The Day the Big Easy Drowned
August 2005, and a doomsday scenario predicted by some engineers and scientists is about to play out, with geographical and man-made factors combining to produce one of the worst natural disasters in American history. The Day the Big Easy Drowned is a scientific analysis of the disaster in New Orleans, explaining what really happened and why. New Orleans has long been a ticking time bomb. Built several feet below sea level, precariously protected from the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain by a series of man-made levees and surrounded by petroleum and chemical industries, the city has had a few near misses from hurricanes in recent years. The levees were built to protect the city from a category two or three storm but as Hurricane Katrina moved along the Gulf coast it gathered pace to become category five. It eventually weakened to category four and turned east; Mississippi took the brunt. It looked as if New Orleans had had another near miss, but what few people realized was that unsustainable water pressure was pushing on the city's only defense. Levees were breeched and water from the lake and the Gulf of Mexico started to flood into the city. We deconstruct what happened using CGI and then explain what happened next, minute-by-minute. Where the water goes, what it does. Soon the floods started to affect petroleum and chemical plants and as they did so, the water turned into a 'witch's brew' with oil, sewage and corpses sweeping through the flooded streets. Access to the Corps of Engineers and to Joe Suhayda, an engineer who in 2004 predicted with startling accuracy the impact of a such hurricane on New Orleans, provided NGT&F with new insight into the disaster and what could have been done to avert it. Our scientific investigation also looks at the fate of the survivors. What happens next for this drowned city? Up to 80 per cent of it was flooded, and tens of thousands of people were refugees. It could take months for the water to disappear, but what of the giant, poisonous mud pit left behind? Will New Orleans rise again and how quickly? And what will be done to protect it for the next inevitable hurricane season?
