(no subject)

[theweaselking]

A cross-section of New Orleans:


The 17th Street Canal levee broke sometime yesterday, after the hurricane passed.

Comments

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Confess to a certain fondness for the anecdote about the womwho's yelling that she's okay as she heads for the second-story roof.

Hoping there continue to be no fatalities.[1]
---
[1] A surreal outlook, given that there may already have been fatalities which are simply undiscovered, but you know.

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

This is the first time I've seen that crossection---I kept reading "it's below sea level" but I guess I'd never really grasped it.

Now.... it's one of those moments where I sound like a Tourette's victim again.

shadowcaptain usually keeps a friends-only journal, but his latest post is public, and has photographs. Which are explained nicely by this crossection, really.

[sivi-volk.livejournal.com]

I maintain that that's a stupid place to build a conventional city.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

It made perfect sense to build it there, at the time. It's the largest port in North America. It's *the* access to the largest river on the continent, the one that allows ships to reach most of the rest of the USA.

And then it started sinking, because it's in the MISSISSIPPI DELTA - 2 km of *mud*, straight down, deposited over the last billion years or so by the Mother Of Waters. Once it started sinking, they started needing walls to keep the water out - and when they put up the walls, the river stopped depositing new mud on the bits that were sinking, which meant you stopped having the bits that were sinking get built up again, meaning they sank *faster*.

And yesterday, the largest force of weather on the planet broke those walls and let the water back in.