Good-bye New Orleans

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APACHE3

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Hmm, should I still apply to New Orleans IM programs, since the entire staff is about to be wiped out!!! New Orleans WAS high on my list of cities. GL guys, let us know what happens! 😱
 
Pretty tasteless post, man. Some of us have a lot of friends and ties the city.

-S
 
I don't think that the OP is all THAT tasteless, since there is a practical question. Charity is surrounded by water (and Tulane is right at the back door). Ochsner is closed and under armed guard.

I was thinking of a friend of mine that is a resident at Tulane (lives well outside the city on high ground, evacuated to Tennessee), who was encouraging me to apply for a staff position for next year. She's all right, but I was wondering about what will happen with her job and all the residents at the Ochsner, Tulane, and LSU-NO programs. Obviously, although it may sound callow, I have taken New Orleans off the list. Likewise, I think it only logical that many people will cross programs in the city off their list.

I, too, wish them luck, and also look forward to hearing more information as it becomes available.
 
The OP was in jest, but of course, its no laughing matter now. I went to college in Louisiana, have many friends in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. I have received emails from most, so they are ok, but evacuated early. However, as a practical point, for me, a family man with young children, I can't see putting them through life in the Big Easy which will be a third world country for the next few years..sad to say. I will probably apply and see what happens. Actually my Step 1 is low 80's, so maybe they wouldn't interview me anyway. Good luck to all down there and to those with friends and family there.
 
are they seriously thinking of rebuilding this city???... wtf?... so another hurricane can wipe it out again?... a city below sea-level right next to an area where there are tons of tropical storms and potential hurricanes is idiotic at best...
 
So is there a place that you honestly think you are more needed than New Orleans in the next few years?

Of course they're going to rebuild New Orleans. Its one of America's great cities and it will go on no matter what....
 
APACHE - don't know what your 3 digit score, but I think the IM cutoff is like 200 for Tulane IM. They aren't that big into board scores ... Sorry to be curt earlier, it just seemed like a smart-ass heading: "Good bye New Orleans", especially to someone who's spent the last four years there ... But, I can see the rest of the comment had a point..

Of course they'll rebuild it! The city has lasted hundreds of years, and this one might have devastated it, but they'll recover. The levee system was crap, and they'll fix that. The housing codes for building hurricane proof structures were too lax and they'll make those stricter. It's horrible right now, but they aren't going to let it become a modern day Pompeii.

-Simul
 
that is one place I wouldn't buy real estate... fool me once, shame on you... fool me twice, shame on me...
 
The bright side is, maybe it will be easier to get slots there now.
By the way, how was New Orleans built in the first place? Did they choose a site underwater and then pump the water out and build the city? Seems strange.

EDIT: I did some research - the French founded it in the early 18th century on the rare bit of high ground in the area, followed by the Spanish and Americans throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. That's how it got the name Crescent City, because the only developed land was the higher land in the shape of a crescent. In the 1910s A. Baldwin Wood invented the pumps and enacted the plan to drain the rest of the city.
 
dante201 said:
Isn't that what the Netherlands did? I thought they were mostly below sea level as well.

That's right. They've had several storms which killed thousands throughout history - one in the 13th century that killed 50,000.
A few years ago, though, they completed the 50 year Delta Project which is a huge system of dikes. It was the largest construction project in history.
 
I have to say I was wondering the same thing. The ERAS site says to check with programs in the area to make sure they are still accepting applications. I think I will do that before officially applying.
 
I assume the NO programs will recruit for a class next year, but maybe they will have to resort to signing bonuses, housing stipends to lure applicants down for a look. We'll see...It's unbelievable what is happening down there. It's like Haiti.
 
Does this mean that ppl with low scores now can also apply to im programs in new orleans?
 
I assume the bar will be a little lower next year in NO.
 
Give me a break...your self-centeredness is disgusting. As if what's going on is all about all of you and the ease of getting your residency down there.
 
APACHE3 said:
I assume the bar will be a little lower next year in NO.

REST in peace all those that passed in the storm.


But just to mk a point. I bet you anything THIS match (2006) is going to be extremely competitive for q thing. Why? Well I know that many of the students that were in LA are now being transfered to other schools in the area. Additionally, there are no residency spots in LA anymore. So.......this basically means same number of applicants and less residents, dont have to be a genius to figure this one out.
 
More patients elsewhere...more demand for doctors elsewhere...more residency spots will open up where the demand has increased.

Well, that wasn't hard.
 
There are great hospitals in NO. We know that. But guess what, if you're a resident there now..are you able to fulfill your required time to graduate? What bad luck for those who just started PGY-1? Maybe they can be picked up elsewhere. But I can't imagine why someone who will be able to go wherever he/she wants for internship would risk the next few years in a NO program. NO hospitals will be back, and better then ever, but that will take a few years, and I for one, (with a family), would not want to take that chance. I went to college in LA. I have friends in LA and family in Mobile. it would be a great location for me, but not now. Who knows, maybe you're right and this event draws the super-charged thrill seeker gunner med student with 250+ boards. My bet, it won't. But who cares what i say..GL to everyone in Match.
 
This is fascinating stuff. It was posted on a Neuro-ophthal list server earlier this week.

Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - September 1, 2005


New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize

By George Friedman

The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the
American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the
Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that
funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a
class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than
they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and
in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding
capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who
alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the
extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and
allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of
the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi
flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New
Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos
stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday,
New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key
moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the
War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect
they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire
Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or,
to state it more precisely, the British would control the region
because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land
and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the
ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew
Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had
much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored
graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets
could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be?
The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was
simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic,
then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial
minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the
agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really
weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred
near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the
Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the
prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear
strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways,
distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America
was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added
value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The
navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question
mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist,
and it was not clear that it could recover.

The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and
south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the
history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in
the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It
exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are
agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion
of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo,
nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not
only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so
on.

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is
where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the
bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the
global food industry starts here, as does that of American
industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of
goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would
have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if
steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies
if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River
transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have
low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the
assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans
by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from
port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough
trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these
enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics
could be managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and
Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense,
it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of
about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf.
The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all
of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil
worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became
unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the
impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a
sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport
of these other commodities.

There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts,
the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the
Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction
operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The
status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the
underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though
not trivial -- is manageable.

The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected
on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees
containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not
silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to
render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently
damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The
river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the
residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving
behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some
are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs
the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not
the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical
significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to
return to.

The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in
order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores
to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for
their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities
critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and
that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce
cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New
Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is
either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a
long time.

.
 
continued...

It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But
the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with
relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had
networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But
those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that
these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they
will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs,
finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming,
they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional
connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection
to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be
making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce
patterns in the region.

A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical
infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to
operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power
plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical.
Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt.
Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people
who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them,
are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.

It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon
went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died,
but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most
are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed
the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but
only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and
those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces.
It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United
States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and
business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right
now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and
it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population
and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has
depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges
navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to
the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this
exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit.
Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has
been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national
security issue for the United States.

Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities,
but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable.
That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence
of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously
less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost
not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river
transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport
system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity
to solve the problem.

It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one
would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are
located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by
ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other
in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem.
Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going
north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States
needs a city right there.

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial
infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but
exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a
city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating.
The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be
opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to
endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the
city will return because it has to.

Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the
way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New
Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its
safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it
is in the worst imaginable place
 
Just a quick post for those of you who were thinking about applying to Tulane for IM: we will indeed be recruiting an intern class for next year. We're not quite sure yet if we'll be coming to you or if you can come to us for recruitment. We plan to be back in partial swing by November 1 and in full swing soon after, definitely by match day. We hope you'll continue to consider us. We're a great bunch, and very dedicated, as is evidenced by what many of our residents went through during the storm and its aftermath. You will all be very lucky to work with such an amazing group, just as I feel now.

Here's the link to the thread: http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=226938
 
To the jackoff who thinks this is a friendly statement, why do people continue to live in California, when the mudslides happen year after year and the threat of falling off the side of the country looms above? And ehat about moving to an area where there are threats of forest fires when there isn't enough rain? Why live somewhere where tornadoes run rampant? Or there are always droughts and water shortages? How about the East Coast where hurricanes are also threats? I can go on and on about each area of the country and the reasons why you'd be a fool to build or rebuild. No place is safe. New Orleans has never seen damage like this and there is no reason to believe it will happen again. When we rebuild, we rebuild better and stronger and smarter. So, it sounds to me that no matter what you say, shame on you.

GoPistons said:
are they seriously thinking of rebuilding this city???... wtf?... so another hurricane can wipe it out again?... a city below sea-level right next to an area where there are tons of tropical storms and potential hurricanes is idiotic at best...
 
I truly hope the Corps of Engineers gets the Netherlands to help on developing a more sound levee system. Amsterdam has been below sea level for..hmmm..about..700 YEARS!!!! I think they know what they are doing, so New orleans will rebound, but those levees need to be upgraded. If Amsterdam can do it, I'm sure NO can!! 😉
 
GoPistons said:
are they seriously thinking of rebuilding this city???... wtf?... so another hurricane can wipe it out again?... a city below sea-level right next to an area where there are tons of tropical storms and potential hurricanes is idiotic at best...
maybe next time Detroit gets burned to the ground, we should leave it that way too...
 
When did Detroit get burned to the ground?

There were some riots in the '60s, but not so much structural damage. And, when we win sports championships, sometimes sofas burn and a couple people die, but as far as the city burning down, wasn't that Chicago?

Or, were you just being clever based on the posters handle?

Simul
 
SimulD said:
Or, were you just being clever based on the posters handle?

Simul
👍 :meanie:
 
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