"Good likelihood of further collapse"

I can't get this quote out of my head. At the very least it is the general motto of 2019.  But it could also title your book about post-Katrina New Orelans, or this entire era of human existence in the 21st Century, really. It all depends on how big you want to go with it.

It comes to us from New Orleans Fire Chief Tim McConnel this week as he assessed the status of the two cranes teetering over downtown after the Hard Rock hotel collapse on Saturday.   As he described the situation, it started to feel a lot like a repeat of the struggle to shut down the Macondo oil well after the blowout.

How crews will stabilize the two cranes is still unknown. According to McConnell, the initial idea that more cranes could be brought in to stabilize the site is no longer an option.

“It hasn’t been the best of news,” he said. “It doesn’t appear we’ll be able to use cranes to take this crane apart and stabilize it. We’re working on other ideas and other techniques to stabilize it.”

Experts from all over the world have been brought to New Orleans to find a solution, including engineers who responded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, but it’s unlike anything they’ve seen before.

They can't stabilize the cranes. They don't even know how to stabilize them.  It's like nothing anyone has ever seen before.  Hell, there's even a live spill cam online you can watch to keep up with their "junk shots" or "top kills" or whatever it is they think might work.

What they think might work right now is dynamite. In fact, this morning, they were thinking they needed to explode the cranes in a hurry before a fast approaching tropical storm arrived to blow them over because, of course that was a thing also.  Today, they decided they had more time and pushed the demolition to Saturday.

Which is probably good because this is a much different sort of job from your typical controlled building implosion.  Under ordinary circumstances, engineers have weeks and even months to carefully plan and stage a demolition of an existing structure.  But in this case they are dealing with two listing cranes precariously balanced over a garbage heap. It's a complicated and dynamic math problem they have a very limited amount of time to solve.  Also, the Advocate tells us,  they have to protect electrical and gas lines. Also they have to move a bunch of cars out of a nearby garage "so the gasoline inside them cannot explode if the cranes should fall on the garage."   They're dealing with a lot of stuff here.

On the bright side, we have this lovely summary from the Advocate reporters.

If all goes as planned, the cranes that have threatened an intersection packed with critical city utility infrastructure will cascade elegantly into the surrounding rubble in a matter of seconds.

I like that sentence almost as much as McConnel's thing about the "further collapse." If all goes as planned the ad-hoc scramble to blow up the cranes before they fall will leave us with an elegant cascade of broken machinery tumbling down onto a trash pile.  So, yeah, let's hope for that.  What are our chances?  Well the experts tell us they can "gurantee perfect predictability."

Another firm on the ground in New Orleans is Controlled Demolition Inc., a Maryland company that demolished the remains of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City after the 1995 bombing there.

The company boasts on its website that it employs “a world-renowned team of experts drawing on backgrounds in environmental remediation, engineering, dismantling, traditional demolition, explosives, material handling and the latest technology to guarantee complete predictability

Still might want to keep those fingers crossed, though.  I'd keep away from any monkeys' paws, though.  We ought to have learned by this point to be more careful about what we wish for.

But Mayor Ray Nagin said in a news conference that the city, which still has less than half its pre-Katrina population of nearly 500,000, can no longer wait for federal help. "We're not sitting around waiting for anybody any longer," Nagin said in a news conference. "We're going to move this city forward with the resources that we can generate creatively, and everybody who wants to join us later, you're welcome to come on board."

Ed Blakely, who was hired this year to coordinate the city's recovery effort, said the plan must be approved by city residents, the New Orleans City Council and the City Planning Commission before officials begin negotiations with investors and developers later this summer.

"By September, we hope to have cranes on the skyline," Blakely said.