The Restoration of New Orleans

New Orleans, as well as many other communities in Louisiana and Missouri, has been rendered uninhabitable. Some other communities are completely destroyed. But New Orleans faces particular dangers not all the coastal cities face. It has been staring at this fate for a long time. Engineers and scientists for as long as I can remember had given New Orleans a shelf life of only a century or so.

New Orleans has an unfortunate and complex convergence of several flaws, some natural, some man-made. The city is below sea level, which obviously nothing can be done about. Human beings have added to the problem however. The Mississippi river has been altered over the years, in order to be made more passable to seafareing vessels. The coastal marshlands were a powerful and effective natural barrier against the sea, but governments, who have always treated marshland as a useless waste of land, have permitted industry to cut canals and passages out of the marshlands for shipping, and drain them for agriculture. The levees built to keep water out of New Orleans also cause the city to sink every year, as the levees also prevent new silt from shoring up the terrain.

After the emergency, New Orleans will probably have to be rethought. This time, the city will have to be rebuilt in a way that lets nature do its job - the marshlands will have to be treated as a valuable defense, and not as an irritant to be drained. The levees may have to be rethought in a way that allows silt to pass into the city. Even the route of the Mississippi will have to be considered, as will be the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. A much stronger city is possible, as long as we learn to admit that nature already knew what it was doing...