RadioBanter - OT PBS Transcript from 3 years ago

WALTER MAESTRI: It's going to look like a massive shipwreck. There's
going to be-- there's going to be, you know-- everything that that the
water has carried in is going to be there. Alligators, moccasins, you
know every kind of rodent that you could think of.

All of your sewage treatment plants are under water. And of course the
material is flowing free in the community. Disease becomes a distinct
possibility now. The petrochemicals that are produced all up and down
the Mississippi River --much of that has floated into this bowl. I
mean this has become, you know, the biggest toxic waste dump in the
world now. Is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Federal officials say that nobody in America has
confronted these conditions before. Not across an entire city. Not
after an earthquake. Not after floods. Not even after September 11th:

So they've gone to the US Army Corps of Engineers, and they've asked
them to figure out — How would the city even begin to function? Jay
Combe has spent the last few years assembling a doomsday manual.

JAY COMBE: Street signs will be gone. The things that you normally
think, "Well, I'm going 'round the corner of Broadway and St.
Charles," and that place won't be there.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So Combe's been mapping crucial structures with
longitude and latitude, because he says emergency crews will have to
use navigation devices just to find out where they are.

And Combe says, how will they get the water out of the city? For the
past hundred years, New Orleans has operated one of the biggest
pumping systems in the world. Every time there's a major rain,
colossal turbines suck up the water and pump it out of "The Bowl."
Combe says that won't work after a big hurricane.

JAY COMBE: The problem is that the city's been under water, the pumps
are flooded. They don't operate now. We have to get the pumps back in
operation and in order to get the pumps back in operation, we have to
get the water out of the city.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Catch-22

JAY COMBE: That's correct.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And here's perhaps the most troubling question of
all: if a huge hurricane does hit New Orleans, how many people will
die?

JAY COMBE: I think of a terrible disaster. I think of 100,000, and
that's just my guess. I think that there's a terrible lack of
perception. The last serious hurricane we had here was in 1965. That's
close to 40 years ago.

So, we've dodged bullets three times since Betsy and I'm not sure we
can keep counting on the hurricane changing its mind and going
someplace else.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Stories about disasters in America usually end on an
optimistic note. People rebound. The nation rebuilds. Life gradually
gets back to normal. But officials in Louisiana are facing another
possibility: If a monster storm strikes New Orleans, this city might
never come back.

DANIEL ZWERDLING (ADDRESSING SUHAYDA): Are you seriously suggesting
that the nation might have to abandon the city of New Orleans?

JOE SUHAYDA: I think there would be some concern perhaps of rather
than trying to rebuild the city would be then to just demolish those
areas that couldn't be refurbished, reclaimed and basically start from
some kind of scratch or blank slate, so to speak.

WALTER MAESTRI: And if I'm the Senator from South Dakota or North
Dakota or wherever, you know, am I going to want to vote the kind of
massive funding that it's going to take to rebuild it, given the fact
that nobody can promise me that it's not gonna happen again two weeks
later.