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villalobos · Sep 10, 2005, 11:15 AM

All right now that I got your attention with that sensationalizing title, the real thing. Actually Chirac defended a thesis on geographical economy and talked about New Orleans, and how the location of the city was prone to be flooded.

For those of you knowing of French, here is the link.
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,...-627421,0.html

I guess the guy is as dumb as he sometimes looks. :-)

analogika · Sep 10, 2005, 01:33 PM

Actually, *everybody* predicted New Orleans flooding. Including the National Geographic, not exactly a low-profile sleazemag.

Except, apparently, FEMA.

iDriveX · Sep 10, 2005, 02:50 PM

I'm sure even FEMA knew that N.O. would be flooded, but yesterday I read an article in Time Magazine that said it would have taken 10.5 billion dollars to retrofit the city for flooding. Well apparently, it will take about 15 billion dollars to save the city post-flooding. And the retrofit wasn't guaranteed to work against a large scale category 5 hurricane. Nothing would have. Katrina might have been that hurricane. So they weighed their options and obviously a decision was made.

I also read another article that they were talking about 3 things happening in the US before the year 2050, and this article was written in 2000. The first was a large scale terrorist attack, the second would be a large hurricane that decimates New Orleans, and finally the third was an earthquake in the 7.5-9.0 Magnitude that would strike Los Angeles County. It was creepy reading that but they went on to say that most of the buildings in Los Angeles County could withstand an quake of that size BUT there were a lot of essential buildings that were never retrofitted, like 5 of the 8 police stations and most hospitals. The deadline for retrofitting was actually this year but all of them got extensions granted to them until 2008. Let's hope that's not too late!