This Passes For Competency?

Louisiana is spending time and effort on trying to keep a football team from jumping to another city. Where are the priorities. You've got thousands of people who don't even have a place to live on a permanent basis, and the politicians are thinking that they can cure their woes with keeping the Saints in New Orleans. I'm sure that the thousands of New Orleans residents who are having trouble finding a place to stay are enjoying the effort in trying to keep a professional football team with an owner who has deep pockets in the city.

Heck, you've got local RV businesses wondering why they were never contacted to supply campers and trailers to people who were displaced. Good question. Maybe if the local politicians did their job, FEMA would have known that you were able to supply the campers and do so at a favorable price to everyone involved. And the demand is outstripping supply.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco's staff remains miffed that FEMA has failed to expedite the process or focus its buying power in-state. Residents bemoan the slow pace of getting city services back on line, a problem partly linked to lack of housing for workers. And all sides seem exasperated with FEMA. As the matter drags on, washed out citizens remain in limbo.

According to the article, the industry can produce about 144,000 trailers, but only 60% meet the FEMA specifications, which require 30-foot trailers with a "bunkhouse construction" that will sleep several people, along with amenities such as a bathroom, shower and kitchen. It might be a good idea to relax the specifications, in order to ease the housing crunch.

In a nod to common sense, buildings that were raised off the ground fared better than those that rested on slabs. If you're going to rebuild, mandate that all new construction include raised construction for the first floor. It will save time and money should the city be flooded again.

Throughout the city, homeowners who never paid attention to such considerations are discovering something their grandparents took for granted: Raised houses are one of the oldest and best ways to protect against water in a flood-prone city.

The evidence is everywhere. Go to any neighborhood that took a few feet of water in the wake of Katrina, and the line between survival and failure is as clear as the high-water mark that still stains the sides of thousands of shotgun doubles.

"I live on Esplanade Ridge, and my house is raised 3 feet -- that's what saved me," said Eleanor Burke, senior architectural historian for the city's Historic District Landmarks Commission. "What people in New Orleans have forgotten is that you can be on the highest land in the city and it can still flood."

In the coming months, as local officials grapple with ways to rebuild the crippled city, this is a lesson that should not be forgotten again, according to Burke and other building experts. To avoid flooding in the future, they say, the city should stop letting people build slab houses at "base flood elevation," which is the minimum level required, theoretically at least, to spare a home from a 100-year flood. New Orleans, they agree, should once again be a city of raised houses that lie above the floodplain.

It makes you wonder how and why city officials ever permitted buildings to be built straight onto slabs, when they knew of the flood hazards. If the evidence was everywhere, as the article claims, then everyone should have known that owning a house that rested directly on a slab was a ticking timebomb that needed only a bad storm to make the nightmare occur.

And considering that one should not reserve 100% trust in the levee systems to protect against the worst that nature doles out, the additional initial cost of building a structure off the ground is well worth the piece of mind.

Construction experts are also concerned the city will not adopt building codes that go beyond the minimum standards embodied in the government's Flood Insurance Rate Maps, which dictate elevation requirements for housing in a flood zone.

Though the maps are supposed to protect property owners from a 100-year flood, they are based on the assumption that a community's levees and drainage system will not be overwhelmed by such a storm. In New Orleans, however, thousands of homes were inundated in the aftermath of Katrina even though they were in areas not officially considered flood zones.

"The levees have given people a completely false sense of security," said Craig Colten, a professor of geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University who is preparing a history of the city's levee system for the Army Corps of Engineers.

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