Peenie Wallie: Laissez Les Bon Ton Roulette

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September 23, 2005

Laissez Les Bon Ton Roulette

For the second time this month, water is flowing through breaches in the levee system surrounding New Orleans. It occurs to me that the fair city of New Orleans still hasn't grasped their predicament. Because they are below sea level, they need to be very sure that their levees don't break. As in, extremely sure. And they need to have a backup plan in place in the event they do break. The backup plan should be something like this:

They should have four Chinook helicopters sitting on standby around the clock.
They should have sandbags the size of boxcars loaded onto barges at various points along the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain.
The helicopters should be used to search for breaks in the levees, and then repair any breaches using the sandbags stored on the barges.
The barges could be moved by tugboats to deliver sandbags to the areas of the levees that are breached.

Why have they not figured this out? The cost would be negligible when compared to the damage done by submerging the entire city twice in the same month. Am I the only one smart enough to think of this? What's going on here? The skies should be swarming with Chinooks. Where are they? If the answer is they're in Afghanistan or Iraq, then lets get them back here, at least through November.

Technorati tags:Hurricane Rita, Rita, Hurricane, New Orleans, Levees, Chinook