Okay, I'll say it.

I'm sure we won't know for weeks yet exactly what the damage to New Orleans is really going to be, or how much it will cost to repair. And I'm a tad wary of expressing my opinion based on the response to some of Democrublican's recent posts that danced around the subject of humans living in inadvisable locations, whatever the reasons. But a certain book has been on my mind a lot since I first heard about Katrina's predicted path last week. If you haven't read it, immediately find yourself a copy of John McPhee's Control of Nature, and read the section on the Army Corps of Engineers and the Mississippi River. It will explain a lot of where I'm coming from, and may explain a lot about where I presume Democrublican is coming from, if not his actual comments.

But I'll go ahead and state it anyway, as a geoscientist who understands the principles of geomorphology, as someone who has worked with the USACE, as someone who has never been there or known anyone there, and most importantly, as an uppity know-it-all with an overly high opinion of my opinions.

We should abandon New Orleans.

Let it fill with water and leave it.

It was a stupid place to have built a city in the first place, and it has only gotten more precarious as the levees were built higher and higher. This was bound to happen sooner or later, and is bound to happen again.

Even if the costs of rebuilding are not as great as I fear they will be, perhaps we should take this as the opportunity to get out now. We've been raising the levees for years because "we're already there, and sure it wasn't a great idea in the first place, but there is a city there now, and we can't just abandon it" (sounds remarkably similar to a lot of the current justification for our presence in Iraq). We could spend the reconstruction money on grants to the former residents so they can live elsewhere. If we do rebuild, the next catastrophe will be even worse. It may take hundreds of years, but it will happen sooner or later. Eventually, Ol' Man River is going to shift into the Atchafalaya River, despite the best efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers. Or the next hurricane will stay at category five and strike just to the west of N.O.

I wonder if any of our politicians or pundits on the right or left will have the cohones to put forth this idea in public. I haven't heard a peep on the subject yet.

Okay. All that said, I'm going to go send some money to the Red Cross, and I wish the best of luck for the unfortunate souls that are caught up in this mess.