Eerily prophetic

[unixronin]

This article starts out reading exactly like a description of Katrina .... but National Geographic printed it in April 2001.  The article makes the telling point that even without development eating away at its barrier wetlands, New Orleans' days were numbered: it loses approximately two acres of protective wetlands and barrier islands per hour to the Gulf of Mexico, 25 square miles a year, 1,900 square miles since the 1930s.  That's like the entire state of Delaware washing away in seventy years.  Part of the problem is the oil development in the Gulf and southern Louisiana -- guess what?  You pump oil and gas out of the ground, the ground sinks.

You know what we really need to do about New Orleans?  We need to get the remaining people out, maybe cofferdam the French Quarter to preserve it as a historic area ... then dynamite the Mississippi and Pontchartrain levees and stop trying to fight nature there.  Because whether the levees hold or not, it's a fight we're losing.

Comments

[msa.livejournal.com]

1) You can't really move the port upriver. Suitable oceangoing vessels have far, far too much draft to navigate the Big Muddy. For a few years, I lived in a town in Iowa along the riber, and you could watch them dredge 2-3 times *PER DAY* to maintain a 150'x9' channel. Obviously a 9 foot channel is far too shallow for this, you'd have to be constantly dredging and I'm not sure how feasible that is. If you assume this is a 300 year event (after all, NO has been lucky this long), the costs of dredging like that over a very long period of time are probably lower than the costs of rebuilding the port periodically.

2) Is pretty much what I was thinking. Floodwalls aren't suitable long term high water defenses, but they would work nicely to keep the levee behind them from eroding.

3) I think we should give the locals a little more credit here. Quite a few will stick, more than I think anyone expects right now.