by Michael Fermanis
An historic scholar once described New Orleans as the "inevitable city on an impossible site." A glance at the map of North America reveals that the continent's interior is drained by a single river system - the Mississippi – that provides a natural waterway system for moving people and goods across the midcontinent of North America and down the Mississippi to its outlet on the Gulf. Another glance at the North American map reveals that there would naturally be a city at the mouth of that river that controls the trade between the vast interior of North America and the rest of the world.
Ironically, New Orleans was chosen by its founders to be the site of that city because it was high ground. Due to the meanderings of the Mississippi, its delta has created natural levees (embankments) each year when spring brought silt with the spring floods to its mouth. These silt deposits formed higher banks along the river’s course, and as the river changed its channel from time to time, the old embankments were left. These ridges were used by the native Americans to avoid the surrounding swamps and one was chosen as the site of New Orleans. The location’s other advantage was its nearness to Lake Pontchartrain a few miles to the north which allowed seagoing ships to reach the city quickly and avoid coming all the way up from the river’s mouth.
Jean Baptiste La Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, established New Orleans as the capital of Louisiana and a fortress to control the wealth of the North American interior. His settlement was along the Mississippi in what is now the French Quarter. Unlike the east coast of the United States, New Orleans was settled by the French and Spanish from Europe, but more particularly from the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. New Orleans has always been very different than the rest of the continent, with unique laws, customs, trade, religions, and a very liberal status for the free people of color (over half the population in 1803). Slavery was common during the 18th century and supplied the labor needed for the cotton and sugarcane plantations as well as for domestic service. Many of the historic buildings and civil engineering projects that remain today were originally constructed by imported African forced laborers. Many of the customs we have today, like Mardi Gras, are artifacts of that early “gumbo pot” of people that have always made up New Orleans.
In August of 2005 New Orleans was over two-thirds black. And half the city’s 400,000 inhabitants were poor. The crumbling schools were dangerous academic failures. The city government was only slowly cleaning up its tarnished image. New Orleans had become a dowager - once beautiful but now a dingy lady creaking with age.
Yet these very shortcomings were also its germ of life. Musicians and artists of all kinds found New Orleans a hotbed of creativity. Visitors came from throughout the world to share in the city’s vibrancy. And the locals wouldn’t live anywhere else – because there is no where else like New Orleans.
One of the first public works after the city was founded in 1718 was the construction of a three-foot levee to keep out some of the river’s annual flood waters. Until the last half of the nineteenth century, the city’s growth was limited to river levees and natural ridges inland where the river had previously deposited silt.
Over the centuries, many schemes were tried to drain or at least keep as much of the water out as possible. Drainage canals were dug, levees were built, and people developed a type of two-story architecture that elevated them above the periodic flood waters. Much of the area around the city remained uninhabitable because it was more water than land. And each year the river continued to flood and hurricanes brought floods and devastation as well.
With the invention of electricity that all changed. The New Orleans drainage system as we know it today dates back to the turn of the twentieth century. In 1899, the Sewerage and Water Board was authorized by the Louisiana Legislature to furnish, construct, operate, and maintain a water treatment and distribution system and a sanitary sewerage system for New Orleans. It constructed canals and dozens of pumping stations to drain the area surrounded by the levees and pump it into Lake Pontchartrain and other bodies of water around the city. Today this system’s pumping capacity is over 29 billion gallons a day, enough to empty a lake 10 square miles by 13.5 feet deep every 24 hours. That flow rate (over 45,000 cubic feet per second) is more than the flow rate of the Ohio River.
Electricity allowed areas to be surrounded by levees, crisscrossed with canals, and pumped dry. This opened up the areas of Mid-City, Lakeview, New Orleans East, and the Ninth Ward to development and industry. The reason people live in these low-lying areas today (some below sea level) is entirely because they were willing to rely on technology to protect them from the natural hazards of living in a river delta prone to annual floods and hurricanes.
Most residents of New Orleans will tell you that hurricanes are generally no big deal. In modern times, you know they’re coming, you leave town and stay out of harm’s way for a few days, and then come back and clean up the mess and repair your house. While hurricanes are dangerous, a distance of 50 miles from their central eye is sufficient to avoid their peril, unless you live in areas right on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain or the Gulf of Mexico.
River flooding is now a less threatening hazard. Spillways and other water control structures along the river have largely eliminated its annual overflow. Of course, this also prevented the deposition of silt that had created the natural levees and outlying islands around the delta that have eroded over time. The Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) claimed that their levees, dams, and other civil engineering feats could withstand nearly anything. The people of New Orleans believed them.
In late August, Hurricane Katrina swept through the straight between Florida and Cuba wreaking havoc on the Florida Keys. It was predicted to continue up the west coast of Florida to the Pensacola area. On Saturday, August 27th the prediction was altered and Katrina’s path was changed to hit New Orleans head-on. Most New Orleanians made plans to leave, and by the time the storm struck early Monday morning August 29th, over 85% of them had left the city. Those who remained were the aged, the infirm, the poor without transportation, and those who had ridden out many previous storms and thought they knew what to expect.
Katrina strengthened as it crossed the Gulf of Mexico and became a Category 5 hurricane, the strongest sort with winds above 150 mph. When it reached land, it passed through Plaquemines and St Bernard Parishes south of New Orleans East and continued on to the Mississippi coast. As does any hurricane, it brought with it a bulge of water (“storm surge”) beneath it over 26 feet high. This surge inundated the coastal areas, overtopped levees like a tsunami and washed away any man-made structures it encountered. The low-lying areas near the mouth of the Mississippi (Plaquemines and St Bernard Parishes) and the coastal Mississippi towns of Waveland and Pass Christian were largely wiped from the map.
New Orleans experienced wind damage and some minor flooding due to the storm’s rain, but the city’s drainage system could easily handle it.
As Monday progressed, however, reports began to surface that some levees had been breached. Soon, it was reported that there were more than a dozen places where the levees had given way or been overtopped. The primary ones were along the Industrial Canal (through New Orleans East and the Ninth Ward) and on the east side of the Seventeenth St Canal (through Lakeview).
Levees are good at keeping water out. They are equally good at keeping it in. The broken levees allowed the storm surge (up to 26 feet above normal sea level) to pour in from canals connected to Lake Pontchartrain and from the bodies of water connected to the Gulf of Mexico in the eastern part of New Orleans. The water continued to flood until the storm surge passed and the surrounding water levels fell. By that time, parts of the city were under 15 feet of water. The city’s entire electrical, sewage, and natural gas systems were destroyed. The pumping stations, knocked out by the flood, could not be restarted to drain the water.
While the hurricane was destructive, the flood was devastating. People had lost their homes, their jobs, and their city. They had no home to go back to and had to rely on family, friends, and government agencies elsewhere to survive. Their very ways of life had been taken from them.
The hurricane was a natural calamity, but neither unexpected nor insurmountable. Had it come and gone as predicted, it would have been destructive, but only another storm like the ones New Orleanians have withstood many times before.
The flood, however, was not a natural event. It was obvious to anyone watching the television coverage that the disaster preparedness plans created before the storm could not begin to address the greatest disaster in American history. The civil engineering systems were inadequately designed, improperly built, and neither maintained nor funded sufficiently to ensure that the city was protected. The levees and pumps failed because of mistakes and negligence.
The first step in recovery was to drain the water. It took weeks to do. The levees must be rebuilt, a job that will take years to achieve. And finally, the infrastructure of the drainage system must be redesigned and strengthened.
On a human scale, over three-quarters of the city was flooded to some extent. According to the Times-Picayune newspaper, over 128,000 homes have been inspected and 5,534 houses (about 4%) are unsafe to enter and must be razed. About 68 percent of the homes in the city are judged to be sound but with structural damage so severe that about half of them (43,000) will eventually be demolished.
The lack of housing means that people cannot return to the city even if they want to. Nearly every available hotel room is occupied by debris cleanup employees, public safety personnel, and other essential laborers. Businesses, provided with almost no assistance from the government they depended upon, cannot restart their operations here with no employees and few customers. So many New Orleanians must remain elsewhere.
Those who have returned are located in areas where there was little or no flooding. These areas are in the French Quarter and along the river – the natural high points settled before the electrified drainage system was created. Neighborhoods that were inundated remain uninhabited, unlit, and full of ruined cars, storm debris, and silt. Their house’s walls are covered with mold and the yards are littered with the ruined keepsakes of their lives
Currently, less than a quarter of the city’s pre-Katrina population of 450,000 has returned. Although utilities have been largely restored, many houses and buildings are too badly damaged to be reconnected. And the availability of services like transportation, cell phones, mail delivery, restaurants, gas stations, and other modern conveniences is minimal.
Some persons will have insurance to cover their losses, either homeowners insurance for wind and rain damage or government (FEMA) flood insurance. Many will not have coverage and will have to rely on their own resources to rebuild. Some will give up on New Orleans and resettle elsewhere where they believe that the opportunities for employment are greater and the chances of hurricanes and floods are less.
This paper was written by Michael Fermanis and was adapted from the following sources:
