Will another flood wipe out New Orleans?

Yes

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by Aldo Bonincontro

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Some weeks ago, I watched a documentary on the Italian TV making a reconstruction of Katrina's destructive path across the Gulf of Mexico and the south of Louisiana. One of the facts reported was that the centre of the hurricane hadn't invested directly the town of New Orleans, but had passed at some tens Km eastward from it. Nevertheless, as we know, the damage has been enormous and this town appeared for many weeks as dead town, invaded by muddy waters and crocodiles, with about 1200 people killed and most of its population evacuated.

This disaster had happened, in the largest part, because the embankments and the natural defences of the Mississippi Delta, in which New Orleans has the difficult task to survive, were old, damaged by negligence and insufficient against massive floods from the river, the Ponchartrain Lake and the sea .

Today (2009), the total rebuilding of these embankments is not complete; in the meantime, there are still some urban areas of the town abandoned by their inhabitants and acquired by building speculators. In any case, even if these works had really started immediately after the disaster, they would take yet some years to be completed and totally protect the town from a new event that could cause even more serious damage, up to the total destruction of the town, maybe left forever to swamps and crocodiles.

The problem are just the hurricanes that surely hit this region each summer and autumn; will they avoid New Orleans, starting from the current year, while the new defence works are still absent or incomplete? It seems this town is only relying on the good luck and this is surely worrying. So, I fear New Orleans is naked, today, while the global warming is increasing the frequency of such destructive hurricanes.

The works to protect this town would be completed as soon as possible, with a complete project; they must be paid and performed by the federal authorities, as a question of national security (not only terrorism threatens America!) and be performed with "Dutch" criteria, with high, wide and strong embankments on all the sides because a good part of this town is under the sea level.

A new arrangement is needed for the water flows around and across the town and the remake of the wooded lagoons, once reported to be southward the town, in the heart of the Delta. This natural environment can't surely be recovered within few years, but now it would be necessary to start because it can adsorb and weaken the violent impact of the sea waves caused by a hurricane approaching the town.

This natural protective action is the same offered by the mangroves and coastal tropical forests of all the world. I remember what I had heard in occasion of the tsunami of December 26th, 2004 in the Indian Ocean about the very limited damage suffered by Bangladesh, despite it had been invested by the big waves. This protection was given just by the still wide Sundarbans forest in the Ganges Delta that have partially softened the impact of sea waves, dispersing their energy.

These protection works will have to be thought for an effective defence of New Orleans against the worst chance: that of a 5th category hurricane (the strongest possible, with winds up to 250-300 Km/h) that invests directly the town.
Otherwise, if the embankments were broken in only one point, the whole town would be flooded within few minutes. Hence, no weak points must exist in such conditions and the expenses mustn't be a problem. Without a work like this, New Orleans has no protections and this is the situation today.

I'm not an engineer, but I know that, if you want to build something able to resist for a lot of time to a force up to 100, you must build it resistant to a force up to 200 and more, caused by exceptional and sudden shocks because not letting a safety margin is really too dangerous.

Will America be able to built something, just for once, not for simple and immediate profit purposes, but thinking and planning the future safety? Or was New Orleans people right thinking bitterly that the White Washington government doesn't give a damn of a rather poor big town of the South, with a majority of Black people? Despite my present pessimism, I hope New Orleans could always survive as the capital of Jazz and Black Music, never becoming that of "De Profundis".

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