We Are All Environmentalists Now.

While every pundit proxy is spending airtime either placing or deflecting blame for the cause of the NOLA disaster and the initially slow rescue effort in the aftermath, some people are focusing on the levee system itself, without calling for anyone's head. Read this post for a three-year old story that warned of such a catastrophe. And then read this companion post on why the levees broke.

This relief also shows the areas in New Orleans that are below sea level.

And here is another view of the city:

Remember that the Mississippi levees did not break. What broke, I believe, were flood control walls, or dikes, at the 17th Street, Industrial and London Street Canals. This may be only semantics, but I always thought that levees were to control the flow of rivers. They usually are earthen berms that follow the general course of a river, but do incorporate higher structures like walls.

Then there's this from 1999. And this which asks, almost mockingly in retrospect, "Would New Orleans Really Flood In A Major Hurricane? How Is That Possible?" Included is a quicktime simulation of St. Louis Cathedral in a slow moving CAT 4 hurricane.

NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday had LSU's Craig Colton on Friday talking about Katrina and the levee system with John Pardue and Ivor van Heerden.

The levee system has been around since the 1720s on the Mississippi, but was not built on the lake side of the city until the 20th Century. Here van Heerden is using the term "levee" instead of dike or flood wall. The problem there, as the Commissar points out, is that flooding from the lake still required huge pumps to basically drain the wetlands near the lake. As the wetlands dried out, the land subsided leading to even greater sinking.

As to the Gulf shore, van Heerden said that Louisiana has lost one million acres of wetlands and barrier islands since the 1930s These are natural formations that slow down hurricanes because their presence robs storms of their power.

So construction of levees and flood walls have had almost the exact opposite if their stated function. And we have again been faced with the futility of challenging nature for too long.

I'm willing to bet that there is someone somewhere calculating Katrina's cost and the cost of Camille and Betsy before her and coming up with some cost-benefit analysis. What seems to be getting just about every sane person in a snit (and most crazies, too) is the retroactive inevitability of it all. You know, "not if but when."

Well, there has been sufficient warnings, it seems. And we can expect to hear even more talk about the "folly" of rebuilding NOLA where it is, if at all, and how we have reaped the whirlwind in trying to tame Mother Nature.

Colton and van Heerden actually believe that much could have and now should be done, including building a smarter form of sea wall such as the Dutch employ to allow freer flow of Gulf waters.

We cannot expect humans to move away from every place where nature might have something to say about it. But maybe we can start to look on our natural world as something not to be controlled so much as understood and to which we must adapt.

See about Colton's 2001 compilation Transforming New Orleans And Its Environs here.

Comments

[The Commissar]

Great post. Love the maps.

[Jack]

At Random Fate, I linked to an article in Scientific American published in October of 2001 that was chillingly accurate in both the path the hurricane would take and the flooding that would occur.

That is why I call shenannigans on DHS Secretary Chertoff for saying "no one anticipated this", because it WAS anticipated. That statement he made REALLY pissed me off...

[The Commissar]

Jack,

Daniel and I are using history, geography, and ecology to LOOK FORWARD, and think about the reconstruction. You know, casting light, not heat. :)