Now, I know a lot of the Netherlands is below sea level – because the Dutch laboriously reclaimed a lot of land from the sea by building dikes and pumping out the areas enclosed by them. But I’ve never heard of anything like that happening in Louisiana. The original city, the French Quarter, was above sea level when it first was built – wasn’t it? What about the rest? Was it diked off and drained before anything was built? Or has it always (even in pre-Columbian times) been kept more or less dry by natural barriers, like the land around the Dead Sea?
There’s been a huge amount about this on the news and on websites about Katrina. The land New Orleans is on has been sinking , much faster than other land is subsiding. This is in large part precisely because of all the efforts to “reclaim” and drain surrounding swampland and waterlands. It didn’t start out low – the Vieux Carre was the high ground, above the sea water level, but now it’s all low. The last I saw on TV reports some of the French Quarter still has dry streets, so it must still be relatively high ground. I’d hate to see the Cathedral of St. Louis destroyed.
I had read someplace that when NO was first settled in the early 1700s, the village was on the natural levy that had accumulated along the river and thus above the common level of the river and thus above sea level. The original settlement is now the French Quarter. Later expansion to the north, east and west was into the swamps and wetlands that were diked and drained for the purpose. I think that James McPhee’s book on the Mississippi that was partially printed in The New Yorker several years ago, talks about this.
I understand that because of siltation the bed of the Mississippi had risen so that even the French Quarter is below the mean water level of the river.
CalMeacham your post says the French Quarter is 5 feet above sea level, Spavined Gelding’s says it’s below the mean water level of the Mississippi. I can’t completely figure out all the charts that are available these days, but it looks to me as if the mean water level of the Mississippi (in New Orleans) is more than 5 feet above sea level.
I missed the part about “mean level of the river”, but now I don’t know what that means. When I was in New Orleans it was on the river, and the French Quarter was clearly above it, and by more than five feet (If it weren’t it would always be flooded). Even now the French Quarter shows up in news shots with dry areas, so it’s not five feet below the river now. So what does the statement “French Quarter five feet below the mean level of the river” mean? It can’t be right.
And I refuse to believe that the river drops as much as five feet from NO to the sea – that’s a pretty short distance.
They can’t mean five feet below the mean level of the whole Mississippi – that’s a pointless figure.
Eithe my memory is shot or something’s completely wrong here. I remember being in the squasre outside St. Louis Cathedral. I could swear that I was looking down on the Mississippi from the hotel there. I couldn’t do that if there was a several meters high levee in the way.
OK, let’s go back. No citations, just recollection and years extreme observation.
Much of NO is built on reclaimed land, not unlike the Netherlands, and lies below the normal level of Lake Pontchartrain. For all practical purposes the lake is at sea level. The French Quarter is slightly above sea level. When it was established just before 1720 the French Quarter was built on the natural dike along the banks of the Mississippi built up from eons of accumulation of high water debris. This is the same process that built the delta of the Mississippi out into the Gulf. With the channeling of the river, the construction of dikes, dredging the process that built up the banks ended and the silt coming down the river began raising the bed of the lower Mississippi. By this process the whole of the river, bed and surface has been raised to the point that at NO the ordinary river level is higher than the French Quarter and now it is the manmade dikes, not the rivers natural accreted banks, that keeps the water out of the French Quarter.
According to this newspaper elevation map the areas along the lake are as much as five feet below sea level while areas along the river bank are as much a ten feet above sea level. A ten foot drop from NO to the sea may seem extreme until you realize that while the surface of the river may be ten feet above sea level the bed of the river is well below that and deep enough for big ocean going cargo ships. Also, it is a long way by the river from NO to the Passes.
All you have to do to prove this to your self is to do as I have– go to Jackson Square, walk along the levy and eye ball compare the elevation of Andy Jackson’s statue to the level of the river.
OK, let’s go back. No citations, just recollection and years *of[I/] observation.
Much of NO is built on reclaimed land, not unlike the Netherlands, and lies below the normal level of Lake Pontchartrain. For all practical purposes the lake is at sea level. The French Quarter is slightly above sea level. When it was established just before 1720 the French Quarter was built on the natural dike along the banks of the Mississippi built up from eons of accumulation of high water debris. This is the same process that built the delta of the Mississippi out into the Gulf. With the channeling of the river, the construction of dikes, dredging the process that built up the banks ended and the silt coming down the river began raising the bed of the lower Mississippi. By this process the whole of the river, bed and surface has been raised to the point that at NO the ordinary river level is higher than the French Quarter and now it is the manmade dikes, not the rivers natural accreted banks, that keeps the water out of the French Quarter.
According to this newspaper elevation map the areas along the lake are up to five feet below sea level while areas along the river bank are as much a ten feet above sea level. A ten foot drop from NO to the sea may seem extreme until you realize that while the surface of the river may be ten feet above sea level the bed of the river is well below that and deep enough for big ocean going cargo ships. Also, it is a long way by the river from NO to the Passes.
All you have to do to prove this to your self is to do as I have– go to Jackson Square, walk along the levy and eye ball compare the elevation of Andy Jackson’s statue to the level of the river.
Kinda hard to do under the circumstances. I’ve been looking for pictures that show the river and the Cathedral or Andy, but I can’t find any on the internet.
It’s been years since I was there, but this still doesn’t seem right. I took a boat across the Mississippi right at Jacksion Square, and I could look back and see the Square and the Cathedral. And i wasn’t looking down at them or at a levee.
Around New Orleans the altitude is a big deal-never more than now. I can update some of the discussion here. (see the BBC for the best most succinct description of the geography of the city I have seen).
The French Quarter is and always has been above sea level because it is built on the natural river bank. The river at new orleans is typically 9-10 feet above sea level but the level changes a lot as the flow of the river changes. It is higher than the Quarter now because it has been channelized by the river levee system. Without the river levees it would be much wider than it is and would flood everything for miles on either side of the river for many miles upstream and downstream of the city. Oh, and the city is almost 100 river miles from the Gulf.
The flooding of New Orleans was caused by the failure of river walls along one of the canals emptying into Lake Ponchartrain. The flooding has nothing to do with the river-those levees all held. the flooded parts of the city are the very low (lower than natural levels because of the settling) areas that were drained to make room for the “suburbs” of the city in the 1700’s. Back then this area was the swampy shore of the lake. Will those areas be rebuilt? probably. but they shouldn’t be.
