New Orleans No More?

Reading this post from the New Orlean's Times-Picayune website -- they finally had to evacuate their building, they published no paper edition today and may not publish for some time to come; to whom would they deliver it? -- it's like some science fiction movie where catastrophe depopulates a city and the survivors fight over the remains. Everyone's fighting for scraps, or to retain some fading semblance of the old order.

That was really brought home to me watching the NBC Nightly News. They showed ragged groups of stragglers streaming along an empty interstate trying to get out any way they could. Some were even camping underneath the overpasses, having nowhere else to go. It was eerie, to say the least.

I think many Memphians also see spooky echoes of Hurricane Elvis from two years ago. Memphis was knocked pretty hard, but not down. Few evacuated; most stuck it out at home. New Orleans is a city that has been knocked over, down and flat. It's even possible that it may never come back at all.

Which is what I'm wondering. At what point does the cost of rebuilding -- building new levees, draining the city, clearing the mess, razing ruins, building new infrastructure, designing the new city and then building it -- become too expensive? Is it possible that New Orleans will actually reach that once unimaginable threshold? Are we looking at the real-life Escape From LA?

Is there a possibility that New Orleans will be abandoned, left to moulder as Lake New Orleans (the larger successor to Lake Pontchartrain)? Will the north shore cities remain? How does a city disincorporate when it's so big and so enmeshed in the fabric of banking and regulation?

There's also the unbelievable situation of having something like two million homeless transients floating across the South -- people from three states who are, in effect, stateless. Many folks have crossed state lines and may end up stuck wherever they've ended up. How will government payments keep track of them? How will people claim checks mailed to homes that don't exist, in neighborhoods sitting under water, in cities the police won't let them into?

As terrible as Hurricane Andrew was in Florida, it missed doing to Miami what Katrina has done to New Orleans. I hope that Louisiana watched and studied the way Floridians recovered, because those lessons will help them in days to come. But when a state's most populous city ceases to exist, how do you recover from that?

Will they try to recover? That, to me, is the fascinating question. It won't be broached for a while yet, as they are still measuring the scope and depth of the catastrophe. But at some point, I think it has to be asked: Can we afford to rebuild this city?