Should we save New Orleans?

The problem for New Orleans is not rising sea level. Global mean sea level hasn't risen significantly since New Orleans was founded, yet parts of New Orleans lie about twenty feet below sea level. The culprit is compaction of the deltaic sediments upon which is was built. The delta subsides under its own weight, and the ground sinks. Floods of the Mississippi River used to deposit more sediment, building the delta up and counteracting the subsidence. But we don't like rivers to flood major cities, so we diverted Mississippi flood waters to the Atchafalaya. Sure enough, the Mississippi delta stopped growing, the ground level started sinking, and a delta has started to form where the Atchafalaya drains to the Gulf.

This is why New Orleans has fallen below sea level, while Boston, San Diego, and other coastal cities have not. Human intervention (raising levees, restoring swampland, etc.) can delay the ultimate demise of New Orleans, but the relentless subsidence of the delta is a geologic phenomenon and will prevail in the end. It might be twenty years from now or a hundred years from now, but the eventual sinking of New Orleans is inevitable.

I understand the urge to rebuild, but the safest thing for all involved in the long run is to rebuild the city above sea level.

I have never been against saving NO but I have always been on the side of rebuilding it on higher ground.

I think that no attempts whatever should have gone into rebuilding the 9th ward right where it was. All rebuilding should have been encouraged in the direction of higher ground.

Unfortunately, politics seems to have gotten in the way. I imagine someone, maybe the 9th Warders themselves or else a cadre of their self-appointed protectors, probably raised cain about breaking up historically "black" neighborhoods etc. and that was the end of any idea of turning those areas into wetlands, parklands etc.

Why, those neighborhoods couldn't have been rebuilt somewhat intact elsewhere is beyond me. Sure they wouldn't have been the same, but some plan could have been put in place to ensure that people who used to live near each other would have been placed near each other again. Who knows, more people might have returned by now if they had had a reasonable expectation of rebuilding their old social lives on safer and higher ground. Perhaps that insistence on rebuilding in the exact same place is what has contributed to the lack of progress in putting these neighborhoods back together. I mean how many current 9th Warders complain about how hardly anyone has come back and how their old neighbors have refused to do so etc. Maybe because they aren't crazy about the idea of getting flooded out in another catastrophe?

Could it be that the very people trying to bring these neighborhods back are the very people who are insuring that they never actually really recover?

It seems that any idea of re-doing NO in way that preserves what is good about it while improving what is bad about it when by the wayside early on and now its probably too late to go back.

Virgil Caine
Almost all of Streeterville, and parts of the Mag Mile and the Loop are built on landfill reclaimed from Lake Michigan. If a New Madrid quake on the order of the legendary early 19th century event were to go down, nobody would remember Mrs O' Leary's cow anymore. Lower Manhattan, Back Bay and South Beach are living on borrowed time. The Colorado river headwaters are doomed, so Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Denver will need some big time desalination pork, as will the growers of the Imperial Valley and anybody else who wants that mache in January. Even Mr. Dickey's Atlanta along with Charlotte and E. Tennessee are not calamity proof, as the recent Sonny Perdue lead day of prayer for rain and the nasty fight brewing among GA, SC and FL over riparian rights to the Chatahoochee attest to.

Indeed. As someone who live near Atlanta, which is, rather accidentally, one of the most-disaster-proof cities in the country, I have to look at everyone else and wonder what they're smoking.

Every east coastal city is in danger of hurricanes, and they can get a lot worse than Katrina. (Just ask Galveston Texas.) Every west coast city is in danger of earthquakes. (And, according to movies, volcanoes, but I doubt it.) Both coasts are in danger from rising ocean levels.

Meanwhile, every southwest city is barely able to drink. Over here in the southeast we're running into similar problems. Unless we're close enough to the ocean...in which case, back to hurricanes as a threat.

Boston and Chicago and Great Lake cities managed to avoid all these problems...but half of them are slowly poisoning themselves because of heavy manufacturing 100 years ago that had some really nasty waste. They have water, but it's often dangerously undrinkable.

North, south, east, and west, there isn't a single major city that couldn't face some sort of plausible existential threat in the next 100 years.

Heck, even avoiding regional threats...everywhere's at risk of tornadoes, and a few of those in exactly the wrong place could topple a city. Take out a few bridges, knock over a building onto the highway, whatever. (We had a near scare with that down here a year ago, when a tornado decided to wander around downtown Atlanta, luckily causing minimal damage.)

you need the rest of what somebody upstream called "a working coast" that accounts for 1.2 million barrels of oil a day and the lumpenprauxletariat that keep the rigs, terminals, refineries and myriad support industries such as barge fleets, commercial helicopters and rig fabrication and repair yards pulsing.

The joke is, really, that while some of the 'heartland' may think they'd be happy to see the cities die...the cities are the actual 'heart' of the country, pumping stuff around to where it's needed. Without them...well, not everyone would die, although you're right in that a huge amount of people should start stocking up on firewood. And canned food.