Life is hard, & fiscal realities are harder still, & cold.
There will be future hurricanes.
New Orleans’ cultural life grew in its seedy, run-down disctricts, which are now gone forever.
As is its culture. You can build a block of shiny new condos, & call them the French Quarter (some clueless Yuppie will, & be forever puzzled why people don’t flock to it), but the people who made the French Quarter what it was are fled, or dead.
So, the homoginization of America marches on. And the old New Orleans is dead. Given the above, is it still cost-effective or good public policy to re-build New Orleans?
An industrial/port center could be built in the area for economic reasons, with workers commuting to the port by rail, from smaller dispersed communities on higher, safer ground.
I’d like to see an assessment of the damage to the city’s infrastructure. What is the price tag for restoring it to usable condition. If it is effectively destroyed, why throw good money after bad? Spend it on relocation and reconstruction in a more sane location.
What would happen if the Mississippi was allowed to switch to the Atchafalaya for its outlet to the Gulf? Morgan City could be the new primary port for Louisiana.
Well, they can stay. The question was should the city be replaced in its present location. It’s hard to reasonably argue that it should.
New Orleans and most of the area south of Baton Rouge, and maybe even Baton Rouge also, are actually in the Mississippi delta. The reason a delta is a delta is that the river keeps changing course because the temporary mouth gets built up with silt until finally the river finds a new course through the delta. This can only be changed by artificially preventing the river from changing course which is what happened from Baton Rouge south. The map of the area shows the river in a long tongue of land sticking out into the Gulf and I don’t see how this process can be indefinitely extended. Sooner or later the river will change course.
Add to the above the fact that the city site is below sea level, partly because the silt that the river formerly deposited on the city site is now carried on downstream. It all makes the case for rebuilding in the present location hard to support on a strictly “what makes sense” basis.
Of course “what makes sense” isn’t the only determinant that needs to be considered but I think the question needs to be asked. After all, the people of New Orleans can’t rebuild in a reasonable time without outside help. Nor I suspect can the people of Louisiana. Your taxes (not yours Sam Stone) will be needed and that need for tax support is in competition with other and perhaps more useful needs so there needs to be more than a knee-jerk “we’ve got to rebuild” response.
I would add that over the world most of the great rivers like the Mississippi that have deltas don’t have great cities in the delta. For example, the cities of the Nile are all north of the delta.
So far as I can tell, this is the first time that New Orleans has been destroyed since the Great Fire of 1788 amd 1795. But the city was rebuilt, and people probably decried that “old” New Orleans was dead, then, too.
I think it would probably be the stupidest thing ever done in the history of the United States if a city was not rebuilt for fear of yuppies moving in.
The alternative, it seems, is picking other sites entirely to accomodate something like half a million people in the city proper, plus whatever tens or hundreds of thousands live in nearby areas. I think building entirely new houses, roads, stores, sewers, power plants, sports stadiums, and all that other stuff needed to support so many people would probably cost a bajillion dollars. Save money, use the infrastructure that already exists (what’s left of it), and spend half a bajillion dollars to rebuild where it is.
But you are still incorrect. Cairo occupies a position more or less equivalent to that of New Orleans (or maybe Baton Rouge; it’s difficult to pinpoint because they’re different kinds of deltas); anything north of Cairo is on the delta. There’s a lot north of Cairo.
Back to the OP, though, rebuilding New Orleans is a matter of economics. The infrastructure in N.O. is huge. Allowing the Mississippi to follow its natural inclination to be captured by the Atchafalaya would be, at this time, far more expensive than repairing the damage to N.O.
You are correct that the capture will inevitably occur, just as Venice will inevitably be under water. But I don’t think the current economics would support Morgan City becoming the new Big Easy.
