I’m glad to see that some of y’all are talking about my home town and what we ought to do with it. I can’t help but notice that with the exception of a few posters, you’re presenting terms rather starkly. Like any area with a significant population, this is a complex place. Let me address some of the highlights from what I’ve read above from the perspective of a local.
(1) It makes sense, long term, for the country to have a city near the mouth of this continent’s largest river. New Orleans is still a viable port, with much traffic in petroleum, grain, coffee, and sugar. As the dry, above sea-level parts of New Orleans (which is a pretty big chunk of real estate, btw) didn’t flood in Katrina/Rita, and as the port wasn’t damaged significantly, and as we’re a major conduit between the oil rigs in the Gulf and the refineries along the river, there will be settlement here.
(2) Yes, left to it’s own devices, the Mississippi would change course in favor of the shorter, lower, and more direct route down the Atchafalya, leaving New Orleans along a 100’ - 200’ deep salty canal. The jury is still out as to whether the Corps would be able to put the river back in the bed we now keep it in, and I’ve read (no time to get you cites, sorry) that it would take large scale flooding of the upper river (the stretch above Cairo, Illinois) and the lower river (that below) to put the Control Structure to the test. So you’ll need massive record snowfall in the Rockes, Lake States, and Ohio River Valley and torrential rains in the lower valley in the same year to get what the Corps calls a “design flood.”
(3) Yes, parts of town are sinking. These are the back-swamp areas that were part of the Lake Pontchartrain floodplain until the 1940s when draining allowed that land to dry enough to allow development. A HUGE problem was allowing folks to build on grade on slabs, rather than requiring that houses be raised. These areas - - Lakeview, Gentilly, Broadmoor, Pontchartrain Park, Old Metairie - -took on the deep water from Katrina. That’s most of the area (with the exception of Old Metairie (million dollar mansions) that we’re debating rebuilding. The Upper & Lower 9th Ward, New Orleans East, and parts of St. Bernard Parish were inundated as well. Debate is also going on about rebuilding there.
Much of the Katrina/Rita flood problem is related to two things (1) the city blocked the Corps from (a) moving the pump stations from the edge of the natural river levees (built at roughly sea level, several miles from the lake, early in the 20th century) where they lifted water and let gravity take it to the lake and (b) gating the canals at the lake to prevent lake surge from getting into town. The Corps is working on that fix at the moment. Breached levee walls flooded the area in the longer list in the paragraph above. (2) The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR GO), an artificial shipping channel linked to the Industrial Canal (built despite objections from those in New Orleans East and St. Bernard), had its levees overtopped and broken as water funnelled up and was concentrated in the shipping channels. This caused the flooding of St. Bernard (brief, but deep-to-the-rooftops) and the double flooding of the Lower 9th Ward. There is pressure to shut down the Mr. Go. I hope it is done.
(4) Most of New Orleans is an old town. Yes, the FQ is older, but the buildings are being maintained, thank-you-very-much. Our soil expands when it’s wet, shrinks when dry, leading to bumpy streets and crooked sidewalks. Much of the old part of town is composed of houses that are pushing 100 years old. We do look shabby, even in well maintained areas, and areas with less attention look worse. It’s just the way it is. You get used to it after a while.
(5) Yes, our number one economic engine was tourism. This due largely to backwards taxation policies and social issues among the wealthy locals that kept other businesses at bay. We were making improvements economically before the storm in revitalizing the port, the waterfront, building a film industry, and maintaining our share of the oil business, and I don’t expect the storm to dramatically alter continued progress in those areas, particularly with storm aid coming in.
(6) We definitely had a massive and barely manageable problem with education, crime, and poverty. This was largely a class issue, though the main victims were primarily African Americans. Why? The affluent whites never had much to do with blacks if they could avoid it, and blacks with gumption got educated at private parochial schools, got good jobs, joined the middle and upper middle class, and migrated from the urban center to New Orleans East and Gentilly, where they were prone not to get involved in helping less fortunate blacks. Thus my calling it a class problem, though I’m sure other will argue with me about that.
The middle class white and black flight to the suburbs left affluent whites and poor blacks in the urban center, at about a 35%/75% split, respectively. This led to about a 35%/75% split among those elected to local political office, and coupled with the French and Spanish colonial legacy (and Huey Long legacy, too) of patronage politics, and you wound up with a bad situation in terms of effective local government. Nagin was a breath of fresh air before the storm - - he was/is honest, businesslike, was modernizing city hall and city services - - but has proven to be a bad disaster manager.
We are encouraged by a spurt of civic activism among whites who had felt disenfranchised in the urban center, a couple of strong candidates for mayor, and some successes in reforming state government. We have moved the schools from local oversight to state oversight, and most are now charter schools - - both are changes for the better.
So… much to post. New Orleans will be smaller, no doubt about it. If we get another hurricane and flood this year, the likelihood is that flooding will be confined to areas that flooded before. There will be a New Orleans metro area here for quite a while, in my opinion, even if it is confined to higher ground (above sea level) along the natural levees of the Mississippi River. It will take a decade to see what that New Orleans might look like, though.
