Lessons from Katrina

[Maeve_Mari]

I just learned that they even tried again in 1996 to improve the levees, so they could withstand storms like this. But yet again the environmental groups went to court to prevent it, and they won, so the levees weren't improved.

Talk about unintended consequences!

I betcha there are a good number of very valid environmental concerns and reasons why rebuilding New Orleans will be a costly enterprise, both financially and environmentally.

I found this, an article from 2001 about the state and future state of New Orleans. It's much too long to post in its entirety here, but it's foretelling of the hazards and consequences is keen. It also talks about the role of the environmental groups and their issues, the battles politically which didn't decide on a course of action, the local economies, the fishermen, oil companies, and other assorted locals. Good article to download and read when you have the chance.


Drowning New Orleans October, 2001
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...mber=1&catID=2

A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city
By Mark Fischetti

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. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.

A direct hit is inevitable. Large hurricanes come close every year. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy put parts of the city under eight feet of water. In 1992 monstrous Hurricane Andrew missed the city by only 100 miles. In 1998 Hurricane Georges veered east at the last moment but still caused billions of dollars of damage. At fault are natural processes that have been artificially accelerated by human tinkering--levying rivers, draining wetlands, dredging channels and cutting canals through marshes. Ironically, scientists and engineers say the only hope is more manipulation, although they don't necessarily agree on which proposed projects to pursue. Without intervention, experts at L.S.U. warn, the protective delta will be gone by 2090. The sunken city would sit directly on the sea--at best a troubled Venice, at worst a modern-day Atlantis.

Article continues: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?art...mber=1&catID=2

[jeff]

Well done - beat me to it. Environmentalists have long been fighting with US Army Corps of Engineers and developer interests over things like draining swamp/marshlands, dredging and straightening rivers for commerce - all things that destroy habitat are (in this case) reduce the ability to handle water surges. Not just in LA either.

[Epee_Pox]

There was an amazingly prescient (but hopefully not too prescient) article in National Geographic last year about what might happen if a major storm flooded New Orleans. So it's not like this was unexpected.

All the more reason to make sure we are prepared to act, rather than dither through bureaucracy, next time it happens. When "processes" become more important than results, you're in danger.

(Not to say that ends justify means, just that the means should never be more important than the ends.)