Posted in Scientific American in
October 2001, the title of this report might well have been "Bin Laden Determined to Strike US":
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000"
New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities.
Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that
more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far."
"Len Bahr, head of the governor's Coastal Activities Office in Baton Rouge... 'This is the realm in which science has to operate,' Bahr says. 'There are five federal agencies and six state agencies with jurisdiction over what happens in the wetlands.' Throughout the 1990s, Bahr says with frustration,
'we only received $40 million a year' from Congress, a drop compared with the bucket of need."
"Late in 1998 the governor's office, the state's Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and all 20 of the state's coastal parishes published
Coast 2050 --a blueprint for restoring coastal Louisiana. No group is bound by the plan, however, and
if all the projects were pursued, the price tag would be $14 billion."
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