Re: Is New Orleans finished ?

Read the reports of the 1953 floods. The North Sea storm that did the
damage wasn't a hurricane - we are too far north for that, though with
enough global warming that might change (I'm reading Tony Hallam's
"Catstrophes and lesser calamities" - ISBN0-19--280668-8 - at the
moment) - but it did build up the same sort of storm surge that did for
the dykes in New Orleans, helped along by some vigorous wave erosion.


The meterological analysis instigated by the 1953 floods discovered a
couple of mitigating factors - the worst case storm surge could have
been a couple of meters higher. The consequent "Delta Plan" cost about
ten billion dollars and the last bit of it wasn't finishhed until 1997.

http://www.verkeerenwaterstaat.nl/cgi-bin/nieuws/vwn_p.pl?arch_srcID=764&id=3

Some of the new sea dykes were protected against wave action by a layer
of asphalt, which turns out to be too weak to be much use, so it is now
being progressively replaced by the traditional layer of big rocks,
which falls under the regular maintenance of the coast and river
defences, which costs of the order of one hundred million a year.
-------------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

.

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