bye bye New Orleans

[Guest guest]

off Orion online

 

 

 

AS WE REACH THE 90-DAY mark since Katrina hit, it's time we ended our

national state of denial. Turns out House Speaker Dennis Hastert had it

right all along, though his reasons were flawed. We should call it

quits in New Orleans not because the city can't be made relatively safe

from hurricanes. It can be. And not because to do so is more trouble

than it's worth. It's not. But because the Bush Administration has

already given New Orleans a quiet kiss of death now that the story has

run its news cycle.

 

 

As someone who dearly loves New Orleans and has experienced many of her

charms, it pains me immeasurably to call for this retreat. This is not

a rhetorical stunt or a shock argument meant to invite compromise

talks. I mean what I say: Shut the city down and board it up before

thousands more lives are lost.

 

 

In the weeks after Katrina, the American media somehow portrayed the

catastrophe as a matter of failed levees and flawed evacuation plans.

The " What went wrong? " coverage involved autopsies of every breached

dike and a witch hunt for those responsible for the Superdome and

Convention Center fiascos. But these were just horrifying symptoms of a

much larger disease.

 

 

Katrina destroyed the Big Easy-and future Katrinas will do the

same-not because of engineering failures but because one million

acres of coastal islands and marshland have vanished in Louisiana in

the last century due to human interference. These land forms served as

natural " speed bumps, " reducing the lethal surge tide of past

hurricanes and making New Orleans habitable in the first place.

 

 

But while encouraging city residents to return home and declaring for

the media audience that " we will do whatever it takes " to save the

city, the President earlier this month formally refused the one thing

New Orleans simply cannot live without: A restored network of barrier

islands and coastal wetlands.

 

 

Tens of billions of dollars have been authorized to treat the

symptoms-broken levees, insufficient emergency resources, destroyed

roads and bridges-but next to nothing for the disease itself, that of

disappeared land, which ushered the ocean into the city to begin with.

No amount of levee building or stockpiling of bottled water will ever

save New Orleans until the state's barrier shoreline is restored.

 

 

Just since World War II an area of land the size of Rhode Island has

turned to water between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, most of it

former marshland. And every 2.7 miles of marshland reduces a hurricane

surge tide by a foot, dispersing the storm's power. Simply put, had

Katrina struck in 1945 instead of 2005, the surge that reached New

Orleans would have been as much as 5-10 feet less than it was.

 

 

These marshes, as well as the barrier islands, were created by the

sediment-rich flood waters of the Mississippi River deposited over

thousands of years. But modern levees have prevented this natural

flooding, and the existing wetlands, starved for new sediments and

nutrients, have eroded and " subsided " and just washed away. Every ten

months, even without hurricanes, an area of Louisiana land equal to

Manhattan turns to water. That's 50 acres a day. A football field every

30 minutes!

 

 

 

 

A $14 billion plan to fix this problem-a plan widely viewed as

technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies,

and fishermen alike-has been on the table for years and was pushed

forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. But for reasons hard to

fathom, yet utterly lethal in their effect, the administration has

turned its back on this plan. Instead of investing the equivalent of

six weeks of spending in Iraq, or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston, we

must now prepare to pay for another inevitable $200 billion hurricane

just around the corner in Louisiana.

 

 

The grand plan to change all this, commonly known as the Coast 2050

plan, would use massive pipelines and pumps and surgically designed

canals to guide a portion of the river's sediment-thick water back

toward the coastal buffer zone without destroying existing

infrastructure or communities. This would rebuild hundreds of thousands

of acres of wetlands over time and reconstruct entire barrier islands

in as little as 12 months. (It is estimated that the government's plan

to rebuild the levees could take decades.) Everyone agrees the plan

will work. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed the soundness of

the approach just last week and urged quick action.

 

 

Yet in its second and final post-Katrina emergency spending package

sent to Congress on November 8th, the White House dismissed the rescue

plan with a shockingly small $250 million proposed authorization

instead of the $14 billion requested.

 

 

How could this administration, found totally unprepared for the first

Katrina, not see the obvious action needed to prevent the next one? My

theory is that Bush hears " wetlands " and retreats to a blind,

ideological aversion to all things " environmental. " Which perhaps

explains why in multiple speeches given during six photo-op trips to

the Gulf since Katrina hit, the President has not one time mentioned

the words barrier islands or wetlands. Not once.

 

 

" Either they don't get it or they just don't care, " said Mark Davis,

director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. " But the

results are the same: more disaster. "

 

 

So stop the repairs; put the brooms and chain saws away. Close the few

businesses that have re-opened. Leave the levees in their tattered

state and get out. Right now. Everybody. It's utterly unsafe to live

there.

 

 

To encourage people to return to New Orleans, as Bush is doing, without

funding the only plan that can save the city from the next Big One, is

to commit an act of mass homicide. If, after all the human suffering

and expense of this national ordeal, the federal government can't be

bothered to spend the cost of a tunnel from Logan Airport to downtown

Boston, then the game is truly over.

 

 

Anyone who doesn't like this news-farmers who export grain through

the port of New Orleans, New Englanders who heat their homes with

natural gas from the Gulf, cultural enthusiasts who like their gumbo in

the French Quarter-should all direct their comments straight to the

White House. But don't wait around for a response

 

 

 

 

Don't need no politician

Tell me things I ought to be

Neither no optician

Tell me what I ought to see

No one tells you nothing

Even when you know they know

They tell you what you should be

They don't like to see you grow