The American Spectator

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(Page 6 of 15)

br> Cut & Shoot, Texas /p>

Two hundred billion dollars! The amount of money is so outrageous most of us can't even imagine how much money it really is.

Tom DeLay is an idiot. Unfortunately, he is from my state. And by the way, Louisiana doesn't have a franchise on crooked politicians. We have plenty of them right here in Texas. Jed is right. Republican as well as Democrat politicians know only one answer to a problem: throw our money at it.

The MSM keeps getting it wrong. The levees were not breached. The flood walls on the canals were overcome. But the levees could have been breached as well. If a breach had occurred in one of the main levees, New Orleans would likely be a cesspool that could not be saved. Nagin and Blanco are not capable of running the type of operation the President is talking about. Frankly, I am not sure anyone is.

p>Whether or not New Orleans is rebuilt, or how it is rebuilt, one thing you can be sure of: our children will be paying for it. br> -- Webster br> Dallas, Texas /p>

...Merely dumping billions of cubic yards of spoil into the levee-surrounded bowl which is New Orleans will not solve the problem.

The entire area is sinking, as a result of the levee system preventing the renewal of the land with topsoil washed down from the Heartland. The island city of Galveston was built on an area which was more stable, and raising an area with a stable foundation worked fine. The muck on which New Orleans is built is several hundred feet thick. When this muck is saturated with water, it might as well be a liquid, from an engineering point of view. Pump the water out, and the muck shrinks as it dries.

Farmland in the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta area has the same problem. Fortunately for Californians, their floods in the area are fairly predictable snow melt.

If New Orleans is rebuilt, the country can look forward to rebuilding it again, sooner or later. The levees, which are lacking a firm base, have to be continually replenished and heightened. As of now, they are also slowly sinking into the swamp. Building them to withstand a Category 5 storm is going to take time, and a huge expenditure of capital, followed by extensive, expensive long term maintenance.

My old college professor, who taught Foundations and Masonry Construction, would be aghast at such idiocy. One of his textbook cases of a city with foundation problems was Mexico City. To quote him, "Every time a water tap is turned on, a building in the city sinks a little more." Mexico City and New Orleans are both built on/in swamps, but Mexico City is not on the shore of one of the mightiest rivers in the world.

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