No way on the rebuild of the flooded sections. That is ridiculous, IMO. Ok, you strip it to the shell, wash the wood, basically rebuild the whole thing. What have you got? (its going to be too late for alot of the wood, btw) What about the soaked crawl space or basement that is still toxic? What about the soil? Thats going no where for a long time. There will probably be some new strains of mold that man has never seen before come out of this due to the mixture of salt, fresh water, sewage, gas, oil, dead bodies and a host of chemicals from countless garages and stores. There is no telling what is going to grow in that soil and affected areas. It will be like a toxic waste dump.
I dont see any way that that city can ever be inhabitable again. I know I wouldnt even consider it, if it were my city, to take my children back into that. We have no clue what kind of diseases may come of that. We dont know because it has never happened. There is a town in Missouri, not far from St Louis, called Times Beach. Although its no comparisson to NO in size, its now gone, many years ago, because some cat was using it for a toxic waste dump. I would consider this along the same lines. There is just no way to clean that city up.
I would say leave the French Quarter for parties, bars and grills, kinda like a vacation spot, but with very few residents. Let the rest go back to what mother nature wanted it to be, wetlands. If she didnt, she wouldnt have made it below sea level and below the level of the Mississippi River. Man keeps encroaching on nature and then whines like a baby when a natural thing happens and they lose it all. New Orleans, or the area it was built on, was mostly meant to be a wetland buffer to protect Baton Rouge and that area. Now thats not hard to see.
Rebuild it, no. Simple for me to see anyway.
Andy
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