politburo diktat 2.0

Levee Reconstruction Will Restore, but Not Improve, Defenses in New Orleans

In the short term, the levees can’t be rebuilt to withstand a Category 3 hurricane. In the long term, New Orleans is sinking in the Gulf. Maybe we should think this over before we spend $200 billion.

The costly federal effort to rebuild New Orleans’s flood defenses in time for next year’s hurricane season will leave the city no less vulnerable to major storms than it was to Hurricane Katrina, engineers and other experts say.

And it will take years or decades, these experts say, to provide New Orleans and nearby communities with protection against hurricanes stronger than Hurricane Katrina, which was nowhere near the worst-case storm when it arrived. Its winds over the city and Lake Pontchartrain were apparently far below the Category 3 standard that was chosen in 1965 as the storm to defend against.

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In the long run, the challenges will only grow. Sea levels are rising around the world, and the land around New Orleans - including the levees - is sinking. The Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico have entered a cycle of intensified hurricane activity that could last a decade or two, and two recent studies have found that global warming might already be causing storms to be stronger than they otherwise would be.

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The city’s pumping system can be modernized and improved, and levees and floodwalls will have to be made higher. But the added weight would cause them to sink even faster, and added width - three feet for every vertical foot - would require costly condemnation of nearby real estate.

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Professor Colten of Louisiana State, the author of “Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature,” said engineering work must be accompanied by efforts to restore nature’s own systems for fighting floods. With the delta sinking, he said, “The most fundamental activity outside of the city would be to restore the wetlands.”

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William F. Marcuson III, the former director of the Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Miss., and president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that even though elected officials have vowed the city would be rebuilt, in the long run it would be foolhardy to redevelop many of the most flood-prone areas.

Essentially, he said, those areas want to be bays and wetlands. “Buy the lots back and let insurance pay for the houses,” he went on. “Then maybe make it a golf course or bird sanctuary.”

But of course, since the mantra of the Left is now “Make levees, not war,” get ready for more of the same — bigger and bigger walls around a city sinking deeper and deeper into the mud, “The Deep Easy.”