Katrina is working very well for the poor.

As a home inspector I have seen many homes that have as little as a few inches of water from a broken water heater have mold and mildew 3 or 4 feet up the basement dry wall and on the wood framing for the underside of the first floor within a few days.

I would think a few feet of sewage and dead body contaminated water sitting in a house for a few weeks in 90 degree weather would cause so much mold and mildew damage that it would be cheaper to tear them down then fix them.

What would be the wisdom in rebuilding these homes because the sea will one day take them back again.

If any are to be rebuilt they should be built with the first floor one foot above the 100 year flood or one foot above the existing high water level (whatever is higher). Not doing so will be a waste of our tax dollars.

 

But that is what our gov is good at.

 

That is kind of like saying "Why make your bed, your just going to sleep in it again." Would I rebuild there....NOPE, I would move to Winnipeg and herd antelopes or wolverines or rhinos or something But, some will say this is their home and they want to live there.

 

Good Point. After LBI was flooded out, they build houses just like that. The first floor is a garage with 'flood away' walls, and the living quarters(second floor) is above the typical serious flood.

I like it.

tom

 

I have to say, this is an interesting economic argument I think that the world as a whole needs to start to seriously think about. With the progress of global warming, this will become more and more important.

In areas where flooding is really a certainty, like New Orleans, does it make sense to divert efforts to attempt to recover these cities at all? The same can be said for the areas of Thailand, Banda Aceh, Sri Lanka etc that were destroyed by the Tsunami.

Should we be trying to rebuild them at all? Or should we just be taking the hint and building "brave new cities" on higher ground.

BTW we aren't out of touch with such flooding in our area either. We are only a few miles from Carlisle and have friends and family living there.

 

Rob,

It is not only the black mold that one has to worry about the stachybotrys is a very bad mold but there are thousands of other molds and mildews out there that cause all sorts of problems.

Different people have different sensitivities. I could eat ten bags of peanuts and never have a problem but if I shook the hand a person with a peanut allergy and they wiped their face with that hand they could end up in the hospital.

 

Watching Katrina coverage I could not help but feel our federal government failed to promptly evacuate those less fortunate from the city in the last few days.

Reading the below information (I did NOT write it) I now see the author of the information listed below feels there could have been other solutions implemented years earlier.

I do NOT agree with all that is below, but it is an interesting differant view point.

An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the
Welfare State

by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure
out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them,
because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going
on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think
that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials
is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send
transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to
stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists,
natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary
people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of
doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and
rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to
do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they
are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself
included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and
flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.
The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by
federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane
Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel
has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not
happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades.
Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.
For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be
confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in
an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in
other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have
been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is
not even what we expect from a Third World country.
When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion.
They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously
organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in
America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own
initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I
have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose
main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of
their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through
the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New
Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a
description from a Washington Times story:
"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists,
knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and
police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.
"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen
poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....
"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened
Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill
orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,'
she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These
troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if
necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article
shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on
an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of
squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It
looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for
an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to
storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the
drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to
attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?
Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further
destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help
them?

Sherri figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life
level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she
told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied
architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South
Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of
the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The
projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and
irremediable squalor.. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)
What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a
whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the
informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news
channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the
residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of
the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's
public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial
fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no
plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just
let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between
these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails
used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the
deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people
from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people
selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced
helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent
administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.
All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of
the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the
city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city
corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure
the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political
supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of
emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact,
some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for
example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans
had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an
execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who
blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is
precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact
opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of
the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is
behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the
responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a
disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome
the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the
government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a
disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about
saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own
anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or
how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those
things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of
stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains
and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral
ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is
reporting.
Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005

Reading the ABOVE information (I did NOT write it) I now see the author of the information listed below feels there could have been other solutions implemented years earlier. I do NOT agree with all that is ABOVE, but it is an interesting differant view point.

 

Gotta love the Bush family. We should all just buy stock in the Carlisle group, then we could feel some of the Texas hospitality too.

 

New Jersey, I find your talk about the mold fascinating.

As a proffesional would you say that in your opinion is would be better to move on or would you actually stay there and try to re-build?

 

One of the things with rebuilding is it isn't just houses and buildings. The city's infrastructure is trashed. They are going to have to rebuild roads, electric lines, gas lines, water lines, sewage lines. First they have to drain all of the water and then shore up all of the levees. Add to the fact that a tropical storm may slow down things and I don't see NO being reinhabited with many people for a long time.

 

That is a good point. When does storm season end?

 

Think its november time

 

So we could see more. This should be a very well thought out plan. They should not rush it at all.

 

It might not be that extreme, but it's definitely serious.

What's going to play a big part in this is not necessarily what any outsiders (us) or the government thinks should be done, but what property owners and business owners want to do. Anyone who owns property isn't simply thinking "I'll never go back", particularly if they're corporate ventures or investors. They're looking at what they can do right now to maintain their equity and get their investment back on track. In fact I'm sure most property owners will be looking at ways they can capitalize on the fact they get a chance to start over.

What's definitely true is that city will not look the same. When rebuilding starts (maybe not all, but most) it probably won't be the same type/style of construction, or maybe even the same type of zoning.

 

Most of the people that were bussed to other cities and are saying they don’t plan on going back to NO are not business or property owners so they really don’t have anything to go back to.

The local news here has said that unfortunately, there are a fair share of people that are on assisted living and government housing and the city is going to be hard pressed to take care of a huge flux of people in that situation if they decide to permanently live here.

 

baseball player kurt schilling found a family of 9 and paid for a house for them to stay in for 1 year, i think other athletes/celebs should do the same, its cool to get people food and water now, but lets look at the long haul, these people have nowhere to live. bravo kurt schilling

 

Interesting flux - to have so many people move to an new area at once. Sounds like these people are ones who are not productive (as far as jobs go) but will need people to take care of them creating (or moving) jobs to that new location.

So many interesting things that are going to be happening over the next few months that will be a test to many others abilities, strengths, and patience.

I hope we will have an opportunity in playing a part in someones lives, helping them get on their feet again. My dad has a cousin over there who, they figure they lost everything material wise, but they left before the storm hit, since they were close to the coast.

 

Yes, I'd say it's a reality check for everyone. Perhaps we need a natural disaster to show us what a social disaster our country in becoming.

 

I just don't see how they can rebuild. Most buildings are going to have be scrapped. Ones that have stable footings and walls will have to be gutted, demodlded and defumigated, thoe cost of which is only worth doing if the outside has charm that cannot be rebuilt. On top of which you do this all on land that is sinking, and requires a vastly improved and incredibly expensive levee.

In Toronto three weeks ago, there was a sudden heavy thunderstorm for a couple of hours, that's like spit compared to Katrina. Yet, many people I know are facing $20,000 bills to rip out the damaged and flooded basements that are now full of mold. That's just to rip and clean, not to rebuild anything.

A few years ago, my washing machine flooded the basement, I started clean up within an hour, and still faced ripping out all the moldy carpet and a $6000 bill for clean up and retiling.

Also, in the past couple of years, there have been many illegal grow houses found. The damage from mold in those houses is so severe, that the insides have be stripped back to the wood framing, and then the wood is sandblasted [I think they use salt not sand]. While this is going on the house is wrapped to contain the toxic dust and HEPA vacuums used to extract the mess.

There is not the manpower and equipment to do a whole city.

Besides which reports are now surfacing that the sludge that covers everything, a mixture of oil, gas, chemicals, sewage, and dead people is mutating to create new chemicals that will make the whole area a wasteland for years. How do you clean that up? Right now it's being pumped into the lake, and destroying that.