The Mississippi Gulf Coast took a hard hit on its bridges, but in fairness to the designers and builders of decades ago, no one anticipated a Katrina. Now that they can, will they, and if so, how so.

I'm a bit of a cynic. The "system" promotes status quo, old, conservative, good-ole-boy bidness, especially in the deep south. I would bet they will put back up what was knocked down, maybe go higher and more costly. If they do, grab your wallets and purses, America.

I think we saw a category one Biblical storm, and will soon see the cat-twos and cat-threes. The cat-two will do-in the new bridges, which will get rebuilt higher and stronger still at a much greater expense that the cat-three will make short work of. There will be no new bridges. The nation will surely be bankrupt.

What about going the other way? What about multi-purpose and going for simplicity and economy, building something the destuctive waves, however big they get or however high the world sea levels rise, can't reach. Let's go low and incorporate floodable tunnels where boats need to come and go, and on the run-ups to the tunnels, make them jetties to greatly restrict the flow between the gulf and the bays so that sea water can't easily engulf a community.

If you must build slab bridges, build them very low. If the bridge goes underwater before the hurricane winds arrive, the monster waves can't get under the slabs. The bridge gets wet. So what. It's nothing but steel and concrete. The tunnel section floods. So what. We designed it to flood. When the water levels return to normal, pump out the tunnels and reopen the traffic conduit.

Little known fact, but you get half of your storm surge before the storm makes landfall. If your road surface is only a couple feet above an astronomic high tide, she'll be under even for the old cat-one and two hurricanes. A cat-two megacane might have your causeway fifteen feet under before things get bad, but however bad things get on the surface, when it is all over, the causeway is just wet and the tunnel needs pumping out.

Mobile tried it for Mobile Bay. They are sure to lose their high causeway, but if they rebuild much lower, they have what I propose Mississippi gets.

The east/west train tracks need to be routed around the bays like they do in the Florida panhandle. They are nothing but a nuisance with noise as these long trains traverse highly populated coastal areas where they encounter crossings every quarter mile for a hundred miles of coast. It was well past time to end that nonsense, but what was the first bridges back up, good as before, doing bidness as usual--yup--da damn trains.

This region has a history of rebuilding as before and plugging along as before to be wiped out as never before. Had a Camille hit anyplace on the east coast or the Florida and Texas Gulf coast, you can bet effective mitigation measures would have been taken and continually enforced and reinforced. Mississippi allows casino gambling and sees nothing at all wrong with floating them on massive barges moored in front of their communities as though gawdy barges are an effective defense. Evidently, they were nothing but offensive.

We now have the ability to lay down paving that breathes and passes rain water right through, putting an end to drainage and storm drains that create major problems in any body of water they empty into as well as starve a ground water table of fresh rain water. Huge parking lots are the big problem. These need to be mandated by code. Instead of resurfacing old roads, take them up and lay down porous paving. Move the community steadily toward the future.

Piers and docks need to go low and be made of concrete or be considered disposable, because no configuration of wood, foam, and plastic fails to end up as debris. I could not ask for a better example of what to build than the low concrete fishing pier located at Katrina's point of landfall where the water was thirty-two feet above mean sea level. Still good as new, just lost the awnings. Too bad their bridges were not built that smart, but fortunate that one was.

The short section of four-lane slab bridge connecting Waveland to Interstate 10 bridges a portion of the bay, but does so at grade, which at that point is four feet above sea level. That section of bridge very early on went underwater, and eventually went twenty feet under to emerge a few hours later wet. No one seems to have noticed, because the talk is all UP.

Everything must go UP. The Hurricane Man says everything must go DOWN, but the Hurricane Man thinks outside the box from well outside the system. Who is out of step, here, the parade, or THAT guy. Conventional wisdom is on their side. Hurricanes are on my side. Time is the enemy of one and friend of the other. Time will tell.