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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What a crock!
So many of you who are indecisive to negative about rebuilding are surely not suggesting the entire country of the Netherlands and the city of Venice should be evacuated and allowed to flood, resettling the entire country and letting the population and architecture of a major city in Italy be left to essentially "die"?
It only took 5 months, (I'd like to think they read my Email of Sept. 12th on calling the Dutch; it just took them awhile, we're on Southern time out here y'all)but they finally had a pow-wow with Dutch engineers.
Proper levees and dam structures make rebuilding absolutely viable. The ULI and Joe Canizaro, an "Italian businessman" type land developer want to redesign the city without its 300 year ancestral African and Creole families. The looooooong delay in allowing anyone to salvage their belongings had NOTHING to do with safety. Many of the apartments were above the flood line. Everything was STILL thrown out because it SAT for 3 months. More than 1800 public housing units with minimal damage are sitting empty while FEMA pays for ocean liners to board workers. You have NO idea unless you come down here and see with your own eyes.
As for toxic waste; they aren't worried about toxic waste! There are 390 petro-chemical plants in this area! This has been a superfund cleanup site for the last 30 years...or it should be.)
And my final observation is regarding WHY were people evacuated thousands of miles away? There are 4.5 million people in this entire state. Lots of vacant land for many apartments, trailers, permanent federal housing developments. How many units do you suppose could have been built for the $40 BILLION spent on temporary housing? My God, this country is in a major mess. Who IS running this asylum?
God Help America!
Anne Gabriel
Baton Rouge LA
While I appreciate Salon’s continued efforts to keep people informed about our struggles to rebuild our city and our lives, this article only illustrates how too many people with insufficient and inaccurate information are being allowed to make decisions that will affect us for generations.
As a native New Orleanian and Broadmoor resident, I am incensed that John McIlwain would pontificate from such lofty point of ignorance about the naiveté of Broadmoor residents. His comments not only reflect his DC-Beltway arrogance, but also his extreme lack of knowledge about the architectural planning that essentially saved most of the homes in Broadmoor. If he'd taken time to study the architectural history of or drive around the neighborhood, he would have noticed that the overwhelming majority of homes are elevated at least five feet above street level, with many (including mine) elevated at least ten feet or more—centuries old building requirements for surviving a “100 Year Flood”. What looks like a second floor entry on a house is actually the entrance to the home's first floor, with the lower portion of the house being what is described in local circles as a "raised basement". These raised basements are often "unfinished" (i.e., no sheet rock, flooring or wall outlets), with nothing more than thick support pillars throughout them to hold up the structure. A closer inspection of one of these homes would have also shown Mr. McIlwain that Broadmoor houses are typically built of thicker than average boards of cypress and redwood (two types of rot- and termite resistant woods). This is why we found no rotten lumber and very little mold in my basement after removing the sheetrock from the walls of the recently (and unwisely) created basement apartment I'd added before the post-Hurricane flooding.
The raised basement/rot-resistant wood architecture characteristic of Broadmoor is why so many residents were able to return to their homes once the flood waters subsided, why displaced residents of other flooded neighborhoods are buying homes in Broadmoor, and why we are all confident the neighborhood will survive—even if we occasionally need to use pirogues (the canoes our Cajun & Creole ancestors used to navigate bayous and flooded areas) to travel in and out of it.
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Salon headlines in your mailbox
