(no subject)

[which_chick]

Tonight for dinner I had a yellow summer squash (fried up in a tiny bit of bacon fat until all limp and bacon-flavored) with some sliced tomato on top (just warmed through) and some rice to go with. It was really quite tasty. For dessert I had two ripe, room-temperature peaches, sliced into wedges with nothing on them. Putting peaches in the fridge ruins their flavor. Brother Joe just called on the phone and totally agreed with me on the room-temperature-fruit thing, so you know it's true. No fridge for the peaches. My peaches are sitting on the counter -- I buy a quarter bushel at a time so that I can eat them all up before they go yuck.

I'm sure everyone went out and ate a peach as a result of yesterday's post, but I'd like to point out that you're supposed to be getting some huge number of servings of fruit peaches that you're probably not getting so if you accidentally forgot to have a peach yesterday, you might resolve to try that here directly. They're really quite good, this time of year. Really. Quite good.



Also, New Orleans appears to be something more than 80% underwater due to several levee failures. Latest update I've seen (6:41 P.M.Central Time - Efforts to stop the levee break at the 17th Street Canal have ended unsuccessfully and the water is expected to soon overwhelm the pumps in that area, allowing water to pour into the east bank of Metairie and Orleans... Souce: http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/WWLBLOG.ac3fcea.html) indicates that all of the city that's below sea level (plus about three feet more due to storm water levels in Lake Pontchartrain) is going to be underwater by tomorrow morning. It's going to suck. Loss of life and property damage are going to be pretty damned impressive by the time we get done with this.

In the days to come, as the floodwaters recede and the Gulf Coast attempts to recover from this admittedly destructive and terrible storm, I'd like everyone to remember that this was not the doomsday scenario. As many people died and as much property as got destroyed, this was NOT the doomsday scenario. Katrina didn't hit as a Category 5 hurricane. She didn't pass directly over New Orleans or a little to the west of New Orleans. She passed to the east of New Orleans, so that the brunt of the storm hit elsewhere. Storm surge didn't overtop the levees during the height of the hurricane -- they were still there the morning after, keeping the water out. The city was evacuated ahead of time with something like an 80% compliance on that. THIS WAS THE SOFT OPTION. Again. This was the soft option. Is everybody certain that rebuilding the damn city is a good idea? Really certain? Completely and totally certain? One more question: Have all ya'll looked at a timeline graphy thing showing the relative frequency (per year) of category 4 and 5 hurricanes since we started keeping track of them?

This just in: 7:24 P.M. - John Marie of Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's Office: No one is allowed back into parish. Marshall law in effect. Forty-seven people were rescued by parish officials Monday and several dozen were rescued Tuesday. Who the hell is Marshall and what's his law? [Yes. They mean martial law. I know that's what they mean.]

Comments

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, having a city at the end of our biggest and most heavily-laden river is pretty much guaranteed to produce a city under effective water level, and probably under sea level, given sufficient time and the natural progression of unnatural circumstances. That is to say, it's all delta land, and thus there's no good bedrock to build on anywhere. New Orleans didn't start out under sea level - it sank, because it isn't sitting on granite or even limestone or sandstone. Just glorified mud - silt, sand, muck. Excellent farmland, terrible terrain for building a city. The nearest solid bedrock is in central Mississippi, in the bend below the Yazoo, I think.

Furthermore, the river's purpose in life once it reaches that part of the country is the production of more delta, and the maintenance of what delta there already is in place. When they diked up the southern Mississippi, from above Baton Rouge all the way down to the mouth, they cut off that riverine source of deltaland replenishment, and send it sluicing down the main channel to the sea. The end result has been a main channel grown year by year above the rest of the delta, above sea level, above the city of New Orleans in particular. This will happen to any hypothetical major port city sitting on any hypothetical main channel, given flood control imperatives. The carrying capacity of the river makes this a physical certainty.

Basically, the Delta is a bad place for urban development of any kind. It's a big country, with plenty of room for cities elsewhere. The big headache is managing the necessary infrastructure of the energy industry on the Gulf, and the logistics of the bulk carrying capacity represented by the Mississippi main channel. Everything else can, and should, be distributed to other, less vulnerable facilities elsewhere.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

In addition, they leveled the wetlands that protected the city and built on them. So the storm surge that would have been slowed (possibly not a huge amoung) by the wetlands was not there to protect the city now.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

That having been said, I like New Orleans. It's a nifty city. Good food, lively people. I would like to visit it as an adult though. As a 16 year old I was happily impressed when the maitre d at the restaurant we had our "big New Orleans meal" at served us all wine ... with the understanding that this was a "private party", not him giving underaged children booze. And no, I did not become an alcoholic from it.

Cafe au lait and begnets... fried dough things... those were very, very good. Pralines ... you just can't get them around here. Not the good ones.