Why is New Orleans below sea level?

[BOSSHOG]

Cause its near the mouth of the Mississippi River; the largest River in the country. It might just be important to commerce. The port of New Orleans (on the MS River) handles more than 11 million tons of cargo each year; services more than 2000 vessels. With a network of railroads, THE PORT OF NEW ORLEANS SERVICES EVERY PART OF THE COUNTRY.

http://www.neworleansonline.com/neworleans/business/port.html

Can we afford to rebuild New Orleans?

Maybe we should engage in a reality check and ask the question can we afford not to rebuild New Orleans?

Throw in the French Quarter; St Charles Avenue; Audobon Park; the Superdome; Jazz Funerals; Horse drawn carriages; Cafe-au-lait and Beignets; Marie Lavou's (several) graves; Deanie's Seafood Platter piled a foot high; the heat; the humidity and you've got one hell of a Perfect Storm of a Town. The Good Times are already rolling again.

[MADem]

1. The businesses in the WTC were able to relocate, but it is a bit

more problematic to relocate a major commercial outlet to the sea. NOLA has to be rebuilt. I only wish that responsible, thinking people were in charge of the effort.

[LynneSin]

2. My arguement for those who question the locatoin...

New Orleans has been around since before the revolutionary war (it's almost 300 years old. It's not like this city suddenly was below sea level in the last 20 - the city was always built that way.

If we rebuild (and i hope that we do) we need to have a maintenence program in place for those levees & dams to ensure they can handle another big hit. It's obvious for years that NOLA was begging for help from the federal government and was denied. ANd now we're all paying the price.

Personally, I think a simple solution to help pay for maintenence costs is a 'sin tax' on beverages and smokes that would be put into the kitty to help keep these things upgraded. Since NOLA is such a major tourist destination, I'm sure the tourists won't mind paying an extra dime for their drinks in order to help keep NOLA alive!

[HamdenRice]

3. Ports are not usually below, but at sea level

Most ports are at sea level, as was NO originally. What happened to NO is that successive governments going back to the French built levees to keep the Mississippi River from flooding the area, which it had done from ancient times, depositing silt and mud, which kept the land at or just above sea level. This stopped the periodic flooding, but the soft, moist earth began to compress under the city. The silt that the river had deposited ceased being deposited and the city sunk below sea level, requiring yet more levee construction on the river and the lake.

But I agree with your overall point that the city is absolutely vital to the navigation of the MR, which is the main commercial transport route for the entire mid section of the country (including most of the midwest farmland).

I think the RW proposal is not to abandon the commercial part of NO, but simply the poor sections.

Incidentally, there was an interesting report on NPR this morning about how terribly the economy will suffer now that the rich of NO got what they wanted, which was the ethnic and economic cleansing of the poor and black people. NPR said the city now has lawyers, accountants, and business people back, but there is no service work force. There are help wanted signs in all the restaurants and hotels and no people to fill those jobs, and this will economically kill the city.

Pesky poor folks: can't live with em and can't live without em.

BTW, the ultimate solution to the sinking problem is a massive hard backfill landfill to raise the low sections, rather than to try to keep back the river.

<edited>

[slaveplanet]

14. Not true

Most ports are at sea level, as was NO originally

much of NOLA was ALWAYS below sea level.
It was an uninhabitable swamp.

When Thomas Jefferson bought it from Napoleon Bonaparte, he sent a team of engineers down to New Orleans, and their official recommendation to the president of the United States was to abandon the city. They said it cannot be built upon , there is no way to protect it... that was 1804, 1805?
But ... in the late 1800's almost 90 years later , along comes a guy named Baldwin Woods, an engineer...and he figured out , that if you just dug the right canals and used these new pumps, he figure you could build these giant screw/ turbine pumps and lift the water up from down below and drop it over a levee. They figure out how to drain this HUGE swamp that was the center of what we call NOLA today.

The settling that is bandied about in order to bring in huge federal dollars, is occurring at a rate of 1 cm per year.
Now how much is 1cm a year going to matter when it was already 8 feet below sea level to begin with?

The midtown NOLA area would have never flooded had the 17th street DRAINAGE canal been upgraded to a full concrete spillway (like those you see in Los Angeles) instead of the earth/concrete flood-wall combo that failed.

[Ediacara]

4. Well, since your post in no way addressed the question you asked...

It's below sea level because of gravity. When you put millions of tons of concrete on a wetland, you are going to get problems with sinking. New Orleans SHOULD NOT be rebuilt to what it was in any way because the problem cannot go away no matter how much infilling and sea-wall making happens.

Keep the port, keep the French Quarter, but the rest of the city is, in a very broad sense, uninhabitable.

[tx_dem41]

6. So the "rest of the city" outside of the FQ is "uninhabitable"

Wow...I am from there...and I never knewthat! I guess I will have to tell my family in Algiers and my many, many friends throughout Uptown (whose homes never came close to flooding) that they are living in an
"unhabitable" area. :eyes:

[Ediacara]

12. Wow, that's for ignoring what I very clearly meant

If you keep building buildings in areas that are at or below sea level, you will always and forever have problems with flooding. Almost every building in the city, especially those that were completely underwater, needs to be razed because they are uninhabitable.

If you keep pouring millions of tons of concrete on goddamned mud, you will always and forever have a sinking city. A city that is constantly sinking is, in a broad sense, completely uninhabitable.

[BOSSHOG]

7. That sounds like an outstanding republican talking point

And that's the point where we have arrived after 30+ years of begging from State Officials for support to save the wetlands which would assist in the reduction of Hurricane Destruction. The begging got nowhere and now we have proposals to, in a very broad sense, let most of the city die.

By the way, I think keeping the port is an incredibly brilliant idea. Commercial activities from sea to shining sea would agree.

[Ediacara]

13. Look, it's not a "Republican talking point"

It's a goddamned GEOLOGICAL FACT. If you keep putting millions of tons of concrete on mud, you will never ever EVER get rid of the problems that doomed New Orleans during Katrina. Add to that the fact that sea level will continue to rise, and for major portions of the city, you have areas that are essentially uninhabitable.

I agree that IF proper measures had been taken BEFORE Katrina, this point would be moot, but NOW when most of the city's buildings are uninhabitable, we are faced with a problem. Do we spend 1/4+ trillion dollars to tear down the city and start anew, or do we see the folley in building there in the first place?

I'm sorry, I know this is an unpopular opinion, but Jesus H. Christ! I don't have any hate for New Orleans, or poor people, or black people. What I hate is wasting money (and almost certainly more lives) rebuilding this city only to have it destroyed again in 50 years.

[Lasher]

5. This shouldn't be a problem

Holland is below sea level, and doing just fine.

We now know that the levees were not breached - they failed without having any water run over the top. And so it is not true to say that they were not designed to handle a surge of this magnitude. Dubya is to blame, for having cut funding for levee maintenance.

[TahitiNut]

8. Bullshit meme. Bullshit question.

See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=5042622&mesg_id=5042622

[Lexingtonian]

9. Same problem as Venice

It's what happens when you build massive, heavy, structures on silty swam fill.

The rational thing to do is to rebuild the port of New Orleans and the highest portions. It will be maybe half the size as before.

As it is, an awful lot of the poor people simply will not return. There's No Future There is what they say, and it sounds entirely correct. The economic basis of the city as essentially a port that transfers goods from barges to small ships simply isn't, and hasn't been, large enough to both maintain as large a population and have it all be/become middle class.

New Orleans became a refugee city during the Civil War and was the largest city of the South before that, iirc. Right now we're looking at the the great grandchildren of the refugees leaving it and that idea of itself and themselves. I have no idea how much or little of the culture survives it; I'm sure it will go on for a generation, but the critical mass of nostalgia that is built on....

I'll guess that half of the people leaving NO will end up simply upriver, in Baton Rouge. The rest will disperse mostly to Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa. It might spread a good bit of NO culture out.

[flowomo]

10. this is a very good article on that point:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18292

[ArkDem]

11. >With a network of railroads, THE PORT OF NEW ORLEANS SERVICES EVERY PART

I wonder how much that railroad to Hawaii cost?

[SoCalDem]

15. It's sinking because the Mississippi has been over-manipulated

and wetlands/swamps were used for housing, instead of their original purpose...drainage and buffers against coastal storms..

Mother Nature always 'wins' in the end:(

[DS1]

16. Horse drawn carriages should be banned from cities