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from the always-look-on-the-bright-side-of-life dept.
After a $14-Billion Upgrade, New Orleans' Levees Are Sinking:
Sea-level rise and ground subsidence will render the flood barriers inadequate in just four years
The $14 billion network of levees and floodwalls that was built to protect greater New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was a seemingly invincible bulwark against flooding.
But now, 11 months after the Army Corps of Engineers completed one of the largest public works projects in world history, the agency says the system will stop providing adequate protection in as little as four years because of rising sea levels and shrinking levees.
The growing vulnerability of the New Orleans area is forcing the Army Corps to begin assessing repair work, including raising hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls that form a meandering earth and concrete fortress around the city and its adjacent suburbs.
"These systems that maybe were protecting us before are no longer going to be able to protect us without adjustments," said Emily Vuxton, policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group. She said repair costs could be "hundreds of millions" of dollars, with 75% paid by federal taxpayers.
"I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans," Vuxton said.
The protection system was built over a decade and finished last May when the Army Corps completed a final component that involves pumps.
The agency's projection that the system will "no longer provide [required] risk reduction as early as 2023" illustrates the rapidly changing conditions being experienced both globally as sea levels rise faster than expected and locally as erosion wipes out protective barrier islands and marshlands in southeastern Louisiana.
Could never have seen that coming.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 19 2019, @02:15PM (2 children)
People made excellent short-term decisions to build in flood plains, close to water transport, particularly at a time when water transport was the only viable heavy cargo option.
Thus, the problem long-term. Levees, particularly in the New Orleans area, make the problem much worse because what used to be the occasional mud depositing land replenishing flood has been redirected out into the deep Gulf, where it's none too good for the ecosystem, and also fails to counteract natural subsidence. It's a similar problem to fire suppression - yes, fire isn't fun, particularly when you build flammable things in its path, but long term suppression of fire is also bad in new and unforeseen ways.
Agreed, but New Orleans is somewhat of a national cultural treasure, not unlike Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Given the choice between building levees to protect the city and building a wall to disrupt cross-border trade with Mexico, I think that protecting the city is the better investment.
Not exactly - we're far ahead of where things were when Katrina hit, and the standards for what is considered acceptable risk have been increased dramatically since then. Four years from now, we will be back at the threshold of acceptable under the new risk models, we were far below that threshold when Katrina hit.
All in all, I believe that the taxes collected on the commerce and tourism supported by New Orleans still exceeds the cost of the levee system. Sure, those taxes normally contribute to the national general fund, but in terms of a "black hole for taxes" you might look toward the interstate highway system linking most of rural Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, the Dakotas, etc. as another "boondoggle" of a federal project, providing a level of service that, according to traffic counts, just isn't warranted. Like how the Amtrak system only turns a profit in the North East Corridor, yet provides some level of passenger service nationwide mostly running at a loss. 50 years after construction for the highways, 100s for the passenger rails, they haven't turned into the promised economic engine everywhere - but the places they have succeeded make up for the places than they haven't yet.
So, as to New Orleans - if you abandon/relocate the city, the port traffic still needs to be handled somewhere, and there really aren't any great building sites on the juncture of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, so wherever you relocate New Orleans to, it's going to be a lot of the same problems - perhaps marginally better than the current location, but some decades after instituting flood controls in the new location, subsidence and sea level rise are going to be the same old problems, and I don't think you can support commercial port operations without some level of flood controls on the facilities, not to mention the surrounding city that supports the port operations. You might attempt a radical redesign of the operations, heavy on automation and extra light on port workers, try to minimize the footprint of the port-city to minimize the cost of flood controls.
In the end, it's a question of the historical/cultural value. Are we, as a nation, ready to abandon the city of Mardi Gras in exchange for $0.014 per person per day?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday April 19 2019, @04:27PM
I agree that New Orleans, at least parts of it, is a national treasure but the long term cost of trying to preserve the area is not something that US tax payers are going to want to fund indefinitely.
It would be far cheaper and easier in the long run to relocate the areas of cultural and historic value to higher ground. The move would also allow the infrastructure supporting those areas to be updated and improved.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday April 19 2019, @05:38PM
Wikipedia has this datum from 2004:
If we were to project the size of the economy needed to make up the rest of the city tax revenue ($5.5B/40%) we would come up with $13.75B. Those are old numbers, so we can assume there has been enough growth to bring the total New Orleans economy to greater than the cost of the levee upgrade. Also, these are annual numbers, but the levee upgrades were several years in the making.
Overall, this becomes a finance problem. Clearly, there's enough money floating around to spend on flood mitigation; it's just a question of whether it's worth it, and to whom. It doesn't make sense for federal money to keep pouring in to fix a local problem, especially if it's not worth fixing.
If the levee costs were borne fully by the local economy, it would certainly be a heavy burden, but would it really be higher cost than many other expensive cities across the globe? California cities come to mind as shining examples of how high the cost of living can get to support the choices the region has made. Also, the other iconic sinking city, Venice, is not cheap. Maybe New Orleans should be headed in that direction.
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