Must see for all folks in New Orleans in path of Katrina [View All]

[Horse with no Name]

Get Out Now! Please! (another DU'er gave me this link and it scares the crap out of me for y'all down there--especially since they are saying this is "THE BIG ONE".)

http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_neworleans.html

WALTER MAESTRI: The hurricane is spinning counter-clockwise. It's been pushing in front of it water from the Gulf of Mexico for days. It's now got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levies of the-- the-- that surround the city, it tops those levees. As the storm continues to pass over. Now Lake Ponchetrain, that water from Lake Ponchartrain is now pushed on to that - those population which has been fleeing from the western side and everybody's caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills. And we've now got the entire community underwater some 20, 30 feet underwater. Everything is lost.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Remember the levees which the Army built, to hold smaller floods out of the bowl? Maestri says now those levees would doom the city. Because they'd trap the water in.

WALTER MAESTRI: It's going to look like a massive shipwreck. There's going to be-- there's going to be, you know-- everything that that the water has carried in is going to be there. Alligators, moccasins, you know every kind of rodent that you could think of.

All of your sewage treatment plants are under water. And of course the material is flowing free in the community. Disease becomes a distinct possibility now. The petrochemicals that are produced all up and down the Mississippi River --much of that has floated into this bowl. I mean this has become, you know, the biggest toxic waste dump in the world now. Is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Federal officials say that nobody in America has confronted these conditions before. Not across an entire city. Not after an earthquake. Not after floods. Not even after September 11th:

So they've gone to the US Army Corps of Engineers, and they've asked them to figure out — How would the city even begin to function? Jay Combe has spent the last few years assembling a doomsday manual.

JAY COMBE: Street signs will be gone. The things that you normally think, "Well, I'm going 'round the corner of Broadway and St. Charles," and that place won't be there.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So Combe's been mapping crucial structures with longitude and latitude, because he says emergency crews will have to use navigation devices just to find out where they are.

And Combe says, how will they get the water out of the city? For the past hundred years, New Orleans has operated one of the biggest pumping systems in the world. Every time there's a major rain, colossal turbines suck up the water and pump it out of "The Bowl." Combe says that won't work after a big hurricane.

JAY COMBE: The problem is that the city's been under water, the pumps are flooded. They don't operate now. We have to get the pumps back in operation and in order to get the pumps back in operation, we have to get the water out of the city.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Catch-22

JAY COMBE: That's correct.