New Orleans is Doomed (Maybe)

60 Minutes aired a segment on New Orleans that included some quotes from Tim Kusky, a professor of earth sciences at St. Louis University and a flood control expert. Kusky says that the Mississippi Delta is eroding so fast that the coastline will pass New Orleans before the end of the century leaving the city as a bowl in an ocean. His advise is to move the city.

“Because New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50- to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” explains Kusky.

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

“That’s the projection, because we are losing land on the Mississippi Delta at a rate of 25 to 30 square miles per year. That’s two acres per hour that are sinking below sea level,” says Kusky.

Note - locally a football game ran over and pre-empted the broadcast but the essentials are here.

Not everyone agrees. The Times-Picayune, which has a vested interest, has a story on its website that quotes rival scientists as disagreeing.

In an interview Monday, Kusky said his projection of the city becoming an island was “based on a statement made by the director of the U.S. Geological Survey” in 2000.

But University of Texas at Austin geology Professor Charles G. Groat, who was then director of the U.S. Geological Survey, flatly disagreed with Kusky’s conclusions.

Groat said Kusky relied on “an off-hand comment that has often been repeated” that was included in a University of New Orleans magazine piece that compared New Orleans to Atlantis.

“No, no, no,” Groat said of Kusky’s island image. “You’ve got a lot of things between the city of New Orleans and the edge of the sea, and they’re not going away.”

There are other things going on, also. The Mississippi naturally changes course regularly. The Army Corps of Engineers keeps changing it back. Otherwise, the Port of New Orleans would have been left landlocked decades ago.

In addition, in an effort to keep the river from silting up they built a channel that funels the river silt into the Gulf. This is a major cause for the erosion of the Delta. The natural silt that would replenish it no longer reaches it.

Some people have suggested a massive effort to restore the Delta or at least to slow the erosion. The problem is that this is means letting nature direct the river again and we are back to the river wandering.

All of this is in the future. In the present we have a city that only has minimal protection from major weather events. The levees are fairly solid but the floodwalls that line the canals are a disaster. It appears that they were built on unsuitable ground and were not properly monitored.

This was done because it was politically easier to build narrow walls than to build wide levees in residential neighborhoods. The floodwalls are not as strong, the ground they sit on turns marshy, and sub-surface water barriers were not effective.

Similarly, the 9th Ward exists in the first place because if was politically easier to build below the water level than to tell people to go elsewhere.

The same politics are pushing for New Orleans to be rebuilt just as it was. The problem is that this will cost a fortune. Politics in Washington may trump local politics.

I've said before, I think that many of New Orlean's poor would be better off elsewhere. New Orleans was just too poor for its population. Unemployment and crime were far higher than in the rest of the country.

To an outsider, it makes little sense to rebuild houses in a flood zone so that the residents can go back to living in poverty.

But you can't say this in New Orleans without someone calling you a racist.