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posted by mrpg on Friday April 19 2019, @04:33AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by physicsmajor on Friday April 19 2019, @05:06AM (19 children)

    by physicsmajor (1471) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:06AM (#832042)

    People made terrible decisions to build in flood plains, below sea level, which were and continue to sink. The fucking planet wants to reclaim this area and is going to win. The only real question is how much money we want to throw away before we admit inevitable defeat. Make no mistake, defeat here is inevitable.

    Taxpayers should no longer be on the hook for this fiasco. There's a limit, and we are so far past it we can't even see it anymore. We shouldn't have done the prior repair either, but hey $14 billion and a couple years later we're basically back to square one. If New Orleans and its residents want to pursue the literal definition of insanity that's on them. We've got actual problems and emergencies that need our resources, which are not infinite, and we cannot afford as a society to flush more good money into the Gulf of Mexico.

    Condemn the neighborhoods in question. Help people move somewhere else, somewhere that isn't literally below sea level (and next to said sea).

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jimtheowl on Friday April 19 2019, @05:14AM (6 children)

      by jimtheowl (5929) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:14AM (#832043)
      That would be admitting that climate change is real. Not with this administration.
      • (Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:23AM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:23AM (#832047)

        This has nothing to do with climate change. You're just discrediting climate change when you try to tie every stupid little thing to it. Yes, we know ORANGE MAN BAD. Right, got it.

        The soil under New Orleans is shrinking. Think about how mud cracks when it dries. Think about how raisins are all wrinkly and small compared to grapes. This is the real problem. There is no connection to climate change or to your president Donald J. Trump.

        The reason is actually flood control. We keep pumping out the water. If we don't do that, the place is flooded. If we do pump out the water, the land shrinks.

        • (Score: 3, Touché) by jimtheowl on Friday April 19 2019, @06:03AM (4 children)

          by jimtheowl (5929) on Friday April 19 2019, @06:03AM (#832054)
          I didn't mention the orange dude, but the administration. The former is just a distraction; it could have been anyone serving the same agenda.

          The politics is simply a reflection of a populace in denial and enabled by people with vested interest in keeping things the way they are.

          FTFA:
          " 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."

          Is the soil shrinking globally? Is there another reason why sea levels are rising?
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:25AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:25AM (#832060)

            This has nothing to do with the sea level. It isn't even the sea that is pouring into the area. There is a huge river and a rather large lake.

            There is no erosion. Think about it. If the dirt started to wash away, where would it go? It would go to the low point, helping to solve the problems!

            Basically, the article is making shit up. Soil shrinks when we pump out water. It isn't exactly global, but we cause it in lots of places. We drop the water table, either with wells or just pumping a low spot dry, and the loss of water causes the land to shrink. This is fundamentally a local problem, although repeated in many other places.

            • (Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Friday April 19 2019, @05:57PM

              by jimtheowl (5929) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:57PM (#832226)
              I am not denying the problem caused by pumping out water.

              The sea level rise is not stated as the source of the problem, but the main reason we are not coping with it as planned.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday April 19 2019, @04:22PM (1 child)

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 19 2019, @04:22PM (#832192) Journal

            IIUC, the sinking land is a result of pumping out a bunch of oil that used to hold it up. So it's not happening globally. The people who built there back in the 1930's had no reason to expect this result, in the 1970's it was clearly happening. Then the sea levels started to rise.

            --
            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
            • (Score: 5, Interesting) by jimtheowl on Friday April 19 2019, @05:33PM

              by jimtheowl (5929) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:33PM (#832217)
              I would have thought obvious that the question was rhetorical, but thanks for that bit of history.

              Here is another: In 1755 the British deported the Acadians from Eastern Canada (Today's newly named Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince-Edward Island) deporting them across the world.

              A large number died, some of them ended up in Louisiana (I am not stating that this is the origin of the French in Louisiana). Not being wanted anywhere, they would end up in swamps where no one would do farming.

              The Acadians (known a 'cajuns' in the US south) practiced a style of faming which involved a system of valves known as 'aboitaux', which allowed the sea tide to go out, but not back in. After that claimed land was dried up, it was extremely fertile.

              What you state rings true, but the origins go much further.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:15AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:15AM (#832044)

      I agree on giving up, pretty much. After the hurricane it probably should have been used for military training or as a landfill. Adding lots of fill would also work.

      It didn't start out so bad. It wasn't great. Our efforts to control the flooding have caused the land to sink. Pumping water out of the lowest spot causes the whole area to drain, and then the dirt shrinks like a dried-up sponge. The more we fight to keep that low spot dry, the more the whole area sinks.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Friday April 19 2019, @05:48AM (1 child)

      by RamiK (1813) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:48AM (#832050)

      The fucking planet wants to reclaim this area and is going to win.

      While it's true New Orleans should be relocated seeing how there's so many other better lands to resettle the people, it's technically possibly to solve the problem if people actually cared enough to do it properly:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation#Land_amounts_added [wikipedia.org]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_the_Netherlands [wikipedia.org]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation_in_China [wikipedia.org]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Artificial_islands_of_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

      --
      compiling...
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday April 19 2019, @04:28PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 19 2019, @04:28PM (#832196) Journal

        Well, the Netherlands is a good example, but I bet the others have high points that they link their dikes to. (Actually, the Netherlands does, too. Total enclosure dikes are rare.

        The problem with New Orleans following that path is the Mississippi River. Which occasionally has major floods. IIUC, you'd need to build dikes right in the center of town. And dikes are NOT narrow. The current levees being too small is a large measure of the problem. IIUC they tried to use high tech levees to avoid encroaching on developed areas any more than they had to. Which is part of both the expense and the short term failure.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:37AM (#832062)

      Start by reinforcing the inner side of the outer walls with a few foot thick layer of geopolymer, the ocean side being reinforced to reduce erosion with a combination of geopolymer, roman concrete, or ceramic tiles held together/in place by basalt fiber ropes.

      Now, while this sounds, and is, stupidly expensive, there is a greater reason for this: This initial 'stonewalling' as it were gives time to begin the ACTUAL New Orleans reconstruction project: The movement of new orleans historic buildings onto geopolymer barges, which can be built using standardized frameworks for the majority of the city. As historic buildings are raised and placed on barges we will collectively as a nation be gaining the engineering knowledge necessary to more cheaply and efficiently relocate housing along the majority of coastlines which will be receding in the near future, and more importantly offer a new and compelling way to indebt more island nations to us instead of the Chinese, Russians, or other interested and financially savvy parties as their islands sink under the newly raised seas.

      The problem of course is that America as it sinks today is incapable of the sort of long term thinking necessary to make both the financial and ideological commitment to such a project necessary for it to not only succeed, but come in under budget, and have the resulting product licensed to anyone willing to pay the standardized royalty costs or provably be headquartered and only employee domestic (US) laborerers for all projects foreign or domestic utilizing the technique. If we could do that, this project would pay for itself many times over as we help elevate foreign nations out of the swamps of our collective making.

      Food for thought.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @07:21AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @07:21AM (#832071)

      assuming it costs 10^5 dollars to build a new house, 14 billions buy 140*10^3 houses.
      I'd say that's reasonable.
      especially since it costs less to build a new house, and you could certainly argue for blocks of flats instead of houses.
      I did not consider the cost of streets, sewers etc, maybe someone who knows these things can make an estimate.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday April 19 2019, @09:58AM (2 children)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 19 2019, @09:58AM (#832094) Journal

      People made terrible decisions to build in flood plains, below sea level, which were and continue to sink... Make no mistake, defeat here is inevitable.

      You mean... like Holland? Which managed to stay reclaim land and keep it dry since 14th century [wikipedia.org]? With a busy international airport 3m under the sea level [wikipedia.org]?

      Just how do you want to make America great if you give up and let the sea make it smaller? (large grin)

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 19 2019, @02:21PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 19 2019, @02:21PM (#832154)

        how do you want to make America great if you give up and let the sea make it smaller?

        That's actually part of what makes America great - so much land, relatively so few people. We can strip mine, abandon lands to the sea, frack and make our ground water flammable, and still we have more good land than all of Europe!

        O.K. O.K. - not technically true, raw land, counting Alaska and Scandinavia, is roughly equivalent, but the mitigating factor is that our population is still just 50% that of Europe - so those pesky mountains and deserts aren't as bad, per capita, as they might seem.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday April 19 2019, @04:21PM

        by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Friday April 19 2019, @04:21PM (#832191)

        I think you missed the bit about the land in New Orleans sinking, not just that the sea level is rising.

        To the best of my knowledge the land Holland has secured is not sinking, so all they have to do is keep building the levees higher and add pumps to compensate for rising sea levels.

        Different situations,

        --
        "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 19 2019, @02:15PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday April 19 2019, @02:15PM (#832152)

      People made terrible decisions to build in flood plains

      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.

      below sea level, which were and continue to sink.

      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.

      Taxpayers should no longer be on the hook for this fiasco.

      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.

      $14 billion and a couple years later we're basically back to square one.

      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.

      we cannot afford as a society to flush more good money into the Gulf of Mexico.

      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

        by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Friday April 19 2019, @04:27PM (#832195)

        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

        by Osamabobama (5842) on Friday April 19 2019, @05:38PM (#832219)

        Wikipedia has this datum from 2004:

        New Orleans' tourist and convention industry is a $5.5 billion industry that accounts for 40 percent of city tax revenues.

        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.

        --
        Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:48AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:48AM (#832051)

    Global sinking is fake news! Total lies from CNN. Walls get taller under my administration, everyone says so. Canada even just built one to keep Amer.....uh, Mexicans out. Terrifically tall and thick, like my own Mr. Bigly down-there. Make Walls Tall Again!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:50AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @05:50AM (#832052)

    Sea level rise since 1995 has been a steady linear trend [nasa.gov]. How can they say it's more than expected?

    • (Score: 4, Funny) by c0lo on Friday April 19 2019, @10:03AM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 19 2019, @10:03AM (#832097) Journal

      How can they say it's more than expected?

      Higher number of meteorological satellites in orbit which increases both the frequency of storms and the height of the tide.

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday April 19 2019, @04:40PM

      by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Friday April 19 2019, @04:40PM (#832201)

      the land is also sinking at a faster rate than expected.

      While looking fo rthe cause of the sink I came across this article [theatlantic.com] that goes into a fair bit of history about the land surrounding New Orleans and the reasons for the current issue.

      tldr; Humans messing with things they didn't really understand screwed things up, again.

      --
      "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:37AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:37AM (#832061)

    Honk Honk!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @03:28PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @03:28PM (#832178)

      Glub Glub!

  • (Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday April 19 2019, @10:02AM (1 child)

    by crafoo (6639) on Friday April 19 2019, @10:02AM (#832096)

    New Orleans, the first walled, sub-sea-level, island city.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by fritsd on Friday April 19 2019, @11:24AM (4 children)

    by fritsd (4586) on Friday April 19 2019, @11:24AM (#832113) Journal

    In order to Make New Orleans Great Again(™), you need to do the following:

    1. stop voting for governments that hire politicians like this: David Bernhardt [wikipedia.org]

    and then

    2. start voting for governments that can do plans that take half a century and raise taxes to pay for it, and hire politicians like this: Cornelis Lely [wikipedia.org]

    otherwise, just forget it; you don't have what it takes.

    Zuiderzee works [wikipedia.org]:

    1891 -- 1919 research and planning
    1920 -- 1924 Afsluitdijk built (first version, that needed a decade or so to "settle" [wikipedia.org] its structure before building on top of it)
    1924 -- 1932 complete primary structure of the Afsluitdijk (excl. raising it to full height and building a motorway on top of it)
    1926 -- 1927 experimental Andijk polder to test methods and techniques on a smaller scale
    1927 -- 1930 Wieringermeer polder (smallish)
    1936 -- 1942 Noordoostpolder (big)
    1950 -- 1968 Flevoland (huge)

    Delta works [wikipedia.org] (much more complicated because we needed nature, shipping and protection from the sea):
    It was started after the disastrous flood of 1953 [wikipedia.org]. I remember my granny telling that lots of refugees from Zeeland had to be given temporary lodging in our village.
    The design parameters are interesting:
    1. estimate cost of a human life
    2. estimate how often the NL floods
    3. calculate price ticket for acceptability of : once per century floods, once per thousand year floods, once per 10000 year floods, up to once per 125000 year floods.
    4. clinically decide price in human lives / cost of project balance: Delta works are going to protect against a once in a thousand year flood (1/10000 year is too expensive).

    It's very important to note that the basis for this Dutch law, the Delta law [wikipedia.org], is what engineers and scientists modeled to be the reality of the geography of the Netherlands. Start with reality, then decide what we can *pay in taxes* to improve flood survival. No idealistic bullshit like "no Dutchman should be at risk of drowning". It doesn't work like that.

    I'll spare you the details (the Wiki page has 'em) but this project took continuous budget and work from 1954 to 1997. Of course the crowning glory was the unique Oosterscheldekering [wikipedia.org], note details on that wiki page like: "four ships were custom designed and built for this project".
    Maybe the Louisianianians can hire them?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:31PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @06:31PM (#832237)

      Here's the difference: the Dutch government is made up of Dutch people protecting fellow Dutch people from the sea. In New Orleans, it's a white government (with the token Moslem thrown in) deciding how much to spend to keep African Americans from drowning. In the Netherlands you use a complex calculation based on the value of human lives divided by project cost, the Americans have the same equation but the solution is much simpler since they set the numerator to zero.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @07:51PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @07:51PM (#832261)

        You are right, everything is the white man's fault, including water and gravity.
        I was wondering how we could blame this on whitey!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @10:05PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @10:05PM (#832326)

          #BlackLivesMatter, cracker, and the sooner you realize it the happier you will be. The greatest president America ever had was black, the best music comes from black hip hop artists like Drake and Wynton Marsalis, and breakfast would be boring without Aunt Jemimah.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @11:39PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 19 2019, @11:39PM (#832371)

            But that Prez was half white and was completely raised by white people.

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