Crossposted from DailyKos.
Now that the level of destruction is clear, I question whether it make any sense to rebuild a city in the gumbo bowl that New Orleans sits in now.
Each year we have hurricane’s that strike the coasts of this country, and wipe out the half-million dollar houses out on the barrier islands. Does it make since to have public policy in this country that encourages construction on barrier islands and other temporary lands by not making the millionares who live in these houses pay the full cost of building on a barrier island?
It’s not like the idea that building on ephemeral coastal lands is a new idea. As the bible says:
Not a new idea at all.
And as the rebuilding of New Orleans begins, instead of rebuilding the city as it was, at constant threat from the sea because of the area’s geography, maybe relocating the city to higher ground needs to be explored as an option.
As HollyGreenDem points out after the 1993 Mississippi floods relocation was an option
The truth is that the whole Louisiana coast is rapidly turning to sea
Rebuilding New Orleans with higher seawalls looks a lot like sticking a finger in the leak in the dam.
Louisiana accounts for 80 percent of the nation’s coastal land loss, with rates ranging between 25 and 35 square miles per year. Over the past 50 years, more than 1,000 square miles of Louisiana have crumbled and turned to open water – that’s an entire football field every half hour. Some of this loss can be blamed on the levee system, which has channelled water and sediment into the Gulf of Mexico instead of depositing them on the coastal wetlands.
The construction of an extensive levee system along the Mississippi River from the 1950s to the 1970s, with the goal of maintaining navigation and reducing the flooding of adjacent homes and businesses, has prevented the coastal wetlands from receiving their regular nourishment of riverine water, nutrients, and sediment, a diet critical to wetland survival. These regional impacts are exacerbated by other hydrologic alterations that have modified the movement of fresh water, suspended sediment, and saltwater through the system. Canals dredged for navigation, or in support of mineral extraction, have allowed saltwater to penetrate into previously fresh marshes. The current regulatory climate, along with improved technologies, prevents similar problems today; however, the damage already done continues to render local areas less able to combat subsidence and more susceptible to saltwater intrusion.
According to the Louisiana Department of Resources Office of Coastal Restoration and Management, if the current land loss rates continue unabated, by the year 2050, Louisiana will have lost more than 527,000 acres of coastal wetlands. That means that the Gulf of Mexico will move inland more than 30 miles, and New Orleans and other coastal cities will be open to the full force of Gulf weather.