Are We Being Realistic About New Orleans? (Keith Olbermann)

Are We Being Realistic About New Orleans? (Keith Olbermann)

SECAUCUS - We are not acknowledging much besides the best-case scenario in New Orleans.

The city may not be back in six weeks. Or six months. Or six years.

That's kind of shocking to say, given the trauma and dislocation of the last five days. But it's true nonetheless. We have to be hopeful, for the 23,000 now getting a tour of the sports domes of the southwest, for the million or more feeling far away and lost, for the people still trapped, for the unknown hundreds or thousands dead.

But long-term we may be doing them - and ourselves - more harm than good.

Consider two pieces in this morning's papers from separate fields - science and sports - in which relying on the best-case scenario can be fatal or financially disastrous. While we instinctively shake our heads at Mayor Ray Nagin's revision of his recovery timetable from 10-12 weeks, to 14-16,  while we wonder why he should be so dour when our modern world can put theStock Exchange back on line on 9/17/01, when we have technological capability undreamed of even when we were rebuilding Europe after the Second World War - it may prove that even Mr. Nagin may be wearing
rose-colored glasses.

Look at what Howard Beck and Pete Thamel are writing in The New York Times about the National Basketball Association moving the New Orleans Hornets franchise out - not just for a few weeks, or the first half of the season, but until October, 2006. The NBA is about people and money, and when it senses a lack of either in one of its franchise cities, it bails. Yesterday, an e-mail went out from the league to each of the 30 teams instructing them to make provisions for playing the Hornets somewhere else this season.

There's only one reason for that. The NBA has examined the situation and has serious doubts that there will be people in New Orleans to go see basketball any time this winter, or roads for them to travel in, or public health conditions permitting 15,000 people to gather in one space.

When I interviewed FEMA Director Mike Brown on Countdown last night, I took him into the future and asked him if, when New Orleans was "reopened," he would look back at the greatest step in that process, the decontamination of the water now drowning the city. He agreed completely. It's not just water - it's water with decomposing people and animals in it. And it's water full of chemicals and solvents and battery acid and anything else dangerous in a city. And it's water destroying homes and foundations and roads. And it's water ruining, of all things, the water system.

And the remedy might even be worse than the cure. Guy Gugliotta and Peter Whoriskey writes in The Washington Post this morning that scientists are afraid of what happens after they drain the floodwaters back into Lake Pontchartrain. It's not just water any more, they say, it's a toxic soup now being dumped into the delta surrounding the city. Getting it out of people's houses is one thing. Getting it out of the ecosystem is - in the worst-case scenario - more expensive than the Gross National Product of this country.

If that isn't enough to make you wonder when the concept of "New Orleans" will be operative again, there's a nauseatingly prescient article in the files of U.S. News And World Report. Posted exactly six weeks ago, the piece posited a hurricane-delivered flood that "could take months to drain," and quotes an LSU expert as forecasting somebody "creating a refugee camp for a million homeless residents."

When Chicago burned in 1871 it was widely predicted that the city would return to being prairie brush by the spring of 1872. No one would ever live in San Francisco again after 1906. Europe would never stand upright after the way everybody bombed each other from 1939 to 1945.

Those were all pinheaded predictions. And this piece here is not going to suggest the place is finished. I'm just suggesting that realism is as important as optimism right now. The danger to the immediate future of New Orleans wasn't the hurricane, and it isn't the looting, and it isn't lack of resolve nor skill. The danger? The city is still soaking in it.

E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com.  To learn how you can help, please visit our website.

. August 30, 2005 | 7:37 p.m. ET