Bringing the Point Home

[anastasiav]

Compare the area of the New Orleans Flood to Your City:

Portland, ME

Boston

Montreal

Hartford

New York - yikes

Comments

[feather-brain70.livejournal.com]

Wow!

And on a side note, as much as I hope you are getting enough sleep, it's heart warming to know that my friends are still awake. :-)

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm going to bed now. And then I shall sleep until noon.....

[(Anonymous)]

I'm jealous. Sweet dreams

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

No Le Jeux for you, either. I guess.

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

No, I'm working today, 130 - 10pm

Josh went to the Fort Knox Demo, leaving at about 6am this morning.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

Compare the area of the New Orleans Flood to Your City:

New York - yikes

Yikes, indeed =8-0 My first thought was "My neighborhood dodged the bullet"--but then I realized that the placement of the circle seems completely arbitrary. Realistically, where would a hurricane likely hit Metro NYC first? The South Shore of Long Island. The Rockaways, and a good chunk of Brooklyn and Queens, would be toast :-(

Dr Science observes that it would be interesting to see a contour map showing what Your City would look like if the water level rose by ten feet....

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

Having looked at a couple of maps here, I'm thinking that they had the idea to do this project and never got it done. I looked at NYC and Boston, and they are both completely unrealistic (Beacon Hill is in the pink zone), and do not in any way reflect the contours or flood threat of the city. Look for example at Salt Lake City, where the tops of some small mountains are included in the supposed flood threat area, but low lying areas to the South are not. These maps are not to be taken seriously.

[shalmestere.livejournal.com]

These maps are not to be taken seriously.

I guess that their point is "What would Your City look like if X% of it were under water?"--and these maps do show that (albeit not in a geologically-informed way). It would be more informative to see a map which illustrates where the damage is most likely to occur, but that may have been beyond their capabilities....

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

1. Flood area is approximate using available satellite images.

This statement is obvious BS.

[zen-thug.livejournal.com]

it appears that they calculate the square acreage of flood damage in New Orleans (that map seems geographically reasonable). And then drew a circular overlay with that same volume, just to give some minor idea of how much ground area would be flooded.

Obviously Witchita would have more area underwater than Denver. The kind of software and time it would take to write a webpage that allows you to arbitrarily enter any city and get a topo accurate flood image is just silly.

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

It may well be, but I think the point is that scaring people with stuff that's not going to happen is not a great idea. There are enough bad things in the world that can happen that I don't think we really need to load ourselves up with extra boogeymen.

[zen-thug.livejournal.com]

A little critical thinking on the part of any viewer will quickly show that there is little to fear from widespread circular floods. ;)

[herooftheage.livejournal.com]

True. But a little critical thinking on the part of any voter would quickly show that George W. wasn't competent to be President.

And yet ...

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

Now, see, this is interesting, because the comments on the website where I first saw this link had much this same kind of commentary -- not realistic, not geographically correct, etc. But it never occured to me that this was their point.

What I believe they are trying to do is help people understand exactly how huge the area covered is, in a way that is more familiar to them. I don't know how far it is from South Clearview Parkway to Paris Rd in New Orleans, but I sure as heck do know how far it is from East Deering to West Scarborough in my hometown.