NEW ORLEANS: IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

Building New Orleans seemed like a good idea at the time, about 1717. The land was more than 10 feet above sea level and the future city's site was protected from a stormy Gulf of Mexico by extensive buffers of marshes, swamps and barrier coastal lands. The British thought New Orleans so strategically and economically important that they tried to take it away from us in 1815, only to be defeated by a ragtag group of settlers, Indians and pirates led by Andrew Jackson.

The early vision proved correct. By the time of Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans marketing area had prospered mightily, accounting for $330 billion of the USA's Gross Domestic Product.

But, unfortunately, the city got messed up along the way.

An axis of evil – consisting of politicians, developers, oil industrialists and the Army Corp of Engineers – conspired to destroy the lands which once supported and protected New Orleans from harm.

The engineers redesigned the Mississippi into massive shipping channels, which prohibited the great river from overflowing its banks and depositing silt in the surrounding areas. This lack of replenishment caused the protective swamps, barrier lands and marshes to erode away, leaving the city at the mercy of raging storms coming off the Gulf. Over one million acres of these protective lands have vanished since 1930.

The developers and agricultural interests pumped the wetlands dry, causing the earth to dry and compress – and slowly sink lower. The drilling of water wells accelerated the sinking. When the oilmen pumped oil out of the ground, more support was lost and the surface sank faster. By the time Katrina swept in, New Orleans had sunk from 10 feet above sea level to several feet below.

Along the way, giant levees and dikes were built to control the waters of both the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain so as to keep the land dry. But the protective dikes themselves began to sink, evidencing the fact that man's engineering genius had converted New Orleans into a giant sinkhole. Although the dikes were allegedly high enough to protect the city against a Category 3 hurricane, an engineering survey of the dikes found that in some areas, the barriers were as much as four feet lower than the experts had thought. Thus, the protective dikes were in no condition to deal with a Category 3 hurricane, let alone the mighty Katrina.

Tragically, New Orleans has now become a sinkhole. This means the higher the dike is built, the faster it will sink. It becomes a never-ending process. House Speaker Dennis Hastert's statement questioning the advisability of rebuilding New Orleans may have been politically incorrect, but it did make sense. Trying to build on sinking ground does have its drawbacks. Ask any engineer.

Although scientists and environmentalists have screamed about the problem for years, no administration (national, state or local) has taken the matter seriously. Neither political party has shown any interest in the peril of New Orleans. As late as 2005, it was easier to get an appropriation to build a bridge to a virtually uninhabited island in Alaska than to protect the "Big Easy." Continuing the blindness of previous Presidents, the Bush administration cut $70 million from a paltry budget request to raise the heights of the levees.

Since 2001, Louisiana and Mississippi politicians have strived for get Uncle George to pony up $14 billion for a 20-year project to restore the Gulf Coast. Instead, we will be coughing up at least $200 billion to repair the damage. Some experts feel it's going to be more like $1 trillion when the heavy costs of inflation, restoration, rebuilding, lost production, lost opportunity and human suffering are added up.

To bad for us that the mothers of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush never taught them some of that old-time wisdom ... like "a stitch in time saves nine."

Or, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Or, in this case, "a dollar in time saves seventy."

Should New Orleans be rebuilt? No, not as it was. Instead, we need to come up with an entirely new, over-arching concept for a city which embraces the requirements of nature, commerce and engineering.

Remember, at one time skyscrapers couldn't be built in Chicago because that city, too, had major sinking problems. Then one day a brilliant engineer decided to build a below-ground platform to support a building's pylons, thus preventing them from sinking. Now Chicago is loaded with skyscrapers – and none of them show signs of sinking.

If we could learn to keep tall buildings from sinking over a century ago, surely we can now come up with a similar means to keep levees from sinking.

The job can be done. Just don't give it to NASA. Those bureaucrats have been mystified by foam for the last 25 years. And keep the project away from the Army Corp of Engineers, whose work on the Mississippi River and in Florida has caused massive ruination of the environment.

Just let's find a bright engineering mind and turn him loose. Or her.