Passenger Trains > New Orleans Flooding

Am I right that the throat to the New Orleans station is in the lower left of this photo (courtesy of the Washington Post)?

If so, you can see the flooding in that area, and this was taken early on in the flooding - who knows what it is like now?

---

You are correct.

It will come to be worse than anyone can now imagine, it will be YEARS until N.O. can in any way be labeled as over this calamity.

You must be a registered subscriber to watch videos. Join Today!

PumpkinHogger Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It will come to be worse than anyone can now
> imagine, it will be YEARS until N.O. can in any
> way be labeled as over this calamity.

Unfortunately, I think you are right. I saw a report tonight that the efforts at filling the levee at the 17th Street Canal are failing and that other failures are expected. It will take months to pump out the water once the integrity of the levees is restored. I haven't seen anyone in the media deal with this question yet, but I don't forsee a lot of the economic activity coming back unless there is a massive program to correct New Orleans inherent drainage problem. The environmental impact statement alone for such a project will take years to complete.

Everyone should take a look at this video, shot by a helicopter crew. It shows I-90 and the adjacent railroad (CSX?) bridges completely destroyed. It runs for about 20 min.

http://www.wlbt.com/Global/category.asp?C=7857&nav=2CSf

I don't think many have yet fathomed the scale of this disaster. Lots of the story has not yet been told, and it will be ongoing for weeks. But there is also lots going on behind the scene, it is a mammoth rescue effort. 3000 rescued so far from rooftops in New Orleans alone. Gonna be rough the next few weeks, in many ways.

Yes. There will probably be more deaths in the end than at the World Trade Center as well.

Unfortunately, many people chose not to evacuate, including people who were able.

If the magnitude of this continues to worsen with the levee breaches and it continues to fill along with cost estimations to return the city to normal, this may sound controversial, but should not finally common sense win out and we stop dropping billions into a literal hole that is lower than the surrounding lakes and rivers? What if another hurricane comes in with a final coup de'gra yet this season?

To return this to focus, Amtrak will need to start looking to reroute the Sunset farther north or its terminus is going to permanently be short of NO.

I would speculate that in the end this is all going to come down to insurance. You can't get a mortgage without it, and who's going to insure in NO?

GNR1938 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If the magnitude of this continues to worsen with
> the levee breaches and it continues to fill along
> with cost estimations to return the city to
> normal, this may sound controversial, but should
> not finally common sense win out and we stop
> dropping billions into a literal hole that is
> lower than the surrounding lakes and rivers? What
> if another hurricane comes in with a final coup
> de'gra yet this season?
>
> To return this to focus, Amtrak will need to start
> looking to reroute the Sunset farther north or its
> terminus is going to permanently be short of NO.


Alas, the Sunset Limited as we know it may already be history....

:-(


Slo

> To return this to focus, Amtrak will need to start
> looking to reroute the Sunset farther north or its
> terminus is going to permanently be short of NO.

I agree with you there. Miles and miles of the CSX trackage along the Gulf has been completely wiped out. I don't know about west of NO, but that area is swampland just like east of NO, so I'm sure it sustained heavy damage as well.

SloRide Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Alas, the Sunset Limited as we know it may already
> be history....
>
> :-(
I have to agree with you. The train’s day as a LA Nol train are probably over for some time to come.

It's still early days but we have no idea what the overall impact of this event is going to be. I expect it's going to be far more profound than 9/11. We will probably look back on this as the moment when our world changed forever and not for the good.

scannergeek Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > To return this to focus, Amtrak will need to
> start
> > looking to reroute the Sunset farther north
> or its
> > terminus is going to permanently be short of
> NO.
>
> I agree with you there. Miles and miles of the CSX
> trackage along the Gulf has been completely wiped
> out. I don't know about west of NO, but that area
> is swampland just like east of NO, so I'm sure it
> sustained heavy damage as well.


East of New Orleans is where the mega-damage occurred, because the eye went east of NOL and the storm surge was east of the eye. That's why you're hearing about massive destruction in Gulfport and Biloxi, whereas relatively little damage occurred in New Iberia, Lake Charles or Baton Rouge.

not sure where i found his but it ran the day before katrine hit and did more to explain the forthcoming magnitude of the disaster than anything else i saw or read...

You must be a registered subscriber to watch videos. Join Today!

To me I'm thinking you guys are losing faith on how resourceful railroads are when disasters like this happen! I'm glad Zenu though says it better compared to the other poster who thinks 1 and 2 is history soon entierly!

Nature has reclaimed what man thought s/he could dominate. Siting a major city below sea level in the confluence of the gulf, Mississippi river and Lake Ponchartrain and surrounding it with man-made levees and pumps requiring power to drain floods is/was man's ultimate arrogance and hubris. No different from us Californians who insist on building on unstable hillsides with grandiose views and with great regularity being wiped out by fires and or sliding down the hills with too much rain etc. and then rebuilding only to have the same old thing happen again. I recall Shirley McLaine years ago during a Malibu hillside fire which was wiping out all the gorgeous homes saying that the area code for Malibu/Southern California should be 911. At any rate, this devastation is astounding----I think it was the governor of LA who said that NOL might be the next Pompeii. She may be terribly right.
The WTC attacks were a surgical removal in a limited area. This is a quite vast geographical catastrophe which probably, "we", asked for by trying to reclaim lands which nature wanted to keep under water. Look at the Sacramento river delta area----had a disaster up there last year which wiped out a lot of farmers with land below the water level and protected by levees which were undermined by gophers and other varmints doing what they do naturally. Nature.
Our visit to NOL 5 years ago showed us that aside from all the marvelous tourist attractions Big Easy joys, the city is full of citizens living on the edge and in the midst of poverty and they are the ones most heavily victimized. I don't see the citizens of the garden area of NOL in the shots of the looters or the refugees in the superdome.
And aside from that, the sheer daunting logistical nightmares are appalling-----we can send all the water, medicines, food, etc. etc. to the area, but if the infrastructure is gone, the roads, power, etc., how do you get them to the people who need them? NOL and the Gulf coast has just become a third world area.
C.

"Siting a major city below sea level in the confluence of the gulf, Mississippi river and Lake Ponchartrain and surrounding it with man-made levees and pumps requiring power to drain floods is/was man's ultimate arrogance and hubris."

Tell it to the Dutch. They've done the same for centuries.

rdsexton Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Siting a major city below sea level in the
> confluence of the gulf, Mississippi river and Lake
> Ponchartrain and surrounding it with man-made
> levees and pumps requiring power to drain floods
> is/was man's ultimate arrogance and hubris."
>
> Tell it to the Dutch. They've done the same for
> centuries.

True. But the Dutch also have a national government that takes responsibility for improving and extending the dikes. We have a government that's run by people who want to shrink government until it can be "drowned in the bathtub". Those aren't my words they are the words of one of Pres. Bush's advisors spoken as recently as Thursday.
Sorry about what some might call politics but words and ideas do have consequences. They are more than something spewed on daytime talk radio.
That aside.. with ocean levels rising at the rate of an inch or so year due to global warming Holland's turn will come. Along with that of every coastal city in the world.

GNR1938 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If the magnitude of this continues to worsen with
> the levee breaches and it continues to fill along
> with cost estimations to return the city to
> normal, this may sound controversial, but should
> not finally common sense win out and we stop
> dropping billions into a literal hole that is
> lower than the surrounding lakes and rivers? What
> if another hurricane comes in with a final coup
> de'gra yet this season?


I'll agree with this completely.