by B. L. Babb

Created on: November 13, 2008   Last Updated: January 08, 2009

New Orleans, also known as "The Crescent City" is a city where every hurricane season is a 6-month period of people holding their breath, waiting to see if "the big one" is going to come this season.

It is not solely due to their being 11 feet above sea level; Norfolk, Virginia is 10 feet above sea level; a full foot lower, yet hurricanes are nowhere near as devastating in Norfolk as they are in New Orleans. Why is this?

New Orleans has been built at the southern end of the Mississippi River, the river flows west to east as it completes its meandering journey from the north before reaching the end of its travel in the gulf. It is very close to bodies of water. The Gulf is to the south, Lake Salvador closer south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, Lake Borgne to the northeast, and various other smaller lakes and marshes from the east all the way to the south.

Through the years, the marshes that were at the end of the Mississippi River have been destroyed, reducing these valuable marshy areas. This is an important point because the marshes absorbed the storm surge from incoming hurricanes, with their cascading demise, the mass of water reaches further inland than before.

When a hurricane approaches land, it pushes water ahead of it; this water is the storm surge.

New Orleans, built so close to sea level has a system of "levees." A levee is a high mound of dirt that runs along the river's edge, hopefully keeping rising water contained within the walls.

A hurricane roars into the gulf region, pushing this wall of water while typically dumping additional water from the buildup of clouds that make up the storm.

Adding high rainfall with the water pushed in during the storm surge only begins the problems with the hurricane.

The winds start from one direction and as the storm passes the winds typically shift to the opposite direction. What this does is causes many trees to be uprooted. Trees, weakened by the saturated ground, coupled with high winds from one direction weaken the tree root system. When the wind shifts to the opposite direction, many of these trees lose their hold in the ground and topple.

When watching newscasts, they usually show a large tree with a massive root ball lying on its side. This is the main reason why these trees topple during the storms.

So we have the storm surge, the heavy rains, and the high winds and how they damage any land when they strike, but why is New Orleans particularly vulnerable?

Pull up a map, look at the course the Mississippi takes

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