An eerie 2002 conversation in light of the week's events:
pbs.org
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JOE SUHAYDA: So this indicates the depth of water that would occur above this ground in a category five hurricane.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: It's hard to comprehend, really.
JOE SUHAYDA: It is really, to think that that much water would occur during this catastrophic storm.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: So basically the part of New Orleans that most people in the United States and around the world think of as New Orleans would disappear under water.
JOE SUHAYDA:: That's right. During the worst of the storm, most of this area would be covered by 15 to 20 feet of water.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit New Orleans in our lifetime?
JOE SUHUYDA: Well, there-- I would say the probability is yes. In terms of past experience, we've had three storms that were near-misses that could've done at least something close to this.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: So emergency management officials are trying to get ready... they're playing a hurricane version of war games.
WALTER MAESTRI: A couple of days ago we actually had an exercise where we brought a fictitious Category Five hurricane--
DANIEL ZWERDLING: The worst.
WALTER MAESTRI: --the absolute worst, into the metropolitan area
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Walter Maestri is basically the czar of public emergencies in Jefferson Parish. It's the biggest suburb in the region.
WALTER MAESTRI: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evident that we were going to lose a lot of people we changed the name of the storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye... because anybody who was here as that Category Five storm came across... was gone.
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WALTER MAESTRI: The hurricane is spinning counter-clockwise. It's been pushing in front of it water from the Gulf of Mexico for days. It's now got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levies of the-- the-- that surround the city, it tops those levees. As the storm continues to pass over. Now Lake Ponchetrain, that water from Lake Ponchartrain is now pushed on to that - those population which has been fleeing from the western side and everybody's caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills. And we've now got the entire community underwater some 20, 30 feet underwater. Everything is lost.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Remember the levees which the Army built, to hold smaller floods out of the bowl? Maestri says now those levees would doom the city. Because they'd trap the water in.
WALTER MAESTRI: It's going to look like a massive shipwreck. There's going to be-- there's going to be, you know-- everything that that the water has carried in is going to be there. Alligators, moccasins, you know every kind of rodent that you could think of.
All of your sewage treatment plants are under water. And of course the material is flowing free in the community. Disease becomes a distinct possibility now. The petrochemicals that are produced all up and down the Mississippi River --much of that has floated into this bowl. I mean this has become, you know, the biggest toxic waste dump in the world now. Is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Federal officials say that nobody in America has confronted these conditions before. Not across an entire city. Not after an earthquake. Not after floods. Not even after September 11th:
So they've gone to the US Army Corps of Engineers, and they've asked them to figure out — How would the city even begin to function? Jay Combe has spent the last few years assembling a doomsday manual.
JAY COMBE: Street signs will be gone. The things that you normally think, "Well, I'm going 'round the corner of Broadway and St. Charles," and that place won't be there.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: So Combe's been mapping crucial structures with longitude and latitude, because he says emergency crews will have to use navigation devices just to find out where they are.
And Combe says, how will they get the water out of the city? For the past hundred years, New Orleans has operated one of the biggest pumping systems in the world. Every time there's a major rain, colossal turbines suck up the water and pump it out of "The Bowl." Combe says that won't work after a big hurricane.
JAY COMBE: The problem is that the city's been under water, the pumps are flooded. They don't operate now. We have to get the pumps back in operation and in order to get the pumps back in operation, we have to get the water out of the city.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Catch-22
JAY COMBE: That's correct.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: And here's perhaps the most troubling question of all: if a huge hurricane does hit New Orleans, how many people will die?
JAY COMBE: I think of a terrible disaster. I think of 100,000, and that's just my guess. I think that there's a terrible lack of perception. The last serious hurricane we had here was in 1965. That's close to 40 years ago.
So, we've dodged bullets three times since Betsy and I'm not sure we can keep counting on the hurricane changing its mind and going someplace else.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Stories about disasters in America usually end on an optimistic note. People rebound. The nation rebuilds. Life gradually gets back to normal. But officials in Louisiana are facing another possibility: If a monster storm strikes New Orleans, this city might never come back.
DANIEL ZWERDLING (ADDRESSING SUHAYDA): Are you seriously suggesting that the nation might have to abandon the city of New Orleans?
JOE SUHAYDA: I think there would be some concern perhaps of rather than trying to rebuild the city would be then to just demolish those areas that couldn't be refurbished, reclaimed and basically start from some kind of scratch or blank slate, so to speak.
WALTER MAESTRI: And if I'm the Senator from South Dakota or North Dakota or wherever, you know, am I going to want to vote the kind of massive funding that it's going to take to rebuild it, given the fact that nobody can promise me that it's not gonna happen again two weeks later.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Officials are stunned by this scenario: They say there's got to be something they can do to save New Orleans and save people's lives. So they're thinking about building more levees and building them higher. They're thinking about building new highways, so people can evacuate faster. And they're calling for a massive project to rebuild some of the vanishing wetlands.
But scientists like Joe Suhayda say these projects would take decades. He says America can't wait that long. New Orleans is going to drown and it needs a liferaft, now.
JOE SUHAYDA:: What we have here is an example of the kind of structure that would be part of the community haven wall.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Suhayda wants to build a massive wall around the historic heart of New Orleans. It'd be like the walls that protected medieval cities. He says that way, at least the core of New Orleans might survive.
This particular wall we're on is just a tiny example but Suhayda's version would be three stories high and miles around.
JOE SUHAYDA: It'd take about 12 miles to protect a critical part of the City where we have the central business district, where we have several hospitals-the governmental buildings the schools and other areas that could be used for shelters.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Suhayda pictures the scene unfolding like a disaster movie: the hurricane's approaching...government officials sound the alarm: get to the haven, if you can.
JOE SUHAYDA: And so through gates like this people would come in buses, walking or automobiles and get behind the wall.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: This is amazing to think about. I'm envisioning those last few minutes when the government knows it's going to have to close this gate and all the other gates and the wall, and people are either going to be in and protected or out and in danger of dying, I mean is there a siren that says, you know, "Everybody get inside the gate. Two minutes left. One minute left"?
JOE SUHAYDA: Well it would come down, of course, to a decision to actually close the gates. I can imagine people trying to carry their dogs, and their-their prized possessions, and fighting-- winds that at this point would be very very strong-- which would make, you know, walking-- over the ground very very difficult. Some people probably falling down and-- and-- and-needing help and maybe they'll be crews and people available that would actually go out and try to assist these people by picking them up or putting them in wheelchairs or some such things to expedite the whole movement...
But there'd come a time when-- the decision would have to be made to-- stop-any entrance to the haven.
DANIEL ZWERDLIG: We've tried to find scientists who'd say that these predictions of doom could never really come true and we haven't been able to find them. The main debate seems to be, when the country is facing different kinds of threats, which ones should get the most attention? The federal government has been cutting money from hurricane protection projects. Partly to pay for the war against terrorists.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: Do you think that the President of the United States and Congress understand that people like you and the scientists studying this think the city of New Orleans could very possibly disappear?
WALTER MAESTRI: I think they know that, I think that they've been told that. I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, you know has come to grips with that as-- as a-- a potential real situation. Just like none of us could possibly come to grips with the loss of the World Trade Center. And it's still hard for me to envision that it's gone. You know and it's impossible for someone like me to think that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone. |
