Thu Sep 01, 2005 11:35 pm   Reply with quote      

Has anyone been personally affected by this horrible storm? Besdies gas prices rising, that's minor to me....

Is everyone's family and friends okay?

I didn't know that new orleans ORIGINALLY Started out under water. It wasn't even a real city first until some engineer came along and said "Hey we can use this land that's under water."

And there you have the birth of New Orleans.

Fri Sep 02, 2005 1:00 am   Reply with quote      

History

...

20th century

Much of the city is located below sea level between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, so the city is surrounded by levees. Until the early 20th century, construction was largely limited to the slightly higher ground along old natural river levees and bayous, since much of the rest of the land was swampy and subject to frequent flooding. This gave the 19th century city the shape of a crescent along a bend of the Mississippi, the origin of the nickname The Crescent City. In the 1910s engineer and inventor A. Baldwin Wood enacted his ambitious plan to drain the city, including large pumps of his own design which are still used. All rain water must be pumped up to the canals which drain into Lake Pontchartrain. Wood's pumps and drainage allowed the city to expand greatly in area. However, pumping of groundwater from underneath the city has resulted in subsidence. This has greatly increased the flood risk, should the levees be breached or precipitation be in excess of pumping capacity, as would later happen in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. A major hurricane could create a lake in the central city as much as 30 feet deep, which could take months to pump dry.

Canal Street, looking away from the river, 1920s

In the 1920s an effort to "modernize" the look of the city removed the old cast-iron balconies from Canal Street, the city's commercial hub. In the 1960s another "modernization" effort replaced the Canal Streetcar Line with buses. Both of these moves came to be regarded as mistakes long after the fact, and the streetcars returned to a portion of Canal Street at the end of the 1990s, and construction to restore the entire line was completed in April 2004.

The suburbs saw great growth in the second half of the 20th century; the largest suburb today is Metairie, which borders New Orleans to the west. Metairie is not incorporated and is a part of Jefferson Parish.

While long one of the USA's most-visited cities, tourism boomed in the last quarter of the 20th century, becoming a major force in the local economy. Areas of the French Quarter and Central Business District which were long oriented towards local residential and business uses switched to largely catering to the domestic and international tourist industry.

A century after the Cotton Centennial Exhibition, New Orleans hosted another World's Fair, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition.

The document was originally published at Wikipedia and the document is licensed under GNU Free Document License. If you'd like to find out more about New Orleans, you might be interested in visiting this page in Wikipedia.

Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:37 am   Reply with quote      

It's all so sad, words escape me...

Wed Sep 07, 2005 6:27 pm   Reply with quote      

All of the experts knew the fragile history. There is no way they should have allowed the levees to break. They KNEW what could happen.

The worst thing about this tragedy is Not the hurricane itself, it's the human carelessness and human error. The human hurricane that could have been avoided.

Sat Sep 10, 2005 9:01 pm   Reply with quote      

The country has number of social problems, and one of problems is the problem of inequality. This is probably the biggest problem in US. No one took it seriously, and this disaster is a result of that.