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laurentius
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Helsinki, Finland
Jun 2001
time: 07:37
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quote:
The lost world
As police throw looters in the Greyhound Bus Station and residents sift through toxic mud, rescuers call out for survivors in vain.
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By Michael Scherer
Sept. 8, 2005 | NEW ORLEANS -- There is nothing left for Dr. Bryan Bertucci to do, so he stands in the sun by the side of Route 42 in St. Bernard Parish. He gazes over at St. Rita's nursing home, a simple brick rectangle that now entombs about 30 of his former patients. "It was one of the best homes in the area, " he says.
Bertucci works part-time as the parish coroner, and he has counted 64 bodies since the storm hit. About half of them still lie in St. Rita's, a home for the elderly and infirm that did not evacuate before the storm. The building is still surrounded by water and caked in mud. Snakes slither on the banks. The haz-mat crews were able to retrieve four bodies yesterday. They have left the rest until the water goes down.
Click here
On a normal week, Bertucci works 80 or 100 hours. When the storm hit, he helped empty a nearby hospital, evacuating the patients to a jail on higher ground, rationing the IV drips, administering the antibiotics. It was days before he had a shower, or changed clothes. Now, for the time being, his work is done. "I am not used to being still," he says. "It is very hard for me." But he has been drawn to the road outside of St. Rita's. As part of his private practice, he used to visit the residents once a month to tend to their needs. He said they loved the home. He says a lot of doctors don't realize how rewarding nursing home work can be.
"Around Christmas we would sing Christmas carols," he says, dressed in a clean hospital smock, a bright white baseball cap and a Mickey Mouse watch. "They didn't know the words, but I didn't either."
There was a time when Bertucci planned to become a Jesuit priest, but he became a doctor instead, fulfilling a similar call to service. Before Hurricane Katrina hit, Bertucci says, the parish offered buses to the residents of St. Rita's. But simply moving some of the elderly patients could have endangered their lives, he says, and so they chose to ride the storm out. "It was just a bad decision." He lost two houses himself, and his business. He sips a Gatorade bottle to guard against dehydration. "I am going to stay here until they get my people out," he says, wiping a tear from the edge of his left eye.
Ten days after Katrina, the remaining residents of the New Orleans area are in a daze. The rate of rescues has slowed to a trickle, but the helicopters still circle in swarms, like flies drawn to the smell of sewage. In the parts of town that have dried, people return to their homes to wade through mud for framed family photos and whatever else isn't ruined -- a rubber football, an antique piece of furniture. "Just stuff to make my wife happy," says Steve Fecke, as he piles photographs and a bedroll on his front stoop. Mostly, though, they find mold already climbing the walls and emaciated dogs that wander the streets.
The highways are littered with abandoned cars, the police are gathering supplies from looted hardware stores, and, at one McDonald's, the golden arches have been blown apart. The Greyhound Station is now the city jail, filled and emptied daily with a steady stream of 45 to 70 looters or worse, says Capt. Chad Dorbonne, an amiable man in a starched white shirt who runs the operation. One of the detainees is charged with eight counts of attempted murder. He shot at police officers as they chased him. "They get food and they get water. They get treated good, which is something they weren't getting on the streets," he says of his inmates.
A sparkling, cream-colored Rolls Royce sits on the curb outside the jail. It was found with a window busted out and the dashboard ripped apart on Wednesday, the sort of looting trophy that a disaster like this makes seem ridiculous. Over at the Sheraton, Blackwater Security, famous for their exploits in Iraq, has taken up positions, each man with a machine gun and a pistol. They are the alpha males of the security set, which now includes police and national guard from nearly every state.
In Chalmette, a community in St. Bernard Parish, whole neighborhoods are slick with crude oil that flowed out of the nearby Murphy Oil Refinery. Lost lap dogs trudge through the stuff, looking like birds caught in the Exxon Valdez spill. Residents drive the streets with no clear direction. Alan Clomburg, a repairman for ocean-bound ships at Buck Kreihs, keeps his pistol by the passenger seat and his wet passport on the dashboard. He still hasn't left his hometown, evacuation orders or no. "I got to go to work," he says, as if the docks might reopen soon.
On the morning of the storm, a week ago Monday, he called his wife at 8:30 a.m. to say the house had survived and everyone was safe. Just then, the waters started to rise. "Fifteen minutes and it was six feet high," he said. "You see vans float down the street." He knew not to go to the attic, fearing that he might be trapped, so he loaded his parents, both in the 80s, into a flatbed boat and lashed it to the side of his house. He had to dive underwater to get out of his house after rescuing his dog. Six hours passed, in the wind and the rain. Then he steered the boat to dry land.
Ten days later, he is still driving around in a jeep caked with oil and mud. "I'm just looking at what I used to have," he says. The oil didn't make it into his house, but it coats the lawn outside. "I just hope they don't play it like an environmental disaster," he says of his town, a hope that will certainly go unfulfilled. The emergency personnel on scene say that it will take 15 years before people can live near this kind of spill. One man points out that the Murphy Oil Refinery had been looking to expand anyway, so maybe they would just buy out the nearby homeowners.
For years, people like Clomburg, and his community leaders, have been asking the federal government to shut down an ill-used shipping canal that connects the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River through St. Bernard Parish's backyard. The canal has been sucking salt water into the marshes for years, killing them off and eroding the land. As far back as the late 1980s, local politicians have asked for the canal to be closed, warning of the danger of a storm surge. Nothing happened; the Environmental Protection Agency started a study. "Maybe now they will listen to us," says Clomburg.
But the canal is a moot point. St. Bernard Parish is a wasteland of toxic mud. "It is slick out there and it is nasty," Lt. Kevin Cadena of the Colorado National Guard barks to his troops, as they prepare to search door to door for survivors or bodies. "You lose your hat in there, you leave it there. I'll get you another one."
The troops deploy, two at a time, calling into the house for people who do not respond. They search each room anyway, knocking on doors with flashlights, trying not to slip on the mud. If they find a body, they say they will mark it on a map for someone to pick up later on. The only sound comes from a desperate dog barking in front of an empty house.
Outside St. Rita's, a few miles away, Dr. Bertucci looks at the pool of water between him and the bodies of his former patients. "The world as I knew it does not exist anymore," he says.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2...08/new_orleans/ |
It seems it will definately be a different city. Think if authorities would tell you couldnt live in your home for the next 15 years. Its really hard to imagine what it feels like. I suspect most of the survivers will be emotionally damaged for the rest of their lives and will probably suffer a major mental breakdown or deep deppression. :/
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Kontiki
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Canada
Aug 2001
time: 00:37
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Holy sh*t. Take a look at the first article Mobius linked to - the National Geographic one. Keep in mind it's from the October 2004 issue. How scarily accurate was the scenario laid out in the first part?
quote:
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great. |
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MOBIUS
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Prifysgol Caerdydd
Dec 1999
time: 15:37
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quote:
Originally posted by Kontiki
Holy sh*t. Take a look at the first article Mobius linked to - the National Geographic one. Keep in mind it's from the October 2004 issue. How scarily accurate was the scenario laid out in the first part?
quote:
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great. |
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Eerie isn't it!?
Yeah, I read that back then - and linked this article into one of the other threads...
Of course Bush claimed that no one had forseen this...
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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:37
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Interesting. FYI, in the age of the Apolyton, Socrates sucks. Links rule. 
I will take a hit on this one, but as Colon says, it's because of the reactivation of faults, not because the volume of oil and natural gas extracted is very large in the geological scheme of things. Because of this, subsidence seems a rare occurence after oil and gas extraction, so I don't feel bad about laughing in the first instance about it occurring near New Orleans -- even though I admit that it could be happening in other higher elevation places where it wasn't noticed. Besides, AFAIK, Louisiana wells are very high pressure wells that don't occur often on land in other high production areas with which I'm familiar (Texas, Russia, Saudi Arabia).
Last edited by DanS on 09-09-2005 at 07:08
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MOBIUS
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Prifysgol Caerdydd
Dec 1999
time: 15:37
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quote:
Originally posted by DanS
I will take a hit on this one, but as Colon says, it's because of the reactivation of faults, not because the volume of oil and natural gas extracted is very large in the geological scheme of things. |
Fault reactivation resulting from hydrocarbon production. Nice to see you've zeroed into just one aspect of the report and you still don't have a leg to stand on...
The whole point of the article is the direct correlation between wetland subsidence in the gulf coast and hydrocarbon extraction.
Good to see that you're admitting you're wrong, but you are still trying hard to squirm out of it...
quote:
Because of this, subsidence seems a rare occurence after oil and gas extraction, so I don't feel bad about laughing in the first instance about it occurring near New Orleans -- even though I admit that it could be happening in other higher elevation places where it wasn't noticed. Besides, AFAIK, Louisiana wells are very high pressure wells that don't occur often on land in other high production areas with which I'm familiar (Texas, Russia, Saudi Arabia). |
It isn't a rare occurrence - it happens all over the world just as the article itself documents! It is elementary Geophysics, if you take stuff out from underneath you, there is a very real possibility that the land will subside...
Basically what you're saying is that you laughed about it because you thought my statement was absurd, through your own ignorance of the subject in question...
PWNED
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MOBIUS
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Prifysgol Caerdydd
Dec 1999
time: 15:37
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quote:
Originally posted by The Mad Monk
Land subsidence resulting from the extraction of a fluid is much better known in hydrogeology -- there are quite a few examples of it happening in California due to overuse of aquifers.
It's all a matter of pressure, really. When a stratum of rock is saturated with a fluid (water or oil), that fluid bears a good deal of the pressure exerted on that bed by overlaying strata. When fluid is removed, the bed's interal pressure is reduced, and the bed will compress until a new pressure equilibrium is established.
Yes, bedrock can compress, and the extent to which it can compress is dependent on several factors, but mainly depends on the amount of space between grains in the rock. If water or oil is filling that space, the bed will resist compression (collapsing of the space between grains) better than if those spaces were filled with air.
It's been a long time since I studied this, the other geologists on the board can probably do a better job at explaining it than I can. |
Of course there is a very neat solution to all of this, which is linked to my little jokey clue about filling them in...
CO2 sequestration
Or basically a Win/Win/Win situation where we can bury billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, rebalance the pressure equilibrium (possibly even raise the land?) and the added benefit of increasing well efficiency by flushing out the last dregs of hydrocarbons in them - which could extend the useful life of these fields...
Hell, if we did that you could even argue that using hydrocarbons would become a carbon neutral activity!
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09-09-2005 04:29
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