As they say, timing is everything:

A full recovery in New Orleans could take 25 years as homeowners, businesses and tourists are coaxed back to the city devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator said Thursday.
"We kind of want it to happen overnight, or I do, but it's going to take some time," White House coordinator Don Powell said in an interview with Associated Press reporters and editors. "This could be five to 25 years for it all to fit into place."

Powell added: "It's been a bottom-up process and it's complex."

Well, the "bottom" part is right. Guess where New Orleans will be in the next half-century or so?

Give yourself two points if you correctly answered "The Gulf of Mexico."

The original (snark-free) version of this Louisiana wetlands projection comes courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and is used at LSU's Louisiana Energy & Environmental
Resource & Information Center (LEERIC) in this article.

Back in September I interviewed the former chair of a Coastal and Marine Studies Department, and asked him the following question:

1. Are estimates that the continued rate of wetland loss in Louisiana will place New Orleans on or in the Gulf of Mexico in the 2050-2090 time frame accurate?

He responded:

The estimates are probably accurate. There are three main factors: Global sea level rise, delta subsidence, Mississippi River sedimentation. Sea level is rising, the delta is sinking and the river is depositing much less sediment on the delta now than in the past (for multiple reasons).

In other words, by the time New Orleans can recover from Hurricane Katrina, it may do so just in time to disappear under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico forever.

I don't have any problems with spending our tax dollars to rebuild New Orleans, I just don't think it wise to rebuild the city in the same nearly indefensible location.

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School Buses
Slightly damp, a total of 259. Previously used as a symbol of incompetence. Works great as anchors and fish attractors. Ask for Ray.

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Landfall...

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...In which the ex-USNS San Diego goes to sea, and plots an intercept course for Hurricane Beryl in the continuing "Salvation Navy" narrative over at Beauchamp Tower Corporation's OES Project blog.

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BCT/OES has Part 2 of their "Salvation Navy" disaster response narrative up.

Check it out.

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I've written several times in the past about Beauchamp Tower Corporation and their plan to convert retired Navy ships into a small fleet of state-of-the-art disaster-response vessels that would greatly increase the nation's capability to respond to both major terrorist attacks and natural disasters such as hurricanes, all without costing the taxpayer a single dime. As a matter of fact, the corporate sponsor-backed program could save the government up to $100 million by taking over old ships the government is spending millions to scrap.

The BTC blog has a new/old post up called Shall...We...Play..A...Game? Part 1, which discusses the birth of what I've dubbed the "Salvation Navy" in narrative form.

If you like to see how things work, BTC will be putting up a post a day describing in both broad strokes, and in small detail, what the program will be like from it's inception and the first "Pimp My Ship" refitting process, through BTC's first hypothetical hurricane response.

I think you'll like it.

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The Associated Press summary video (embedded in this Washington Post story) of a high-level videoconference made one day prior to Hurricane Katrina's landfall smells to high heaven.

The leaked video—heavily sympathetic to former FEMA director Michael Brown—relies on dramatic still image splices of a post-Katrina New Orleans for dramatic effect in a heavily edited montage of dramatic hypothetical situations, narrated by an AP voice attempting to weave together an otherwise incoherent 2 minute, 41 seconds of disjointed footage.

There is no way of telling, of course what the full video shows until it is seen in an unedited, un-spliced form. Until such a point as the unedited footage is made public, any claims made about this AP video should be regarded as highly suspect.

Jason Coleman covers some of the inaccuracies in the spliced video in more detail.

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Ward Brewer is tired. Exhausted. Pissed.

It took years of effort to get this far, and as it comes down to the wire, everything he's worked so hard for depends on what happens in the first tense days of March.

The former emergency responder is the CEO of Beauchamp Tower Corporation, a non-profit organization with a bold and brilliant idea: convert obsolete, scrapyard-bound military vessels into a fleet of state-of-the-art disaster response ships that can be on-site after a major natural disaster like last year's Hurricane Katrina in a matter of hours instead of days. Many of the challenges Beauchamp Tower Corporation have been document Operation Enduring Service on the OES Project Weblog.

Retired Navy veterans such as Mars-class combat stores ships and other obsolete but still-capable cargo ships will be refitted to provide complex emergency communications support that can replace cell phone and radio towers lost in a hurricane, so that on-shore first responders can answer rescue calls even if the local phone and radio systems are destroyed.

These same ships, crewed by the Coast Guard Auxiliary and supported by disaster-aid groups, can bring in hundreds of emergency-response personnel to a disaster zone and provide them housing so that lodging on-shore can be dedicated to the victims of the storm, while bringing thousands of tons of supplies. Each ship will also be capable of distilling, bottling, and shipping thousands of gallons of water and over 100 tons of ice to shore each day.

This humanitarian fleet—this Salvation Navy—will have far more disaster-response capability than anything currently in use by either FEMA or the military, and—here's the kicker—it actually saves taxpayers the tens of millions of dollars it would have taken to turn these ships into scrap.

Generous corporate sponsors will underwrite the conversion and modernization of the rescue fleet.

So why is Ward Brewer so upset? Politics.

For want of a "germaine" bill between now and the end of March to which they can attach a rider giving these obsolete ships to his non-profit Beauchamp Tower Corporation, the entire program could be sent to the bottom.

The U.S. Navy has been holding these ships, but if legislation does not come through soon, other interests and indeed other countries will be allowed to potentially scrap or salvage these ships, ships that could be saving American lives in coming hurricane seasons. We gripe about foreign nations controlling our ports, even as we give away our ships. This must not stand.

Ladies and Gentlemen, kickstart your Congress.

Save this Salvation Navy.

Update: The OES Project Web Log has a new post up today that explains the concepts and technologies involved in far more detail.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:00 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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