Home > Goodbye, New Orleans

Goodbye, New Orleans

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 10 December 2005
3 comments

Catastrophes USA

by Mike Tidwell

AS WE REACH THE 90-DAY mark since Katrina hit, it’s time
we ended our national state of denial. Turns out House
Speaker Dennis Hastert had it right all along, though
his reasons were flawed. We should call it quits in New
Orleans not because the city can’t be made relatively
safe from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do
so is more trouble than it’s worth. It’s not. But
because the Bush Administration has already given New
Orleans a quiet kiss of death now that the story has run
its news cycle.

As someone who dearly loves New Orleans and has
experienced many of her charms, it pains me immeasurably
to call for this retreat. This is not a rhetorical stunt
or a shock argument meant to invite compromise talks. I
mean what I say: Shut the city down and board it up
before thousands more lives are lost.

In the weeks after Katrina, the American media somehow
portrayed the catastrophe as a matter of failed levees
and flawed evacuation plans. The "What went wrong?"
coverage involved autopsies of every breached dike and a
witch hunt for those responsible for the Superdome and
Convention Center fiascos. But these were just
horrifying symptoms of a much larger disease.

Katrina destroyed the Big Easy-and future Katrinas will
do the same-not because of engineering failures but
because one million acres of coastal islands and
marshland have vanished in Louisiana in the last century
due to human interference. These land forms served as
natural "speed bumps," reducing the lethal surge tide of
past hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the
first place.

But while encouraging city residents to return home and
declaring for the media audience that "we will do
whatever it takes" to save the city, the President
earlier this month formally refused the one thing New
Orleans simply cannot live without: A restored network
of barrier islands and coastal wetlands.

Tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to
treat the symptoms-broken levees, insufficient emergency
resources, destroyed roads and bridges-but next to
nothing for the disease itself, that of disappeared
land, which ushered the ocean into the city to begin
with. No amount of levee building or stockpiling of
bottled water will ever save New Orleans until the
state’s barrier shoreline is restored.

Just since World War II an area of land the size of
Rhode Island has turned to water between New Orleans and
the Gulf of Mexico, most of it former marshland. And
every 2.7 miles of marshland reduces a hurricane surge
tide by a foot, dispersing the storm’s power. Simply
put, had Katrina struck in 1945 instead of 2005, the
surge that reached New Orleans would have been as much
as 5-10 feet less than it was.

These marshes, as well as the barrier islands, were
created by the sediment-rich flood waters of the
Mississippi River deposited over thousands of years. But
modern levees have prevented this natural flooding, and
the existing wetlands, starved for new sediments and
nutrients, have eroded and "subsided" and just washed
away. Every ten months, even without hurricanes, an area
of Louisiana land equal to Manhattan turns to water.
That’s 50 acres a day. A football field every 30
minutes!

A $14 billion plan to fix this problem-a plan widely
viewed as technically sound and supported by
environmentalists, oil companies, and fishermen alike-
has been on the table for years and was pushed forward
with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But for reasons
hard to fathom, yet utterly lethal in their effect, the
administration has turned its back on this plan. Instead
of investing the equivalent of six weeks of spending in
Iraq, or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston, we must now
prepare to pay for another inevitable $200 billion
hurricane just around the corner in Louisiana.

The grand plan to change all this, commonly known as the
Coast 2050 plan, would use massive pipelines and pumps
and surgically designed canals to guide a portion of the
river’s sediment-thick water back toward the coastal
buffer zone without destroying existing infrastructure
or communities. This would rebuild hundreds of thousands
of acres of wetlands over time and reconstruct entire
barrier islands in as little as 12 months. (It is
estimated that the government’s plan to rebuild the
levees could take decades.) Everyone agrees the plan
will work. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed
the soundness of the approach just last week and urged
quick action.

Yet in its second and final post-Katrina emergency
spending package sent to Congress on November 8th, the
White House dismissed the rescue plan with a shockingly
small $250 million proposed authorization instead of the
$14 billion requested.

How could this administration, found totally unprepared
for the first Katrina, not see the obvious action needed
to prevent the next one? My theory is that Bush hears
"wetlands" and retreats to a blind, ideological aversion
to all things "environmental." Which perhaps explains
why in multiple speeches given during six photo-op trips
to the Gulf since Katrina hit, the President has not one
time mentioned the words barrier islands or wetlands.
Not once.

"Either they don’t get it or they just don’t care," said
Mark Davis, director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal
Louisiana. "But the results are the same: more
disaster."

So stop the repairs; put the brooms and chain saws away.
Close the few businesses that have re-opened. Leave the
levees in their tattered state and get out. Right now.
Everybody. It’s utterly unsafe to live there.

To encourage people to return to New Orleans, as Bush is
doing, without funding the only plan that can save the
city from the next Big One, is to commit an act of mass
homicide. If, after all the human suffering and expense
of this national ordeal, the federal government can’t be
bothered to spend the cost of a tunnel from Logan
Airport to downtown Boston, then the game is truly over.

Anyone who doesn’t like this news-farmers who export
grain through the port of New Orleans, New Englanders
who heat their homes with natural gas from the Gulf,
cultural enthusiasts who like their gumbo in the French
Quarter-should all direct their comments straight to the
White House. But don’t wait around for a response.

— -

Mike Tidwell is the author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich
Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. He
lives in Takoma Park, Md.

To learn more about the causes and lessons of hurricane
Katrina, visit www.katrinanomore.com.

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/front/index_front.html

Forum posts

  • That is true. A country which squanders billions of money for support on Israel and in wars, has nothing left to support its own citizens. Moreover the Republicans are happy that the political map was changed to red again.
    New Orleans will become a kind of Disney Land and next year after the first storms have hit nothing will remain anyway. The levee system is still breached and far away from reconstruction. Sounds familiar? Just listen to "success" stories on reconstruction in Iraq.

  • The talk of levee’s, engineering and budget failures is distractive. That’s not why nawleans flooded, it’s just an effect of the dwindling population of decent europeans who are being led to extinction by foreign rulers and their doctrines, we are at the beginning of the end stage of our civilization. It’s like asking how did the roman empire end, the answer is simple the original roman people ceased to exist themselves; therefore their civilization ended much the same as New Orleans.

  • Don’t forget that the neocons believe they are here to destroy this place so Christ (sic) can return... they think they are doing God’s (again sic) work to bring the apocalypse. Bush & the madministration are just the tip of the melting iceberg. It’s not just about keeping their oil friends fat and happy... they must be stopped.