NOW with Bill Moyers: The City in a Bowl
September 20, 2002, © PBS
Transcript

DANIEL ZWERDLING: When travelers rate their favorite cities around the world, they put New Orleans near the top of the list… Cajun culture… The Mississippi…The French Quarter.

But a scientist named Joe Suhayda sees a more troubling vision of this city.

JOE SUHAYDA: What we have here is a surveying rod and it has the lengths marked along the length of the rod. So what I’m going to do is go ahead and extend this.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Can I help you here?

JOE SUHAYDA: Yes. Go ahead and hold that.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Suhayda studies hurricanes. And he’s brought me to the French Quarter to show what could happen if the most powerful kind of hurricane hits New Orleans.

JOE SUHAYDA: So this indicates the depth of water that would occur above this ground in a category five hurricane.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It’s hard to comprehend, really.

JOE SUHAYDA: It is really, to think that that much water would occur during this catastrophic storm.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So basically the part of New Orleans that most people in the United States and around the world think of as New Orleans would disappear under water.

JOE SUHAYDA:That’s right. During the worst of the storm, most of this area would be covered by 15 to 20 feet of water.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit New Orleans in our lifetime?

JOE SUHAYDA: Well, there– I would say the probability is yes. In terms of past experience, we’ve had three storms that were near-misses that could’ve done at least something close to this.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So emergency management officials are trying to get ready… they’re playing a hurricane version of war games.

WALTER MAESTRI: A couple of days ago we actually had an exercise where we brought a fictitious Category Five hurricane–

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The worst.

WALTER MAESTRI: –the absolute worst, into the metropolitan area

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Walter Maestri is basically the czar of public emergencies in Jefferson Parish. It’s the biggest suburb in the region.

WALTER MAESTRI: Well, when the exercise was completed it was evident that we were going to lose a lot of people we changed the name of the storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B… kiss your ass goodbye… because anybody who was here as that Category Five storm came across… was gone.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The American Red Cross lists the worst natural disasters that might strike America. They worry about earthquakes in California, and tropical storms in Florida. But they say the biggest catastrophe could be a hurricane hitting New Orleans. . . .