New Orleans' Tragic Relationship With Water

Water has sustained New Orleans and perpetually threatened it. City officials estimated that 80% of the town is under standing water.

1 minute read

August 31, 2005, 11:00 AM PDT

By Chris Steins @planetizen

"In 1718, French colonist Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville ignored his engineers' warnings about the hazards of flooding and mapped a settlement in a pinch of swampland between the mouth of the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico and a massive lake to the north... But when the rainfall brought by Katrina breached levees and overwhelmed the city's pumping stations, the catastrophic consequences of Bienville's miscalculation could no longer be ignored.

...The charming quirks of its geography like the practice of entombing the dead aboveground because high water tables make burial a short-term proposition may no longer seem so charming. The water, cherished by Bienville for its potential to open the region to commerce, has now all but strangled access. Bridges and causeways are shredded, and city streets are buried in debris."

Transportation (and related) professionals, may also be interested to see the magnitude of the damage on just this one interstate, I-10 in Louisiana.

Aerial video footage (no sound). (From WDSU.com, submitted by Linda LaSut.)

Thanks to Chris Steins

FULL STORY: New Orleans' Tragic Paradox

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 in The Los Angeles Times

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