This 2002 PBS interview

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Suhayda studies hurricanes. And he’s brought me to the French Quarter to show what could happen if the most powerful kind of hurricane hits New Orleans.

JOE SUHAYDA: So this indicates the depth of water that would occur above this ground in a category five hurricane.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It’s hard to comprehend, really.

JOE SUHAYDA: It is really, to think that that much water would occur during this catastrophic storm.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So basically the part of New Orleans that most people in the United States and around the world think of as New Orleans would disappear under water.

JOE SUHAYDA:: That’s right. During the worst of the storm, most of this area would be covered by 15 to 20 feet of water.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit New Orleans in our lifetime?

JOE SUHAYDA:Well, there… I would say the probability is yes. In terms of past experience, we’ve had three storms that were near-misses that could’ve done at least something close to this.

[...]

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The American Red Cross lists the worst natural disasters that might strike America. They worry about earthquakes in California, and tropical storms in Florida. But they say the biggest catastrophe could be a hurricane hitting New Orleans.

WALTER MAESTRI: The hurricane is spinning counter-clockwise. It’s been pushing in front of it water from the Gulf of Mexico for days. It’s now got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levies of the– the– that surround the city, it tops those levees. As the storm continues to pass over. Now Lake Ponchetrain, that water from Lake Ponchartrain is now pushed on to that – those population which has been fleeing from the western side and everybody’s caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills. And we’ve now got the entire community underwater some 20, 30 feet underwater. Everything is lost.

[...]

DANIEL ZWERDLING: We’ve tried to find scientists who’d say that these predictions of doom could never really come true and we haven’t been able to find them. The main debate seems to be, when the country is facing different kinds of threats, which ones should get the most attention? The federal government has been cutting money from hurricane protection projects. Partly to pay for the war against terrorists.

DANIEL ZWERDLING:Do you think that the President of the United States and Congress understand that people like you and the scientists studying this think the city of New Orleans could very possibly disappear?

WALTER MAESTRI:I think they know that, I think that they’ve been told that. I don’t know that anybody, though, psychologically, you know has come to grips with that as– as a– a potential real situation. Just like none of us could possibly come to grips with the loss of the World Trade Center. And it’s still hard for me to envision that it’s gone. You know and it’s impossible for someone like me to think that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 at 8:37 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.