From: "Phil Payne" 

"Don Hills"  wrote in message
news:yqk+DtgaXm4C092yn{at}attglobal.net...
> If you have access to old copies of Scientific American, the October 2001
> issue had an article that predicted in considerable detail the disaster's
> causes and effects.

http://www.sciamdigital.com/browse.cfm?ITEMIDCHAR=D58B96E1-60BC-4C0F-BCE2-8C9B8
A05275&methodnameCHAR=&interfacenameCHAR=browse.cfm&sequencenameCHAR=itemP

Drowning New Orleans; October 2001; by Mark Fischetti; 10 page(s)

THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large,
windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big,
slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it
would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 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." New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. 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 a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking
further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The
low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also
rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of
delta marsh-an area the size of Manhattan-will have vanished. 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. Extensive evacuation
would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape
routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled
hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more
than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.
File size: 2.13 MB

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5