The New Orleans Folly

Sept. 3, 2015

The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina has come and gone.

We’ve relived the nightmare and once again been vividly reminded of both the best and worst of people in the midst of disaster. New Orleans alone saw nearly 1,000 deaths, 200,000 homes damaged or destroyed, and the entire city displaced.

We’ve congratulated them on their recovery and bemoaned the fact that so many are still displaced; New Orleans’ population is about 40 percent smaller than it was immediately before Katrina, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses remain unoccupied and uninhabitable.

Still, most seem to agree New Orleans has most of its old swagger back. The cultural history and traditions are not so easy to submerge.

It didn’t hurt that the federal government has thus far kicked in more than $71 billion for Louisiana alone, and most of that was dedicated to rebuilding and protecting New Orleans.

It has all been folly.

Sooner or later, we will be asked to do it all over again. The improved levee system now in place will not protect New Orleans from another Category 5 storm and nor will any other levee system.

The notion that we can protect a major U.S. port city that sits below sea level from nature’s worst is cute but a sad overestimation of our abilities. And ironic. New Orleans was founded, at least in part, because it was more protected from hurricanes than other coastal areas in the region.

Nature, in its infinite wisdom and generosity, actually provided for our at-risk coastal areas. Swamps, wetlands, barrier islands and coastal dunes all give a layer of protection against storm surge by blocking, slowing or absorbing the resultant destructive and deadly flooding.

We drained the swamps and wetlands so we could grow and build stuff there, bulldozed the dunes for condos and hotels and put vacation homes on the barrier islands.

Every hurricane that makes landfall in the United States now does billions in damage at least in part because we decided nature’s protective barriers were either inconvenient or too convenient.

It may all be moot anyway if some NASA scientists are correct. They now believe a three foot rise in sea level is "inevitable" and perhaps as soon as 2050. Worse still, they say sea levels could rise by as much as 10 feet in just the next century.

That all sounds reasonably dire for low-lying coastal areas. It becomes cataclysmic if the experts are right – an inch in sea level rise usually translates to about 100 inches of coastal encroachment. A sea level rise of three feet would mean water 100 yards inland from where it is today. Add high tides and storm surges and you’ve got problems.

New Orleans would be among the first to be swamped and all the levees in the world wouldn’t stop it.

Even now, with just a puny three-inch rise in sea level since 1992, the impact has been felt in places like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and indigenous coastal villages in Alaska. Entire communities have been forced to move inland.

They are just the first of many, we’re told; the canaries in the coal mine for rising sea levels. Low-lying coral islands around the world, many of which are no more than a few feet above sea level at their highest points, will shrink and disappear.

While we wait to be slowly inundated, should we be celebrating the revival of a city we know will be wrecked by another hurricane or rising sea levels? Is it worth saving?

New Orleans, which will celebrate its tricentennial in 2018, has all the cultural tradition you could want in a major city. It’s been controlled by the French, the Spanish, then the French again, then the United States, then they tried being a republic for a bit before becoming part of the Confederacy and then, finally, back to the U.S. (it also has traditions of grinding poverty, failing public education, rampant corruption, antebellum-level racism and high crime).

The question isn’t really should New Orleans be saved the next time, but should it be moved. One way or the other, it would seem our below sea level Crescent City is going to be below the sea. If it’s worth saving again, then it’s worth moving up river and above sea level.

Even if the NASA scientists are wrong, New Orleans will be flooded by the next giant storm and then another and another.

We’re too late, or too unwilling, to restore the protection nature gave us. Massive storm destruction is now an inevitability. Then we stubbornly rebuild directly in the crosshairs of the next Big Blow.

Americans should be heading inland and above sea level. It will be cheaper in the long run if we stop rebuilding and start moving. New Orleans should be the first to go.