New Orleans is shaped by its environment more than most American cities. Consider: while outsiders bemoan the foolishness of placing a city in a low-lying river basin, it was founded precisely here so it could command the mouth of the Mississippi. Nevertheless, the local dance between humans and nature has generally been an uneasy one: do nothing and the land is uninhabitable; impact the land too much and the waters will flood elsewhere.
The first important factor to consider is that New Orleans is surrounded by water. It stands between the Mississippi River, which curls like a devilish snake around much of the city, and Lake Pontchartrain, a large saltwater body connected to the Gulf of Mexico. Swamps and marshes cover much of the remaining area around the city.
The land the city stands on has been wrested from the Mississippi’s natural floodplain. The oldest parts of town adhere to the high ground, which is, in fact, made up of natural levees created by the Mississippi depositing soil there during floods. The high ground in New Orleans is just a few feet above sea level. Much of the rest of the city is below sea level, forming a bowl that obviously remains vulnerable to flooding, despite human-made levees. The city’s elevation averages 2ft below sea level. And it is sinking.
The US Army Corps of Engineers built and maintains miles of levees that have kept the Mississippi River on a fixed course for more than a century. You’ll see the levee from Jackson Sq, in the French Quarter, as it rises like an evenly graded hill and hides the river from view. That’s right: as you walk uphill in New Orleans, you’re coming closer to the water.
Compounding the difficult geography is the weather. New Orleans sits within the Atlantic hurricane zone, and hurricane season lasts approximately half a year here, from early summer to late fall. Hurricanes cause floods by pushing in water from the Gulf (not, as many assume, the Mississippi). Surging gulf waters run through town via the canal system and can be far more difficult to predict than rising river tides. Storm surges rise like tsunamis, lunging upward as they squeeze through narrow canal passageways. River floods, by contrast, can be observed far upstream, often weeks in advance.
The levee system was extensively updated, repaired and built out after Hurricane Katrina. Hopefully it will stand up to the next storm, but the final test will be whenever a big storm hits.
In the meantime, smaller rains are meant to be dealt with by the city’s pump system, which is administered by the archaic Sewerage & Water Board. In 2017, heavy rains – but no hurricane or tropical storm – caused severe flooding in parts of the city. There were famously parts of Claiborne Ave that looked more soaked than they did during Katrina. This waterlogged state of affairs was partly down to a full 14 pumps being inoperational in the midst of the storm. As was the case during Katrina, human error exacerbated rough natural conditions, and the resulting outcome was an avoidable disaster.
Louisiana’s coastal parishes lost 2006 square miles of land from 1932 to 2016. Erosion is further enhanced by the extensive canal network that’s dredged for oil production; Louisiana is one of the top oil and natural gars producing states in the country. Oil pipes and rigs are also subject to leaks and spills. In addition, the wakes of shipping traffic wear away the delicate edges of the canals.
Miles of bird refuges – home to more than half of North America’s bird species, as well as freshwater homes to Louisiana’s treasured crawfish – are disappearing. For New Orleans, the loss of these wetlands makes the city more vulnerable to hurricanes, as the diminishing land buffer enables hurricanes to maintain full strength nearer to the city. For similar reasons, New Orleans will become more vulnerable to storm surges like the one that followed Katrina.
Schoolchildren in Louisiana grow up learning that their state is shaped like a boot, but given the amount of land loss experienced in the last few decades, journalist Brett Anderson has proposed a new map be drawn of the state, one where the iconic boot looks as if it has been slashed with a pair of garden shears. See his story ‘Louisiana Loses Its Boot,’ on medium.com.
We want to finish on an upbeat note, but the loss of Louisiana’s coast has not only continued unabated in recent years – it’s gotten worse. Environmental regulation is contentious in Louisiana, especially when the affected industries are oil and shipping. Those industries have a considerable political voice in Louisiana – the energy sector has provided employment for thousands of residents and helped lift the Cajuns, formerly one of the poorest demographics in the country, out of poverty.
We advise you to see the Louisiana wetlands south of New Orleans now. They may well be underwater in a generation.
On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling rig owned by Transocean and leased to BP operating in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded after highly pressurized gas expanded into the rig and ignited. Eleven men were killed. Two days later, oil from the underwater Macondo Prospect was spotted seeping into the ocean.
In all, 4.9 million barrels of oil were spilled into the Gulf as a result of the Deepwater disaster, the most expensive in US environmental history. The tourism industry of the Gulf states took a significant hit. Wildlife did worse: oil-slicked animal corpses were found (and continue to be found) on beaches in Grad Isle, south of New Orleans, while reports of lesions, missing eyes and other mutations have been attributed to the chemical dispersants used by BP to clear away oil.
The Gulf of Mexico’s tourism and seafood industry seem to have recovered from the spill (helped along by the $7.8 billion settlement BP paid to those who lost livelihoods as a result of the spill), but the long-term impacts remain to be seen. Oil has entered the food chain via zooplankton, which could have biological impacts five or 10 years (or more) down the road. Disturbingly, scientists say they have discovered a 10-million-gallon ‘bath mat’ of oil that has adhered to the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. How this impacts the ecology of the region has yet to be determined, but one imagines 10 million gallons of oil does not make for a healthy environment.