I'm just wondering what sort of dream world so many have been living in, to see these continued reports on the news about NOLA repopulating.

Remember what Donald Trump put so pointedly a couple weeks ago? The one thing you can't have happen in a city that is below sea level, is to have the levees fail. Since these four failures in the canal walls (which have been reported in the news as "levees") that have been patched up, and not effectively, the city continues still extremely vulnerable to additional flooding. So why would anyone come back until they figure out how to reengineer the bad design, get it fixed, fix the St. Bernard MS River levee that was topped, and then overhaul and upgrade the other river and lake levees that surround the city? This is not to mention getting rid of Mr. Go, which destroyed so much wetland, and which continues to get minimal use (congrats again to the Army Corps of Engineers, way to go). Mr. Go is not getting enough press either.

Why is it so necessary that the city be repopulated right away? Let's just bring everyone back and have them wear paper bags over their heads all the time. NOLA culture is not going to disappear if we stop and take 5-10 years to fix the problem. It is still possible for NOLA to be safe from flooding if the problem is addressed (look at what was done in the Nederlands), but it is a long-term solution (and one probably best addressed without the help of ACE and without letting NOLA decide how to spend its own money to do it).