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WASHINGTON (AP) - It's too early to predict how long it will take to remove the floodwater from New Orleans because the Army Corps of Engineers is still planning how to accomplish the feat.
Lieutenant General Carl Strock says engineers are developing a plan to make new breaches in the levees in New Orleans -- from hundreds of feet wide to 3,000 feet -- so that a combination of pumping and the effects of gravity will move the water out of the city.
A former head of the Corps of Engineers estimate that pumping the water out could take a month or more.
Former Lieutenant General Robert B. Flowers says removing the water depends on how much of the pumping capacity engineers can get working. Flowers says there're six city pumping stations and the Army could bring in auxiliary pumps.
Cost to rebuild infrastructure after Katrina: staggering
WASHINGTON (AP) - No one knows how much it will cost to rebuild the streets, the highways and the bridges devastated by Hurricane Katrina. One thing for sure, however: It will cost more than any other post-disaster reconstruction effort in U.S. history.
Estimating the amount to rebuild isn't on anyone's radar screen yet, as most of New Orleans still is under water and transportation officials are concerned primarily about opening roads for emergency access.
Jeffrey Brown, assistant professor of urban planning at Florida State University, said the total cost will be staggering. Transportation systems in Mississippi and Louisiana sustained the worst damage. State and federal damage assessment teams are being trained and sent into the field.
A major New Orleans artery, Interstate Highway 10, can't be used because the ramps are under water. Giant sections of the eight-mile Twin Span bridge -- about 40 percent of the structure that connects New Orleans with Slidell -- collapsed into Lake Pontchartrain.
U.S. Highway 90, a hundred-mile stretch of road that runs along the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Pascagoula, Mississippi, was basically destroyed. The Bay Saint Louis-Gulfport and Biloxi-Ocean Springs bridges are gone.
Nagin says feds 'don't have a clue' about how to deal with disaster relief
NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The mayor of New Orleans is seething over what he sees as the government's slow response to his city's disaster.
Ray Nagin went on WWL Radio Thursday night to say the feds "don't have a clue what's going on."
He added, "Excuse my French - everybody in America - but I am pissed."
The mayor says he needs troops and hundreds of buses to get refugees out. Nagin accused state and federal officials of "playing games" and "spinning for the cameras." He says he keeps hearing that help is coming, but "there's no beef."
Congress is rushing through an aid package of more than $10 billion and the Pentagon is promising 1,400 National Guardsmen. |
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