Breakfast at Tiffany's – Because I Do Not Know

The Slow Drowning Of New Orleans

As promised yesterday, this Washington Post article is long, but interesting -- and especially informative to those with limited knowledge about man vs. water in southeast Louisiana.

In short, history shows that those charged with keeping New Orleans above water always were more concerned with the Mighty Mississippi instead of the occasional storm from the Gulf of Mexico. And the more man fought the river, the more he made the city vunerable to the sea.

For decades, the Corps has waged an unrelenting war on nature to protect New Orleans from the Mississippi River, but one result has been the destruction of wetlands that helped protect the city from the sea. And when Corps engineers finally took up hurricane protection in the 1960s, they designed projects based on economic analyses that did not take into account the cost of human lives but promoted development of low-lying wetland.

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In 1718 , French pioneers founded New Orleans on a crescent of high ground overlooking the Mississippi, a "natural levee" formed by silt the river had carried to its delta. The original settlement was above sea level; the Crescent City's historic French Quarter would remain relatively dry during Katrina. The city was always vulnerable to hurricanes that could roar up the Gulf into nearby lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne, but it had a measure of natural protection, thanks to a buffer of hundreds of square miles of coastal swamps that helped absorb the energy of storm surges before they reached dry land.

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But protection had its price. The armored and constricted Mississippi no longer eroded its banks and rambled across its floodplain, so it no longer carried as much silt to its delta, and no longer built coastal marshes that helped blunt the impact of hurricanes. As the Corps choked off the river's natural land-building process, marshes disintegrated into open water at a rate of 25 square miles per year. And low-lying New Orleans began to sink even lower, as the tons of silt that had shored up the city's foundation no longer served as natural fill.

The city was now safer from the river. But it was more exposed than ever to the sea.

Read the whole thing and impress your friends the next time Katrina is the topic of cocktail-hour conversation.

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