Adios New Orleans

I made the unpopular suggestion that New Orleans should not be rebuilt here on Saturday and over at Running Scared yesterday. It may not be popular but I'm not alone. (Hat tip to Low and Left)
Nuevo New Orleans

Somebody has to be the first to say this, and it's probably not me, but I haven't actually seen it anywhere so will take the rap. Because it is a hard, hard thing to say:

New Orleans is dead.

It was a semi-stupid place to put a city anyway, everybody has long admitted. When you can't even bury the dead in the ground because the water table is so high the caskets simply bob to the top like corks, this is a clue. When the living put up with yellow fever on a hideously regular basis for centuries. Where every living thing is dependent on constantly-working pumps just to keep what's currently going on from making everybody grow gills like Kevin Costner in Waterworld.

At any rate everybody who has stopped to think about it has realized for years that New Orleans was doomed. But a city is a huge investment and something you don't just walk away from casually. So we build yet another dike, and raise the levees yet again, and put in more pumps, and hope to scrape by by the skin of your teeth just one more time.

There is more so head over to Corrente.

As I said yesterday:

It now appears that the destruction of New Orleans will be nearly complete. It is not only flooded but flooded with a toxic brew of salt water, sewage and hazardous chemicals. It will take weeks or even months to pump it all out. We can start making the painful decisions we are going to be forced to make by not re-building New Orleans in it's current location. Although we don't know the death toll it is safe to say that thousands have already died and more will die as the water continues to rise. Man does not own New Orleans the sea does. We should let the sea reclaim it. This will be only the first of such decisions we have to make. The warm water of the Gulf of Mexico that makes the Gulf Coast such a desirable place to live and visit also makes it unsafe for human habitation. A risk assessment of the entire Gulf Coast should be done taking into account the changing conditions. New construction should be controlled based on that risk assessment.