hamburger wrote:ps. i'm trying to retrieve the link to a program shown on friday (thursday ?) around 7 to 8 pm on PBS.
this program had originally been shown in 2002 i believe. it provided the history of NO going back to the french and their fight against flooding and also showed the problems of preventing the marshes from dying out.
has anyone else seen this program ? do you have a link ? i've tried tracking it - unsuccessfully so far.
hbg
didn't find that article but found this transcript from September 2002
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_neworleans.html
Quote: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.
found the dying marsh hamburger was looking for ...
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_delta.html
Quote:DENISE REED, GEOMORPHOLOGIST: This is a world class coastal ecosystem. And it's in serious trouble. It's our only big system like this
Reed is a "geomorphologist." She's a leading scientist who studies wetlands. She says we're wading into the heart of a dying marsh.
ZWERDLING (ADDRESSING REED): Hold up, you're going too fast. I keep losing my sandal.
DENISE REED: You all right?
ZWERDLING (ADDRESSING REED): I think so.
ZWERDLING: To an outsider, this wetland hardly looks like it's dying. I always assumed that a wetland is sloppy with water. But Reed says no, the term wetland, or marsh, just means land that gets flooded periodically. She says if this marsh were healthy, we could stroll across it like a field.
DENISE REED: When you just look at it now, it looks nice and green. It's a pretty day, It looks nice and healthy. We're standing here with grass up to our waists. But as we walk through it, we can tell that this is, by no means, a continuous cover of vegetation. We had to be very careful where we walked. I don't know how many times you fell in over your knees. But I fell in several times. It's full of holes.
And of course we're standing here right next to a pond. This is not a very big one. When you fly over coastal Louisiana, you can see that there are myriads of ponds that are very, very much bigger. And that's land loss. This is what coastal land loss is in Louisiana. Something that's a marsh with grass on turning to open water.
ZWERDLING: Reed says if you want to understand why it's falling apart, you have to look back in history, say, five thousand years.
thanks for your links !
what happenend last week was pretty well predicted in this program broadcast in 2002.
it's quite sad that these things have to happen - but i think it's fair to say that they do not only happen in the united states. hbg
It's being reported that Aaaron Broussard is telling people in his parish to re-enter to get your personal items you may be out for months.
Sure sounds confusing given all the other problems about.
One of my employees has an ex-wife and two teenaged daughters in NO. He has been trying to contact them since this all started, He came in this morning and reported that, last night, around 2 am, he got an answering machine at their house. An answering machine. We all high-fived.
But what, really, did this tell us? The power was back on in that portion of the city; the phone was working, but is it lying beneath a bunch of rubble. And where is his family.
Our exhilaration faded quickly.
RJB, Phoenix has a thread with links to sites where people are posting, if they can, that they are ok. I'll be back with a link if I run across it.
Ah, here it is, just in case -
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=58844&highlight=
My cousin, her two sisters and her housemate entered Jefferson Parish just outside New Orleans city limits at 6am this morning and packed three SUV's with their things. They're back in Houston tonight. The West End suffered very little damage. She had a broken window but everything else was dry and intact. Still and all, they could not stay.
No post here for several days. Is there a new place, or are people just talked out?
My employee with the still uncontacted daughters in NO came into the shop Sunday night to do a little construction project. 9 pm or so. He thought he had everything he needed but, when he opened his tool box looking for 3-inch nails, he didn't have a single one. He told me this on Monday morning. "I couldn't do much because I didn't have any nails."
I immediately thought of this. And I had most of it right from memory, but I did Google to, um, nail it down:
For the want of a nail a shoe was lost.
For the want of a shoe a horse was lost.
For the want of a horse a rider was lost.
For the want of a rider a battle was lost.
For the the want of a battle a kingdom was lost.
And all for the the want of a horseshoe nail.
Often used, according to one of the Google links, as a nursery rhyme to explain to a child the events that may follow a thoughtless act of neglect.
rjb - there are at least 15 threads on the aftermath in the politics forum, as well as a couple in health.
I don't do well when in distress. I know some people do. Not me.
Under stress maybe, but not in distress.
I wouldn't have been able to get around needing those 3" nails.
Donate, donate, donate.....to the Red Cross. This program operates in the red a lot of the time, but they keep going because our world needs them.
I donated $25 because that's all I can afford right now, but I keep reminding myself that twenty-five bucks will buy a lot of water.
Try to imagine yourself being thankful for just a drink of water. Just one taste.
Please donate if you can
http://www.redcross.org/
As is their motto 'no donation is too small'.
Ophelia. She's not too big or strong.
The hurricane season is by no means over. Watch this one, please.
Supposed to hit the SC coast--near Charleston?
Man, there needs - I am estimating - to be beaucoup time put into house design, both for flexibility (+ perhaps mobility), and sturdiness, two antipathetic needs or maybe they are the same, if houses could be like trees, with winding flowing through key places.
I've paid some attention to manufactured home design, though I haven't given all the links I see over on my quiet little landuse thread, but the really interesting ones are fairly expensive, and not necessarily designed to storm thwart.
For earthquakes in liquefaction zones, there have been modules designed for flotation...
it seems to me time to engage for single family homes in hurricane zones, for as simple, yet complex, a matter as holding the roof on.
Great!
Looks like Bear and I will be getting a visitor Monday morning about the time we head out to new jobs.
Seriously, if this Ophelia chick thinks she's gonna mess with us after the summer we've had... Why I'll...
Correction, I couldn't read dates on Timbers map. The weather channel has us in the middle of her projected path for Wednesday evening. Man, She's a slow mover.
Maybe she'll peter out.
talk about sheer aggravation...
Looks like she's just gonna brush you all with her skirt, squinney. But keep an eye out and take care.
