and a Shrinking La. Coastline Contributes To Flooding Two months ago, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) told an audience of congressional staffers and scientific experts the federal government needs to spend billions of dollars over the next two decades to restore her state's wetlands. She warned that intentional rerouting of the Mississippi River over the past century, coupled with rising sea levels due to climate change, had eroded Louisiana's natural buffer against massive storms.
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The NYTimes has a brief article specifically citing the landscape problems that Katrina uncovered, or why urban design by the Army Corps of Engineers is not always a good idea. "Although early travelers realized the irrationality of building a port on shifting mud in an area regularly ravaged by storms and disease, the opportunities to make money overrode all objections" – as well as, I'm sure, the opportunities to try out cool new concrete pouring systems and to get some heavy tax breaks for local construction firms...
Katrina becomes a question of human geotechnical construction interacting with the earth's atmosphere – with the help of the US tax code – and you get new urban weather events of strange intensity in the process: high winds scouring manmade landscapes. And so when a storm collides with what the NYTimes calls a "degraded landscape," those forces have to cut themselves new channels.
They need to build themselves new landscapes.
"Without the fine sediment that nourishes marshes and the coarser sediment that feeds eroding barrier islands, 'the entire delta region is sinking,' [Dr. Abby Sallenger of the USGS] said" – and so a new Atlantian landscape emerges: New Orleans underwater.
To quote in full (the bureaucratic intricacies of this artificial landscape are fascinating!):
"Of course, New Orleans is vulnerable to flooding from the Mississippi River as well as from coastal storms. North of the city, the Army Corps of Engineers has marked out several places where the levees would be deliberately breached in the event of a potentially disastrous river flood threat, sending water instead into uninhabited 'spillways.'
But there is no way to stop a hurricane storm surge from thundering over a degraded landscape - except, perhaps, by restoring the landscape to let the Mississippi flow over it more often.
Some small efforts are being made. For example, at the Old River Control Structure, an installation of dams, turbines and other facilities just north of Baton Rouge that keeps the Mississippi on its established path, workers collect sediment that piles along the dams and cart it by truck into the marshes.
But truly letting the river run would exact unacceptably heavy costs... Instead, there continue to be efforts to build more capacity into New Orleans flood control efforts, said Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University and the author of a new book, *An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans From Nature* (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). That will mean ever more costs, Mr. Colten said, given that the city, which is below sea level, must run pumps simply to keep from being flooded in an ordinary rainstorm.
Roy K. Dokka, a geologist at Louisiana State, said flooding would be even worse for decades to come, not just in New Orleans but in the entire Gulf Coast region.
The consequences were clear yesterday, Dr. Dokka said, around Port Fourchon, La., where the single road that is the commuting route for oil workers heading to offshore rigs lay under water. 'That road that all the roughnecks and oil workers drive down every day has sunk a foot in 20 years,' he said. 'It's now under water every time there's a significant south wind blowing.'
But as Dr. Kelman said: 'Once you've invested enough in urban infrastructure, you have to keep on buying in. And that doesn't even count the cultural dimension.' The reference was to the region's cuisine, culture and mystique.
'With billions of dollars sunk into the soil in southern Louisiana and the Gulf Coast,' Dr. Kelman said, 'it's kind of too late. We're there, and we're staying there.'"
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