Water: The Fate of New Orleans Hangs in an Uncomfortable Balance With Mother Nature

by Olga Bonfiglio

Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the havoc Mother Nature can play on a modern city.

It also brought to light the way our concerns about economics can compromise people's safety when we attempt to control nature.

Over one million people in the Gulf area were affected by "the storm," as residents call it, including just about everyone in New Orleans. Ninety percent of this 485,000-person city evacuated as 125,000 homes were severely damaged and 250,000 homes were summarily destroyed.

"The 150 mph winds from the east funneled water into the man-made navigation canals and the Category 5 surge strength made the levees breach starting with the 17th Street Canal of the Industrial Canal," said Richard Campanella, associate director of Tulane University's Center for Bioenvironmental Research and a research professor with Tulane's Department of Earth and Environmental Science. "Sixteen feet of water poured into an area that was four feet below sea level. That caused a flood of 20 feet in St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward. This area had been developed after Hurricane Betsy [of 1965]."

"There was no electricity and the city was empty, with no sound, no birds and in complete darkness," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), relating her feelings a few days after the storm as she looked over the city from a high bridge. The born and bred Orleanian and former mayor found Katrina's damage to be an unbelievable "out of body experience."

They both spoke at the annual conference of the American Planning Association (APA) recently, which focused on the effects of Katrina and the recovery effort.   READ MORE

Water: Blue Bayou

 by Olga Bonfiglio

It's morbidly painful to see ecological disaster strike at southern Louisiana-again. At risk now are the wetlands-the bayous.

The bayou is French for slow-moving waterway. In Louisiana it is an offshoot of the Mississippi River that forms a delta at the river's mouth. 

It took a thousand years of annual spring flooding for the silt and sediments to develop this region. But it's taken only the past 60 years to endanger it and the oil and gas industry is at the center of this destruction. 

But the threat to the bayous didn't happen last month with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. 
Oil rigs began to appear in the brackish coastal areas of the Gulf in the early 1930s when the Texas Company (Texaco) developed the first mobile steel barges for drilling. After World War II, other companies began to build fixed off-shore platforms near southern Louisiana. Today the Gulf hosts about 4,000 platforms. 

Since 1950, an 8,000-mile system of canals has been constructed in the bayous- with channels 15 to 25-feet wide and six to seven-feet deep-to accommodate the transport of oil-related equipment.
READ MORE

Cities: New Orleans, Louisiana

by Gigi Leet

-     Before Katrina, New Orleans paid relatively little attention to sustainability

-     New Orleans locations has a high natural disaster risk

-     Katrina predictable and predicted, but predictions ignored (seemed costly, and predictions insufficiently specific or certain at the time)

o     Costly: City decimated, $100 Billion pledged from Gov., environment, social, and cultural damages, loss of life.

o     After the storm events happened, now everybody is interested in the environment," said Wynecta Fisher, director of the city's Office of Environmental Affairs. "I hate to say that it came at a good time, but because of the storm, we've been able to build on that momentum."

o     Prevention cheaper than repair – clear in hindsight

-     What to do about it?

o     1^st choice – Abandon, move, or rebuild?

o     2ed choice – How to rebuild?

o     3ed choice - Manufactured vs. natural capital?

-     Recent Sustainability projects (NGOs, Gov projects, businesses, ext)

o      Bio-fuel public transit

o     Hydrokinetic Power

o     Solar street lights

o     Costal restoration

o     Green building (LEED)

-     Challenges

o     Scale

o     Expense $$$

o     Equity

o     Potential for future disasters

-     What is needed is a new vision of a truly New Orleans—one that can provide a sustainable and high quality of life for all of its citizens while it works in partnership (not in futile opposition) with the natural forces that shaped it. This New Orleans can serve as a metaphor and a model for the sustainable development of western industrial society more generally.”

- “Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans” editorial from Elsevier