around in the back yard, hearing them bark, watching them jump and play. In other words, moving back into our home. Then when I woke up yesterday morning and I heard about the breach in the levee, it was as though the ground ripped opened at my feet creating a wide chasm, and I spent all day trying to balance on a narrow ledge, trying to keep from falling in.