Living in a "fish bowl" city? What does that LOOK like?

Question

What exactly does this mean? I remember people saying that NOLA is like a fish bowl, which is why Katrina's hit was so bad because they are technically "lower" like in a fish bowl.

I even had a teacher tell me that she was from NOLA and it IS like a fish bowl in that in some areas you can see the ships in the distance and they seem to "tower/float" above the skyline and surrounding buildings.

ANYONE have pictures of a city designed like a fish bowl so I can get a CLEAR picture of what this looks like

Answer 1

heres the best i can do

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

what it means is that lake pontchatrain is to the north, and the mississippi river is to the south.  normally, levees (or big concrete walls) stop the water from going into the city, because the level of the water is above the level of the streets in new orleans.  if these walls werent here, the whole area would easily flood .  so when a hurricane comes in, and pushes an extraordinary amount of water that breaks those levees or floods on top of them, all the water rushes into the city and doesnt stop until an equilibrium is reached. tahts why in some places, it flooded to 18 feet or so  

Answer 2

The "bowl" and "fish bowl" analogies are used a lot by the news media, along with "below sea level".

However, the descriptions are not accurate.

The best analogy is to compare the geography of New Orleans to a compartmented lunch tray with really thick ridges & edges.  There are high areas and low areas in about equal proportions (most of the city is above sea level) with ridges criscrossing the metro area.  Also the high areas and low areas are not perfectly uniform and - for example - there are high spots within the low areas, and low spots within the high areas.

The city was bult on the "high ground" through the end of the 19th century.  The parts of the city built on the "high ground" did not flood during Katrina.

The low areas are almost always parts of the city that were swampland until the early late 1800s or early 1900s. The swamps were drained to fight Yellow Fever and neighborhoods eventually grew on the "new" land as the population grew (usually after WWII) .  A drained swamp subsides over a period of years (which is where the false idea comes from the "New Orleans is sinking") but the ground eventually stabilizes.

The neighborhoods of Lakeview (where I lived when Katrina struck), Gentilly, the Lower 9th Ward, and parts of New Orleans East were built on drained swampland, which is why they flooded so badly.

The Mississippi River tends to be really high during the spring, and ships in the river are easy to see over the tops of the river levees. The superstructures of the ships are much higher than the top of the levee, so they appear to "tower" over the neighborhoods close to the river.

Hope that helps.

Answer 3

What was Bush and his planner thinking?

They should have moved all these people out of that place.

With commonsense, i think no one should go back there to stay.