After the Storm: Katrina Ten Years Later by The Washington Post

Author:The Washington Post [Washington Post, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Social Science, Disasters & Disaster Relief, 21st Century, United States, Essays, History
ISBN: 9781682301340
Google: -JV2CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2015-09-01T20:42:04+00:00

Louisiana State University ecologist Andy Nyman examines a wetlands area in Louisiana's Sawdust Bend Bayou, about 95 miles downriver from New Orleans. A Mississippi River diversion – a gap in the river's banks – built in the 1980s in nearby Pass a Loutre allowed sediment-rich fresh water to flow in, helping wetlands grow in an area that was once a shallow lake. (Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post).

Rising seas, sinking land

The crown jewel of New Orleans's impressive new hurricane protections is a 1.8-mile-long, 25-to-26-foot-high surge barrier across a marsh landscape that includes the much-loathed Mississippi River Gulf Outlet – the MRGO, or "the Mr. Go" as locals sometimes call it – an artificial channel through the wetlands that was widely blamed for funneling Katrina's storm surge straight at New Orleans. At $1 billion, the barrier is the largest structure the Army Corps of Engineers has ever built. Its concrete walls, reinforced with eight Eiffel Towers' worth of steel, are designed to stop any storm surge that comes at the city at this most vulnerable of points. A complementary series of walls protects a 133-mile circuit around the larger metropolitan area, providing vastly stronger defenses, as much as 32 feet high in some places.

"The protection system is now light-years ahead of where it was 10 years ago when Katrina hit," says Rick Luettich, who is director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and served on a major National Academy of Sciences panel studying New Orleans's protections. The protections are designed to fully stop the storm surge of a one-in-100-year hurricane – roughly a Category 3 storm.

There is certainly an argument that New Orleans ought to be protected even more – up to a Category 5 level. But Luettich emphasizes that even in a stronger storm, the new defenses make the risk of catastrophic levee or seawall failure – as happened in Katrina – less likely.

The problem, though, is that walls are not all that New Orleans needs as it stares down a future of rising seas and sinking land.

"After Katrina, there was a consensus developed that we need to do two things," says Don Boesch, a New Orleans-born wetland scientist and president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "One is stabilize and maintain the coastal landscape, to provide a context in which you are living rather than an island surrounded by a big wall in the gulf.

And second, you needed to make honest-to-goodness, robust flood defenses."

"They've done a good amount of work to accomplish the latter," Boesch says, "but it's been slow on the former."

Viewed from the top of the sea wall, the wetland fringe is thin and short – there is open water and grasses but no trees.

Inside one of the structure's massive gates, meanwhile, each foot of elevation is ticked off on the side, up to 26 feet.

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