by Manjit Handa
If a big, slack hurricane crosses the Gulf of Mexico on a certain track, it would drive a sea surge, drowning New Orleans below 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."
That is what the future holds for New Orleans, published Scientific American in October 2001. It further said that the city lies below sea level in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of an uncomplimentary union of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at an increasing flood risk. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which safeguards the city from the gulf, is also rapidly vanishing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh will have vanished because an acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. In that case evacuation would also be impossible as the surging water would cut off the few escape routes.
Scientists at Louisiana State University predicted that more than 100,000 people could die, that it was a disaster, a little had happened until now and more could happen any time.
Not just that, they also calculated that any such catastrophe at New Orleans would have serious economic and cultural consequences as well. Louisiana produces one third of the country's seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas. Then it is the abode of America’s inclination for jazz, Cajun and Creole, and who can even ignore Mardi Gras.
So it is not to say that we were not warned. Almost everything the article predicted has come true. Could it not have been avoided then? While families have broken forever, so has the New Orleans social structure. For years to come, that state is going to be different.
BUT, it is one thing to bear with the geographical factors, things we have no control upon but to very humbly comply with the supernatural intervention, for, since time immemorial mankind has seen such highs and lows, AND, it is another thing to bear with the very much controllable factors. The other hurricanes. The fact that a lot of the humankind could have been saved by the not-hit-by-the-storm kind, just by being there in time. That the issues of ‘race’, 'poverty' and 'class' could have been left aside.
Well I just forgot that that is also an old thing.
Putrefying bodies are being evacuated every moment in New Orleans. Perhaps it is an obsolete question to even ask as to when the putrefying minds will be evacuated. Can we ever connect with our own fellas on a deeper level?
For now, the wreck is total.
Yours, with disgrace,
Manjit
