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A different New Orleans thread

Badly Shaved Monkey

Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Badly Shaved Monkey
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Feb 5, 2004
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I'm steering well clear of the other one!

Can anyone explain the factors that led to the development of a sizeable city like New Orleans below sea level in such a dangerous location? Although it's easy to be wise after the event, it does seem inevitable that this would happen at some stage given the number and severity of hurricanes in the area. Has it just been lucky for 200 years and so its vulnerability got forgotten? Anywhere on that coast will get hit by a big hurricane eventually but there's a big difference between being 20 feet above sea level and 20 feet below when it hits.

(BSM lives at an altitude of 79m and will only buy a boat if Antarctica melts. Having less far to drive to the beach would be nice.)
 
geni said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_Orleans
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Cheat! ;)

But, more seriously, the history says that it was founded in a very low lying area and that "Until the early 20th century, construction was largely limited to the slightly higher ground along old natural river levees and bayous, since much of the rest of the land was swampy and subject to frequent flooding. This gave the 19th century city the shape of a crescent along a bend of the Mississippi, the origin of the nickname The Crescent City. In the 1910s engineer and inventor A. Baldwin Wood enacted his ambitious plan to drain the city, including large pumps of his own design which are still used when heavy rains hit the city. Wood's pumps and drainage allowed the city to expand greatly in area." but it doesn't explain why it grew in such an apparently daft location. Does the geography constain any large development to be in that location meaning it has to run the risk of inundation but that other benefits made that location valuable or could an insightful 19th century city planner have worked out the the focus of development should be moved.

Mind you, many 20th century houses in the UK seem to have been built on river flood plains oblivious to the risks. Only latterly has there been the kind of 1 year in 50 versus 1 year in 1,000 statement of risk applied to these areas as a guide to future action, which is a bit late for residents of the existing housing stock. So there seems to be a fair amount of being wise after the event going on here as well.

There is a fundamental problem with risks that involve severe damage at intervals greater than the length of human generations, which means that it is difficult for these risks to be perceived as 'live'. The Galveston hurricane that killed 6,000 wasn't a fictional event , but if even your grandparents have never experienced such a thing it is hard for any polity to plan for these risks. It also takes money and a high level of organisation- would you rather be in Tehran or Tokyo to sit out a magnitude 9 earthquake?
 
BSM, I've been wondering exactly the same thing. It's not like this is in an area not known for large storms, therefore the risk is in one of those 'not if but when' categories. In addition, there have been several groups on different news broadcasts expressing their opinion on how the city, state and the U.S. government have 'dragged their heels' on implementing certain measures in the face of such a potential catastrophe.

Not intending to make this a controversial political argument, but considering the US has made it a focus to create a safe environment for its citizens by spending a monstrous amount on changing another country's political regime, I would have thought protecting its cities against definite large scale threats from nature would be up there as a concern as well.

Athon
 
Not all of it is under water, only a smallish fraction really. Like all major cities, it has a considerable urban span. So it would be fairly unreasonable to abandon ALL of New Orleans on that basis.

However, I would expect a reasonable case can be made for "filling in" that area that is protected by levees now, to a level that would essentially make it unnecessary to have the levees at all. The existing houses can be raised - they do it all the time. Or, for missing houses, simply hold off building until the area is higher (if they get rebuilt at all).

But whatever happens, the flooded area will have to be secured and pumped out ASAP anyway. So the sooner that happens the better.
 
Zep said:
Not all of it is under water, only a smallish fraction really.
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Well, since you mention it that's another oddity. We've seen plenty of newspaper reporters standing on dry roads near shallowly flooded roads telling us that it is impossible for people to get out. (It's the complement of the irritating phenomenon of the reporting of floods in the UK, when the local news reporter bravely tells us about the catastrophe having carefully positioned himself in the one and only flooded street rather than in the completely dry streets on either side.)

What really brought this home has been schematic maps in the papers showing the extent of the flooding making it clear how narrowly confined it is to central New Orleans. It is not at all clear that all those 'trapped' people couldn't just have walked out if competent local emergency workers had plotted safe routes for them. Instead they sat there "waitin' fo' the buses", which they were told to expect but that simply failed to arrive. That would leave only the sick and the old requiring rescue.

There is a confusion in the reporting in all media at the moment between the extreme need to shelter from the dangerous hurricane and the lack of need to shelter from the floods that rose after the hurricane had passed through. There seems to have been a complete paralysis in the face of the flooding. It seems to me that a local offical with a contour map needed to ask only one question: how high will the water rise? The location of the breaches determine that figure. Any continuous stretches of land above that elevation would remain dry and would form an escape route. Mind you- flood escape routes are surely the most basic element in a flood survival plan for a low lying city, so I shouldn't really need to be thinking of this for them!

No one is claiming the hurricane itself was not devastating, but the flood and its aftermath seem to have been self-inflicted by ill preparation and after the fact incompetence.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
While we're pondering why anyone would live in New Orleans, we should consider why anyone would live in Bangladesh.

http://www.fao.org/sd/EIdirect/EIre0047.htm

~~ Paul
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I think that comes under the heading "Lots of people and nowhere to go", which didn't apply to New Orleans 100 years ago. :)

"According to Nicholls and Leatherman (1995), a 1m sea-level rise would affect 6 million people in Egypt, with 12% to 15% of agricultural land lost, 13 million in Bangladesh, with 16% of national rice production lost, and 72 million in China and "tens of thousands" of hectares of agricultural land. "

I'm still not convinced. That seems to work on the basis of taking a pair of scissors and snipping off the margins of those countries and then seeing what's been removed. But, a decades-long ingress would surely just induce a slow rolling inland of the same coastal fringe activities as exist now. Indeed poor, low-infrastructure countries could evolve more easily than somewhere like London if the once a millennium flood becomes the once a decade flood.
 
I heard that New Orleans developed because it was an important port where ships could arrive to collect or deposit their cargo from barges that went up and down the mississippi. The ships were too deep for the shallow waters of the delta which are continuously deposited with silt. So barges were easier than dredging deep channels for the ships.

I couldn't find a link to support this though, apart from the bit about it being a port here
 
If not, "Why, Bangledesh?" then perhaps "Why, Venice?" or "Why, The Netherlands?" could be considered for comparison.

I assume that New Orleans is not alone among the worlds trade centers whose locations are, essentially, accidents of geography. A convenient place to land one's boat becomes a natural location for many boats to congregate, and thus a place for trade to take place. With trade, comes prosperity, and opportunity for service industries to thrive in support of the trading activity. As the populations increase, along with land values, people begin to occupy even the less desirable areas.

To me, this question often comes across as if to suggest that someone, somewhere, must have made a deliberate decision to build New Orleans in a sinking bog. Like pretty much everywhere else in the world, it was a lot of different people, at a lot of different times, for a lot of different reasons.
 
Also the geography has changed over the years.

From listening to a radio show my hubby learned that 50 miles of Missisippi Delta swamp that separated New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico has disappeared. This swamp acted as a buffer against storm surge. The reasons it disappeared seem to be levee building all along the river (causing less flooding and therefore less silt being in the river) and by oil companies cutting channels through the delta/swamp which makes the water flow faster out... and whatever silt there is ends up further out in the Gulf.

Hmmm... I found an article: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00060286-CB58-1315-8B5883414B7F0000
 
Badly Shaved Monkey said:
It's the complement of the irritating phenomenon of the reporting of floods in the UK, when the local news reporter bravely tells us about the catastrophe having carefully positioned himself in the one and only flooded street rather than in the completely dry streets on either side.)
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[OT]
Remember when there was a lot of flooding here a few years ago? The Beeb took a not-too-wild guess that the action would be at Arundel, where a low-lying town is protected from the Arun at high tide by some absolutely whopping levées. So Nicholas Witchell and a huge team of cameramen and reporters spent a long and boring night there watching the water rise not quite to the lip of the levées, and Arundel slumber peacefully.

While the B team in Lewes got all the glory.

Actually, I remember said B team interviewing a farmer in Lewes, who stated that there had been just such a flood in the 1960s, basically so what. Then they did find some archive footage proving he was absolutely right. The point nobody actually drew attention to was that the architecture of the flooded houses which were the backdrop to the interview was classic 1970s.

You wouldn't catch me spending money on a house in a low-lying part of either town quite frankly.

I notice much of the building in NO is wood though, and it seems as if the structures aren't nearly as robust as what I'm sitting in right now. Is this a false impression? If devastating hurricanes are actually relatively infrequent (and if NO was built during one of the quieter times of the cycle we hear about), maybe it just wasn't all that high in the 18th century consciousness?

Rolfe.
 
Rolfe said:
[OT]

I notice much of the building in NO is wood though, and it seems as if the structures aren't nearly as robust as what I'm sitting in right now. Is this a false impression? If devastating hurricanes are actually relatively infrequent (and if NO was built during one of the quieter times of the cycle we hear about), maybe it just wasn't all that high in the 18th century consciousness?

Rolfe.
Click to expand...

It's been a couple of years since I was there, but the older part of town like the French Quarter is brick. There are a lot of wooden houses in that part of the South and they are traditionally raised up a few feet off the ground and have a porch on the front. I think that people are more concerned about flooding and sinking that having their house flattened. When you drive through the rural areas in that part of the country, everything is wood and the poorer people have tin and tarpaper roofs.

I can't see people letting NOLA go and I don't think they should. It's one of the few cities in America that actually has a personality and you have a sense of history when you're there. They definitely need to talk to some Dutch folks though.
 
Perpetual Notion said:
It's been a couple of years since I was there, but the older part of town like the French Quarter is brick. There are a lot of wooden houses in that part of the South and they are traditionally raised up a few feet off the ground and have a porch on the front. I think that people are more concerned about flooding and sinking that having their house flattened. When you drive through the rural areas in that part of the country, everything is wood and the poorer people have tin and tarpaper roofs.

I can't see people letting NOLA go and I don't think they should. It's one of the few cities in America that actually has a personality and you have a sense of history when you're there. They definitely need to talk to some Dutch folks though.
Click to expand...

The Dutch have a relatively benign environment to deal with, being on the wrong side of the ocean and too far North to attract the truley violent hurricanes, much like Oregon and Washington in the US.
New Orleans occupies the position it does by being at the mouth of one of the world's most treacherous "navigable" rivers-the Mississdippi (which is Native American for "How do you stop spelling this word?":D ). It drains all the continent except the coasts and some (most?) of Canada. That's a lot of territory. The river is full of stuff-from sand and silt to trees, houses, and other things that will rip the bottom out of a lot of boats.
Shallow-draft steam boats-stern wheel and other paddle-wheeled Barge-like ships were the common mode of transport. Historically, it also changed courses every year, until the channelization worked on it in the early 20th century. By that time N.O. was too big to abandon-and had evolved into a much more "Modern" seaport, technologicaly.
As for the wood construction-in the 19th century, goods were shipped to N.O. on wooden Keel-Boats (See "Mike Fink"). The goods and the boats were sold, either in Natchez or New Orleans, and the boat crews hiked back home vian the Natchez Trace.
Guess what the wood was used for?
 
Neutiquam Erro said:
To me, this question often comes across as if to suggest that someone, somewhere, must have made a deliberate decision to build New Orleans in a sinking bog.
Click to expand...

Point only half-accepted. New Orleans, like most of the rest of our former colony, was only built about 5 minutes ago when one might have thought a degree of deliberate town planning might have been achievable. It just seems a pity now it is too late to think that this modern city grew up in the face of such an obvious danger.
 
Badly Shaved Monkey said:
Point only half-accepted. New Orleans, like most of the rest of our former colony, was only built about 5 minutes ago when one might have thought a degree of deliberate town planning might have been achievable. It just seems a pity now it is too late to think that this modern city grew up in the face of such an obvious danger.
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Obviously, North America's cities are mere infants compared to those of "Old Europe" (apologies for borrowing an unfortunate phrase from our Sec. of War). With regards to urban planning, I do wonder how often such projects successfully accomodate metropolitan expansion beyond the scope of their original design, or provide adequate accomodation for the inevitable "under" classes?

The "Old World's" (there I go again) walled cities provided physical security for their residents and economic security for their commerce. However, these design features became increasingly irrelevant as populations expanded, forcing the occupation of the surrounding, unprotected areas. Have modern urban planners found a solution to this problem?
 
Neutiquam Erro said:
Have modern urban planners found a solution to this problem?
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I doubt it. The existing infrastructure present in towns encourages accretionary development in areas that would not be chosen if you had a blank canvas. Olde Englande also doesn't want its green spaces built on, so there is a big political drive to force new houses onto the marginal land of old towns amongst which flood-prone areas are frequent.

However, notwithstanding the reporting of the New Orleans emergency, recent footage leads me to question just how bad the damage has been there compared with the flattened devastation of adjacent areas affected 'only' by the hurricane not the levee breaches. It'll be interesting to see an assessment of the relative damage from those two factors. I'm beginning to wonder whether the real strategic damage due to the flooding alone will turn out to be relatively minor in comparison. Why does this matter? The flooding was largely the fault of the city's construction and management and could be addressed by policy, whereas hurricanes are not avoidable unless the entire US South-East coast is permanently evacuated
 
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