REBUILDING NEW ORLEANS

This article, in the Boston Globe, is the first I have seen on the subject. There will, no doubt, be many more.

President Bush yesterday vowed to rebuild New Orleans, a herculean task beyond anything that civil engineers have faced in US history.

''New communities will flourish and the great city of New Orleans will be back on its feet, and America will be a stronger place for it," the president said in a nationally televised address, adding that he has ordered his cabinet to come up with a comprehensive rebuilding plan for New Orleans and smaller Gulf Coast cities devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

But even as Bush was speaking, city planners and engineers predicted that any attempt to restore the city of 469,000 -- now mostly under water -- will take years of work and tens of billions of dollars to complete, and will likely unleash political battles over which areas should get priority.

Some engineers said that replicating the exact cityscape of New Orleans, which is six feet below sea level, makes little sense. Any reconstruction should be aimed at protecting against a recurrence of the floods that devastated most of the city but left nearby areas as little as 5 feet above sea level unscathed, they said.

The engineers pointed to a long list of tasks: Levees will have to be rebuilt -- higher and stronger than before. Power plants and telecommunication centers should be spread around the city, so that all would not be lost in future floods. Even many buildings that survived the flood, which covered 80 percent of the city, will have to be razed to protect against mold and disease.

''We are talking about bulldozing entire neighborhoods," said Doug Bandow, a senior analyst at the Cato Institute who specializes in redevelopment. ''Much of New Orleans is relatively uninhabitable."

Read the whole thing. The question, of course, is whether or not it makes sense to rebuild a city below sea level in a hurricane zone. The solution, of course, will not be based on logic. Rather, it will be based on emotion. Therefore, expect the city to be rebuilt on the exact same spot.