Scoble is in New Orleans, and I can tell you that I'm not surprised by his first report from there:

Regarding the neighborhoods here, it’s dark, so I can’t see the full extent of the devastation, but the little bit I can see is simply horrific. Driving along I saw boarded up homes and buildings. Many of which still have spray-paint messages left by rescuers that say whether or not there were any bodies inside.

I predicted as much back on September 3rd, 2005.

Browsing around, I discovered that the city of New Orleans has a disaster plan - i.e., they had a stated plan of action for this kind of situation. One of the sadder things I'm seeing right now is a desperate attempt by partisans - of all stripes - to grab this disaster and use it as a stick with which to beat their opponents. I'd guess that mistakes were made up and down the chain here:

• Bureaucratic ones further up (Washington), because the larger and organization gets, the more paper is required for anything.
• Local failures to follow the plan - because a plan is one thing, an actual emergency is another.

On that latter point - take a trivial example, backup of crucial data. We all know that hard drives fail, and that we'll face a loss of data at some point. We know this. And yet, how many of us (myself included) fail to do backups diligently, subconsciously thinking "it won't happen to me"? Now, when we do lose data, how many of us decide to point the finger at IT, since it's far easier to do that than look at ourselves?

On the first point, how many of us know a "stickler" who insists on following "the rules", no matter what the situation is? Bureaucracies are loaded with that type of personality.

There's a lot of finger pointing happening here, with the addition of partisan game playing by all and sundry.

New Orleans will be rebuilt, but it will never be what it was. Consider - the process of:

• Plugging the Levee holes
• Draining the water
• Inspecting/Demolishing buildings

Will take many, many months - I'd say longer than anyone is guessing right now. The historic district seems to have mostly escaped, and will be one of the first places to come back - property owners there will actually have property to come back to. The rest of the city?

Well, consider - there's some proportion of the population (many of the 80% who evacuated, I'd guess) who have family and/or friends who will be able to take them in. For those people, regardless of their age, this will be like a return to being 18 (or 21, if they went to college). They'll have to start all over again, with nothing but a helpful push from their families. How many will return to New Orleans? Not many, I'd guess - most won't want to put their lives on hold for the next 6-12 months.

Then there are the people who are only being evacuated now - they have even less than the first group. Many of them don't own homes (I saw census bureau data that stated a 49% rental rate in the city). They've lost almost all the goods they did own, so there's very little holding them to the city - no jobs, no family - nothing. Unlike the group above, these folks probably don't have as many outside family/friends to go to (if they did, I suspect they would have gone there earlier). This means that they'll start without the helping push, but they'll have to start again nevertheless. And like the first group, I very much doubt that they'll sit in a holding center for 6-12 months when there's nothing to return to.

So what do have left? The residents of the historic district (or buyers of their property in the interim - there will be speculative buying on the cheap going on). Business interests that need to be there - import/export, energy, fishing. However, that's going to be limited by the willingness of insurers to sponsor construction - and believe you me, those outfits are going to take a very critical eye toward rebuilding in areas that are under a lot of water. Regardless of what new plans come down the pike to rebuild levees stronger, everyone knows that it will be a multi-year effort to do that - and any new construction will be in danger while that happens.

Consider the history of Galveston, TX after the ruinous 1900 hurricane:

While Galveston received financial help from the county, state and federal governments, a large portion of the burden had to be carried by the city itself, at the expense of other projects.

McComb sums it up about as well as it can be:

"Human technology made it possible - for the city of Galveston to remain on such unstable land. The city did not flourish. Houston - left the island city far behind. Galveston simply survived.

That's the future history of New Orleans, right there - and bear in mind, that as bad off as Galveston was then, New Orleans has it worse. Galveston, like Biloxi today, merely (I hate to put it that way) has rubble to clear before rebuilding could start. New Orleans has all that water...

I ran across an interesting analysis of the flood issues in New Orleans in "Civil Engineering" - written well before the current disaster. There's a ton of information in this about the danger that faced the city, and what the answers had been over the years. The bottom line on this is, the plan for anything as powerful as Katrina was "pray it doesn't happen". Consider:

In 1999 the Corps was authorized by Congress to study the feasibility of various proposals for protecting the city against such devastating storms. An obvious possibility would be to raise the current levees to a height deemed acceptable by an AdCirc analysis. That, however, would also require widening the levees, which may not be possible in many areas because of the proximity of homes. Among other alternatives, Naomi will investigate the possibility of creating an immense wall between Lake Pontchartrain and the gulf to keep water out of the lake during a severe storm. Such a project would involve constructing massive floodgates at the Rigolets and Chef Menteur passes, where storm surge would enter the lake.

According to Naomi, any concerted effort to protect the city from a storm of category 4 or 5 will probably take 30 years to complete. And the feasibility study alone for such an effort will cost as much as $8 million. Even though Congress has authorized the feasibility study, funding has not yet been appropriated. When funds are made available, the study will take about six years to complete. “That’s a lot of time to get the study before Congress,” Naomi admits. “Hopefully we won’t have a major storm before then.”

Forget levees for a moment, and consider the other problem that is busily creeping toward New Orleans - the loss of coastal marshland. The taming of the Mississippi has meant no new floods as bad as the 1927 horror, but it's had a nasty side effect - the protective buffer of marshland (the bayou) south of the city is disappearing, fast. At current rates, New Orleans will be a gulf coast city within 30 years. That would mean that - notwithstanding the current flooding - Lake Ponchartrain would be the least of the problems facing the city - a similar storm hitting in 30 years would visit the storm surge that wiped out Biloxi and Gulf Port on downtown New Orleans:

“We’re trying to enforce human decisions on a natural process,” says Naomi. “What we’re trying to do is take a snapshot of geologic time and say, ‘This is what we want; this is where we want to live.’ The question is, Is it going to be feasible in the long term?”

Naomi says this question will not be answered with levee feasibility studies alone. It will also require a more complete understanding of the natural processes at work in and around New Orleans. For example, the wetlands of coastal Louisiana, which would act as a buffer and slow any storm during its approach to the city, are dying because the freshwater and nutrients that historically flooded into them from the Mississippi can no longer escape the river. At the same time, the sediment deposited here by the river long ago is subsiding, and no new sediment is overflowing to replenish it.

That's not the worst of it, believe it or not. The entire southern portion of Louisiana is sinking:

The true situation, however, is almost too grave to consider. “Coastal Louisiana is sinking under its own weight,” Dokka says. “The ground in Louisiana is ultimately going to go under.”

Indeed, the state is subsiding so quickly that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS) considers the orthometric markers in Louisiana surveyed every decade for the North American Vertical Datum (NAVD) to be “obsolete.” Dokka and his colleagues, together with experts from the NGS, are now using high-powered transponders and numerous Global Positioning System satellites to develop “true” elevation points in the state on the basis of their relation to the center of the earth.

Using a rate of subsidence measured at a tidal gauge off the coast of Grand Isle adjacent to an original NAVD marker, Dokka was able to calibrate rates of subsidence at hundreds of other markers around the state. His results indicate that the elevations of some areas have dropped as much as 2 ft (0.6 m) since they were last surveyed for the NAVD. Based on Dokka’s “true” elevations, some of the Corps’s levees in New Orleans may be more than 1 ft lower than their posted elevation.

Which means that the entire levee system is just so much whistling past the graveyard.

New Orleans has been in an exposed condition for well over a hundred years. This time, the city's luck ran out. The main thing we can do now? Visit this FEMA page, which lists charitable organizations that are helping out. Donate to or volunteer with one of them.

Here's some live-blogging from New Orleans - far better feel for what's actually happening on the ground than the media reports I'm seeing.

And in the "who would have thunk it" category, here's a network vendor still on the air from the city - up in a tower with supplies and generator power.

Derek asks the question that's been in the back of my mind, and I'm sure it's been in the back of other people's minds as well:

So now that New Orleans is underwater, and the devastation of property is huge, various charities have started beating the drums about raising money to "rebuild New Orleans".

I'm forced to ask myself one simple question: "Why?"

As he says, it's not as if this threat was unknown - it's been the "crazy aunt in the attic" of New Orleans for decades. It's worse than the coastal communities that get whacked from time to time, because at least the water leaves those - as bad as Biloxi was hit, for instance, it's not underwater.

Holy smokes - I was flipping between Fox and MSNBC this evening, and both networks had interviews with a spokesman from the Army Corps of Engineers. It doesn't sound good. While the water level in New Orleans is no longer rising, that's only because the water has reached its natural level. Apparently, they just found more breaches in the flood walls that they weren't aware of, and they've not been successful in their attempts to block them. Why? They aren't accessible by land or water, and they can only do so much from the air.

It gets worse. Even once they get the holes plugged, they then have to drain the city. The spokesman said that would be a 3-6 month job. So what we have is a nearly unprecedented situation in the US - hundreds of thousands of refugees who won't be able to return home for months. Many of them may not ever get home. Consider the buildings in flooded New Orleans. First, there's whatever wind damage they took during the storm. Add in a few months of being marinated in semi-toxic water. What do you end up with? A whole lot of buildings that need to be condemned and demolished, that's what.

Things are going to stay bad for New Orleans for a long, long time.

This is a Q/A session with the Army Corps of Engineers - and it sounds like the "Best Case" scenario is pretty tough. Never mind that the caveats thrown out are pretty big. There is simply no telling when - or, to be really pessimistic if - New Orleans will recover.

It could get worse too - have a look at this story - here's the kicker:

Once the levees are fixed, Maj. Gen. Don Riley of the Army Corps of Engineers said, it could take close to a month to get the water out of the city. If the water rises a few feet higher, it could also wipe out the water system for the whole city, said New Orleans' homeland security chief, Terry Ebbert.

Thus far, they have had little luck plugging the holes in the levees - and the water is still rising. I understand why the Governor of Louisiana has a "deer in the headlights" look when she speaks in public - it must be horrible to be in charge of a state, and be utterly powerless against this sort of thing. All we can do now is donate to the Red Cross, and pray that the experts can get those holes patched.