Mayor Ray Nagin ordered an immediate evacuation Sunday for all of New Orleans

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by DanS
Here's a picture of the blown levee. It's sort of hard to tell which side of the levee is where the people live...

Actually I think it's working out what side the houses are on and the direction of the water flow...

But I'll accept that for you those are difficult concepts...

[Boris Godunov]

Geezus.

[Boris Godunov]

And more geezus.

[MOBIUS]

Yeah well at least the French Quarter has survived pretty much unscathed - probably because the French built it on the highest ground around...

[Colonâ„¢]

Originally posted by Colon
So if I get it right, they'd first need to plug the holes in the levees and then fix the pumps before they can get all that water out of the city?

Maybe a silly question, but I guess the water can't flow away as is the case with regular floods?

[DanS]

Yeh, you gotta pump it all out. I've heard it will take a year to pump it all out, although I don't have a clue if this is accurate. Wouldn't surprise me. That's a hell of a lot of water. That last picture that Boris posted looks like a dystopian Venice.

[MOBIUS]

Not unless it can defy the laws of physics seeing as all the water around it is at a higher level...

[Chemical Ollie]

Evacuation seems to have been a good idea.

[DRoseDARs]

As I said elsewhere in another thread (on DU) there's no way to deal with that serious a breach in the 17th Street Canal in the dead of night. The only thing they could have realistically done instead of fighting with the water widening the gap is to close off the mouth of the canal at the lake to prevent further waters from flowing in. Someone wlse mentioned put two large ships in the gap, but this isn't a shipping canal, it's a drainage ditch. They wouldn't fit into the canal in the first place.

[SpencerH]

Its become a disaster of biblical proportions. The entire city of New Orleans is fast becoming uninhabitable. No drinking water, no power, no sewage, no food, no nothin. Its even difficult to leave since the major routes out are unpassable.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Oh yeah, and it's on fire, too.

[lightblue]

Doesn't look good at all

As an interesting little tidbit of infomation i acquired today:

Apparently when the french built New Orleans it was significantly higher than it is now (above Mississipi level, and sea level), but they built on it fairly freshly laid sand deposited by the river, which over the decades settled and compacted to the level they got now.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by SpencerH
Its become a disaster of biblical proportions. The entire city of New Orleans is fast becoming uninhabitable. No drinking water, no power, no sewage, no food, no nothin. Its even difficult to leave since the major routes out are unpassable.

Originally posted by Dis
am I an idiot? As predicted this storm really hasn't done much damage or killed many people.

So we can say yet that Dis answered his own question with an affirmative?

[Kuciwalker]

It's taken you this long to figure that out?

[MOBIUS]

So where will the Saints be playing their games then?