A comment on this morning’s post about FEMA reminded me about posting this.
Pakistan is to rebuild the city of Balakot in a completely new location after it was razed by last year’s Kashmir earthquake.
The city, home to 300,000 people before the quake, will be rebuilt in a safer location to modern design standards.
More than 73,000 people died and three million lost homes in the earthquake.
No site for the new city has yet been identified, Pakistan’s Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmad told a high-level meeting in Rawalpindi.
The politics of such a decision would probably be impossible in the United States. Yet, Balakot is about three-quarters the size of the city of New Orleans. In physical and engineering terms, it ain’t going to be any easier than it would be — in Louisiana.
The economic necessity of the maintaining a port in New Orleans would still exist regardless of whether or not it is deemed prudent to reestablish a large urban area on land that is lower than the water that surrounds it.