Rebuilding to require historic effort
WASHINGTON -- President Bush yesterday vowed to rebuild New Orleans, a herculean task beyond anything that civil engineers have faced in US history.
''New communities will flourish and the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it," the president said in a nationally televised address, adding that he has ordered his cabinet to come up with a comprehensive rebuilding plan for New Orleans and smaller Gulf Coast cities devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
But even as Bush was speaking, city planners and engineers predicted that any attempt to restore the city of 469,000 -- now mostly under water -- will take years of work and tens of billions of dollars to complete, and will likely unleash political battles over which areas should get priority.
Some engineers said that replicating the exact cityscape of New Orleans, which is six feet below sea level, makes little sense. Any reconstruction should be aimed at protecting against a recurrence of the floods that devastated most of the city but left nearby areas as little as 5 feet above sea level unscathed, they said.
The engineers pointed to a long list of tasks: Levees will have to be rebuilt -- higher and stronger than before. Power plants and telecommunication centers should be spread around the city, so that all would not be lost in future floods. Even many buildings that survived the flood, which covered 80 percent of the city, will have to be razed to protect against mold and disease.
''We are talking about bulldozing entire neighborhoods," said Doug Bandow, a senior analyst at the Cato Institute who specializes in redevelopment. ''Much of New Orleans is relatively uninhabitable."
Harvard Design School professor Michelle Addison, who is teaching a class this fall on rebuilding Sri Lanka after last December's tsunami, warned that houses should be torn down quickly for health reasons. ''Anything that has been water damaged pretty much becomes a mold factory almost immediately," Addison said.
In US history, portions of large cities have been rebuilt, including Boston, San Francisco, and Chicago after devastating fires in the 19th century. However, those were not modern cities which would be much more complex and costly to rebuild.
''It is unprecedented in anything any of us are familiar with," said John Durant, managing director of the American Society of Civil Engineers. ''The scale of the World Trade Center was enormous in terms of the cleanup and rebuilding, but that was two or three city blocks. Now we are talking about 25 miles of coastline and a densely populated city."
The flooding of New Orleans, which had long been feared, raises the question of whether the city should be rebuilt in the same place, with the same layout.
Cities around the world have employed different strategies to rebuild after catastrophes. After World War II, Poland rebuilt its capital city of Warsaw to look as it had before the Nazis leveled it, painstakingly recreating its medieval sector from old drawings. By contrast, Japan built a modern city with wide boulevards among the ruins of Hiroshima, leveled by an American atomic bomb.
Lawrence Vale, who chairs MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and who recently co-edited a book about the history of urban rebuilding after disasters called ''The Resilient City," predicted that New Orleans will be rebuilt in exactly the same place despite the challenges of the location.
''Human inhabitation of cities is a very stubborn thing," Vale said. ''There is a level of inertia and investment, on the one hand, and emotional attachment on the other that makes it next to impossible to imagine a city choosing to relocate, even when it is demonstrably located in a disproportionately vulnerable location."
New Orleans sits in a particularly problematic place. Most is below sea level, in a kind of geographic bowl surrounded by water. It stands on a soggy foundation of silt, sand, and clay deposited over the ages by the Mississippi River. The city has long relied on an elaborate network of levees, canals, and pumps to remain dry. Even if it is rebuilt in a stronger form, the levee system could fail again in the face of another hurricane.
Still, some engineers suggest it could be rebuilt in a smarter and safer way.
MIT architecture professor Carlo Ratti said that New Orleans could protect itself against floods by rebuilding homes in at-risk neighborhoods on stilts, as people in Asia have done. But he predicted that the idea would probably receive little support because it would be considered too radical a change.
Still, he said, there are other engineering solutions that could minimize potential damage, such as building walls in such a way that they would be less likely to cave in. ''People will still have to leave the city [when there is a hurricane]," Ratti said. ''But we can minimize the damage."
Because New Orleans was a sharply divided city, with a few affluent tourist areas and a downtown business district set off against vast run-down neighborhoods with high levels of unemployment and crime, how federal assistance is apportioned and what gets rebuilt first could have major political overtones.
Vale said that past disasters in economically stratified cities, such as the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, led to political unrest by throwing into sharper relief the division between haves and have-nots. In the case of Mexico City, when downtown business areas were rebuilt before low-income housing areas, discontent led to the defeat of the party that had long run the city.
''What inevitably happens is that the post-disaster environment is a window onto the inequalities of the power structures of the place before the disaster hit," Vale said. ''We learn about which people are valued most . . . by seeing which kinds of things are attended to first."
In recent decades, smaller cities such as Wilkes-Barre, Pa., have been rebuilt after devastating floods. The 1972 destruction of Wilkes-Barre by flooding caused by Hurricane Agnes may be a particularly instructive example, said Eugene Roth, a Wilkes-Barre attorney who helped lobby Congress for federal assistance.
First, Congress gave residents $5,000 grants to help them get back on their feet, clearing the way for them to repair their property themselves. Many didn't have flood insurance. Second, he said, the Army Corps of Engineers raised the levees surrounding the city by five feet for 13 miles.
But that effort also underscored the challenges facing New Orleans: The new levee system for Wilkes-Barre was not completed until last year. 