National Geographic, 2004: Dire Prediction for NOLA disaster

[paineinthearse]

When Mr. Bush states publicly that "nobody could anticipate a breach of the levee" while New Orleans journalists, Scientific American, National Geographic, academic researchers and Louisiana politicians had been doing precisely that for decades, right up through last year and even as Hurricane Katrina passed over, he should be laughed out of town as an impostor.
~ Gordon Adams, "After Katrina fiasco, time for Bush to go", Baltimore Sun, September 8, 2005 ~ http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.administration08sep08,1,1222575.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/

The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.

By Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner

It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday. But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation,up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction,"says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. "Our technology is great when it works. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse."

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The Lost Coast

With the runoff from a third of the nation, the Mississippi River built coastal Louisiana, a swath of marsh, islands, and swamp that covered more than 6,000 square miles (15,500 square kilometers) in the early 20th century. Levees raised in the 1930s ended spring floods that pumped vital sediments and nutrients into wetlands. Then nutria, a South American rodent imported by fur farmers, escaped into the wild and began devouring marsh roots. By the 1960s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had dredged 14 major ship channels to inland ports, while oil companies cut countless canals for pipelines and wells, resulting in wetland loss in such areas as Barataria Basin. Add the toll from subsidence and sea-level rise, and Louisiana has lost 1,900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of wetlands since the 1930s. With another 700 square miles (1,800 square kilometers) likely to vanish by 2050, the state has proposed an ambitious 14-billion-dollar plan to save what's left. "We ripped the guts out of south Louisiana," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. "Now we want it back."