Because, like Venice (the Italian one, not the one in Los Angeles where I used to live), New Orleans is sinking.
A 2001 Scientific American article by Mark Franchetti suggested that the impact of a major hurricane on a city that has subsided 3 feet in the last 100 years would be catastrophic. The (pay-only) article opens:
THE BOXES are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. “As the water recedes,” says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, “we expect to find a lot of dead bodies.”
New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms.
If Ivan hits New Orleans – or even comes close – the potential exists that New Orleans will be reshaped, and probably not in a good way.
The subsidence is caused primarily by compaction of the soft sediment the city is built on – like Venice – but in addition, as a center for oil and gas production, a substantial amount of the subsidence is caused by the simple extraction of the oil and gas which had been holding the city up.
Several proposals have been floated to inject water into the strata under the city, but these – like the gates being built to protect Venice – are major and expensive infrastructure projects.
When I talk about infrastructure, and Kotkin talks about ‘sewer socialism’, this is the kind of stuff I mean. If we don’t invest in this, it really doesn’t matter whether we preserve historic architecture or demolish it for roads – because neither the historic architecture or roads will be there in a couple of decades.
“New Orleans Is Sinking”
by the Tragically Hip
Bourbon blues, on the street loose and complete
Under skies all smoky blue-green
I can’t forksake the dixie dead shake
So we dance the sidewalk clean
My memory is muddy what’s this river I’m in
New Orleans is sinking and I don’t want to swim
Colonel Tom, what’s wrong? What’s Going On?
You can’t tie yourself up for a deal
He said “Hey North you’re south shut you big mouth
You gotta do what you feel is real.”
Ain’t got no picture postcards, ain’t go no souvenirs
My baby she don’t know me when I’m thinking about thoes years
Pale as a light bulb hanging on a wire
Sucking up to someone just stoke the fire
Picking out the highlights of the scenery
Saw a little cloud looked a little like me
I had My hand in the river
My feet back up on the banks
Looked up to the lord above and said hey man thanks
Sometimes I feel so good I gotta scream
She says Gordie baby I know exactly what you mean
She said,
She said,
I swear to god she said…
My memory is muddy what’s this river I’m in
New Orleans is sinking, babe, and I don’t want to swim
(Swim!)
Don’t worry; the free market will take care of it.
By the way, linking to this is probably in poor taste. Don’t do it.
Convene an emergency meeting of the Security Council. They should be able to launch an emergency study by December. What is the French position on evacuation?
The French recommended sanctioning the Gulf of Mexico until it cooperates.
If the free market were operating, New orleans would have been abandoned a long, long time ago. But, since the free market has been distorted, making New Orleans appear to be a great place to live, 10-20 thousand people may eventually pay the ultimate price. You can’t fool Mother nature.
Praktike,
Your link “in the above comment”:http://windsofchange.net/archives/005512.php#29583 is a JPEG picture, not multimedia. Try that again, so we can, uh, choose to avoid the correct bad taste site. Yeah, that’s it…
Twenty feet of Water is not enough. Something deeper and more permanent.
I’ll buy 1000 Tragicaly Hip Albums upon the sinking(20 feets okay, but its got to be at least 20,000)!
As I understand it there simply is not enough water in the shallow gulf around New Orleans to cause a storm surge high enough to actually drown the city.
Looks like I picked the right time to leave for the mountains.
The storm surge may or may not be a catastrophic consideration (NOLA is about 40mi inland, so the surge has to wind its way up the river), but the rain is a serious consideration. It’s not unusual for a particularly heavy rain to flood streets and yards, as it is, even if the canals have been drained ahead of time as a precaution.
What concerns me, in addition to the friends I have there, is what might happen to the space program. The Michoud Assembly Facility (where the Space Shuttle External Tank is built) is located on the east side of the city, along the Intercoastal Waterway. It’s right at water level. If it suffers the same degree of damage as Frances inflicted on the buildings at KSC, or worse, the cost of repair could be another nail in the Shuttle program’s coffin.
It’s worth mentioning that most of the dead bodies they expect to find floating aren’t fatalities from the storm. New Orleans has a long history of above-ground mausoleums. And these mausoleums are even more susceptible to releasing corpses than submerged (traditional) cemetaries.
Authorities definitely don’t expect 10,000 people to die, even in a direct hit.
Yeah, it was the incessant rain that caused the extensive flooding in downtown Richmond, VA, not the storm surge. They long ago prepared for the storm surge but nature cheated this time.
Joe, that was a photo of a famous Pat O’Brian’s Hurricane beverage. Thought someone here would get the (very bad) joke. Alas.
New Orleans is an untenable location. It’s below sea level, and more worryingly, below the Mississippi. Furthermore, the Mississippi will continue to raise itself above the countryside through the continual accumulation of silt. If I were an insurer, I would refuse insurance for any new construction in New Orleans, and raise risk premiums on existing facilities through the roof.
My best-case future for that section of the country is a measured preparation for a new channel for the Mississippi, and a deliberate break of the levees in 2014 or so, with the expectation that the City of New Orleans gets the opportunity for a ten-year Going Out Of Business Sale. New Orleans would dry up and blow away without the Mississippi, but at least it wouldn’t drown, and ten thousand with it.
And hope that the next decade doesn’t serve up a super-Ivan. Thank the hypothetical absolute that Ivan decided for an easterly track, while you’re at it.
According to John McPhee’s Control of Nature, New Orleans is sinking because of a lack of soil replenishing floods — an unintended consequence of the Mississippi River dike system.
When I lived in N.O. (freely of my own will and without government coersion), I was led to believe that a catastrophic huricane would have to hit the city from the East, bringing ocean water into Lake Ponchatrain and dumping it on the City. Because huricanes tend to head inland once they come close to land, this was not believed to be a likely path.
I was on a plane recently with a woman who told me she was looking forward to climate change and its attendant consequences because the two “wickedest cities on the planet” New Orleans and Amsterdam, were likely to be destroyed. One person’s tragedy is another’s divine judgement, I suppose.
The city to turn itself into a trash dump for about 30 years and when the trash got piled high enough then cover it with concrete and start over again.