First, before we get all fired up and take up hammer, saw, and paintbrush in order to rebuild the Crescent City, let’s try and get a handle on exactly what we’re up against. And the picture drawn in this Washington Post article is daunting indeed:

First they have to pump the flooded city dry, and that will take a minimum of 30 days. Then they will have to flush the drinking water system, making sure they don’t recycle the contaminants. Figure another month for that.

The electricians will have to watch out for snakes in the water, wild animals and feral dogs. It will be a good idea to wear hip boots and take care of cuts and scrapes before the toxic slush turns them into festering sores. The power grid might be up in a few weeks, but many months will elapse before everybody’s lights come back on.

By that time, a lot of people won’t care because they will have taken the insurance money and moved away — forever. Home rebuilding, as opposed to repairs, won’t start for a year and will last for years after that.

Even then, there may be nothing normal about New Orleans, because the floodwater, spiked with tons of contaminants ranging from heavy metals and hydrocarbons to industrial waste, human feces and the decayed remains of humans and animals, will linger nearby in the Gulf of Mexico for a decade.

Read the whole thing because there’s many more obstacles to rebuilding New Orleans than one can imagine.

There’s been a lot of “Buzz” on the blogs about not even bothering to rebuild New Orleans. To my mind, this is silly. Say what you want to about levees and dikes and such, but there’s a very good reason why New Orleans is one of the oldest cities in North America.

Location. Location. Location.

Located as it is at the mouth of the Mississippi, the importance of the city as a port cannot be overstated. Currently, the Port of New Orleans is the 9th largest in the country handling more than 130,000 freight containers and almost 700,000 passengers in the cruise industry every year. And despite the advent of trucks and railroads, more than 280 million metric tons of freight are carried down the Mississippi every year. Much of that freight – grain and other agricultural products mostly – ends up in those 130,000 containers to be shipped abroad.

Still want to abandon New Orleans?

Then there’s human sentiment to consider. While it’s probably true that most of historic New Orleans has been submerged (the French Quarter apparently is relatively undamaged) there’s a reason we have historic preservation societies; to protect and maintain historic sites and buildings.

Rebuilding all the historic buildings that were destroyed is not possible. But I’ll bet if given half a chance (and generous donations), the New Orleans societies would jump at the chance to rebuild many of those beautiful old buildings exactly as they were – down to the studs used in the flooring.

Finally, the Captain asks exactly the right question; what will it say about us as a nation if we fail to rebuild one of our major cities?

Americans don’t do pessimism, not as policy and not as part of our national character. We grew into the nation we know through an unbridled optimism about the kind of people we are and the kind of people we could become. Jimmy Carter found that out when he decided to tell Americans that we had come as far as we could go in his infamous “malaise” speech, and that we needed to know our limits. Rarely has an elected leader so misunderstood the people he led. We put men on the moon less than a decade after the notion occurred to us as a real possibility. We don’t do limits.

And so New Orleans must be rebuilt, in some manner, right where it is now. No leader will get up and say, We give up. Katrina beat us. Let’s move on. That message will not resonate with the vast majority of Americans on either side of the political divide, which will bring a political consensus to ensure that we produce some kind of recovery for New Orleans. We can and will debate the how and the what, but not the whether. We’re Americans, and we don’t run from a fight.

Spot on. And if a partnership between government and private businesses can be formed for the rebuilding efforts, I predict that people will return in droves to take advantage of relatively cheap housing as well as business opportunities galore.

“It’s good to be shifty in a new country” could be the motto of the new New Orleans. All it takes, as the Captain points out, is the national will to rebuild it.

See ya in the French Quarter at Mardi Gras in five years…