New Orleans a test case for global warming--Tom Darden

[Louisiana1976]

New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Copenhagen, Denmark, is 5,000 miles away from New Orleans, Louisiana. But representatives of the 192 nations gathering this week at the climate change conference need to keep the memory of a flooded New Orleans in mind.

Two years ago this month, the Make It Right Foundation was launched to help the families of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward rebuild their lives and community. That was already two years after Katrina, and the once-vibrant neighborhood was still in ruins, failed by government and frustrated by a lack of progress.

Working with the Lower 9th Ward community, with families who lost everything in Katrina, with cutting-edge architects and inventive builders, we learned some truths and made some discoveries we would like to share with the climate change negotiators in Copenhagen:

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http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/12/07/darden.katrina.lessons/index.html

[madville]

1. I have a suggestion

"we learned some truths and made some discoveries we would like to share with the climate change negotiators in Copenhagen"

Yeah like don't build a city below sea level in a hurricane zone.

[SoxFan]

2. Thanks for the insight, genius

:eyes:

[jobycom]

3. It's been there almost four hundred years, and through a lot of hurricanes and floods.

So no, your suggestion is uninformed and ignorant. The location isn't the problem. The federal government that siphons its resources and pays back only a fraction of what it takes while still refusing to provide even the most simplistic flood protection is the problem. More money is spent on San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, St. Louis, and a slew of other US cities sitting atop natural disasters to protect them than is spent on New Orleans, despite the fact that it's a major port and critical to the nation's oil supply. Fix the levees and hurricanes won't be a problem.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. and replace the marshes and barrier islands

:-)

[jobycom]

5. yeah, it would help if the Army Corp would quit interfering with that, too.

Plaquemines Parish, for instance, wants to use silt dredged from the river to rebuild levees and reestablish wetlands, but the Army Corp of Engineers dumps the silt elsewhere where it does no good. The parish and the state have had to get their own equipment and pipe silt to the marshes because the ACoE won't help.

Every two miles of wetland cuts half a foot off a storm surge. If the wetlands in Louisiana had been what they were in 1969 when Camille hit, the 32 foot surge of Katrina would have been fifteen feet or lower, which would not have topped the lake levees, might not have flooded the Lower 9th Ward or the Ninth Ward, and would have saved much of the Mississippi Coast, too.

[misanthrope]

6. New Orleans was founded less than 300 years ago...

...when the coastline and lower Louisiana looked far different than it does now. Human interference with the river's cycle of floods, the city's continual sinking and other factors place it in more danger now than it has ever been. The last seven decades have seen the loss of nearly 2,000 square miles of Louisiana wetlands, a vital buffer that protected the Crescent City. It's estimated that at the current rate of decay, the Gulf will reach New Orleans before the end of this century.

[jobycom]

7. Yeah, my math sucks tonight, but the picture isn't that bleak.

You're right largely about the coastline and wetlands, but those are reversible trends, and there is no guarantee the erosion and shifting will take a particular direction, anyway. The coastline could alter in a way to protect New Orleans further, especially if controlled.

Second, the old story about New Orleans sinking is repeated so often that few people understand the statement. Parts of the city seem to be sinking, other parts are not, and there is debate on whether any of the measurements even make sense. How do you measure the elevation of an entire city over a period of decades? No individual spot is likely to be unaffected by erosion or contruction, and taking an average of many points barely solves the problem, especially when you are measuring differences of inches. Some methods show no sinkage at all. Overall, there is evidence that the entire delta and river and lake regions are underlaid by a solid bedrock that prevents any real sinkage.

Headlines love to scream the most fatalistic findings, but there are contradictory studies. Here's one, for instance: http://www.geosociety.org/news/pr/06-26.htm . Given that sea levels are generally rising, and if global warming turns out to be as catastrophic as some predict, cities like New York--directly on the coast--are in more danger in the next 50 years than New Orleans.

Third, all of the Netherlands is below sea level, and Rotterdam and Amsterdam are lower than New Orleans, yet they've been protected by levees and dykes since the Middle Ages. Surely we can do as well as medieval technology in New Orleans. And at least half of New Orleans is above sea level, anyway.

The worst damaged part of New Orleans--the Lower 9th Ward--is above sea level. It flooded because of a man-made construction error. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal funnels water from the Gulf directly into the Industrial Canal, and during Katrina the storm surge flooded the MR-GO, pushing water higher than the storm surge (since it was channeled) and over the levees into the Lower 9th Ward, and into the Industrial Canal, causing levees on the IC to top, and in one case shatter. They have since closed MR-GO (which did the same thing during Betsy and Camille, btw), which in itself could save hundreds of lives. People had been after the ACoE for decades to put storm gates on the MR-GO, but they didn't. Hundreds of lives might have been saved if they had.

It's a city that could be easily protected, with no more cost than what it takes to protect many other US cities.