Leeville was settled by refugees, or, to use a less contested term, flood victims. On October 1, 1893, a hurricane wiped out the area’s main settlement, Caminadaville, which sat on a spit of land bordered on three sides by the Gulf and on the fourth by swamp. Nearly half of Caminadaville’s inhabitants perished in the storm, most by drowning, some when the buildings they had taken refuge in collapsed. Father Pierre Grimaux, the local parish priest, who rode out the disaster in the upper story of the presbytery, reported that “out of two hundred and fifty houses, only four remained.” Survivors sailed up the bayou in their damaged canots and began buying land from an orange-grower named Peter Lee, who was selling plots for $12.50 each. For sixteen years, they fished, planted rice, and held fais do-do dancing parties in homes with covered verandas. Then, in 1909, the Leeville Hurricane struck. (A contemporary newspaper account described survivors of that storm subsisting on drowned rabbit.) Six years later, a third hurricane forced residents to flee north once more. According to local legend, the storm surge carried one house from Leeville nine miles inland. The owner simply bought the plot underneath it and moved back in.
In the nineteen-thirties, Leeville rebounded briefly. Oil was discovered in the area, and by the end of the decade there were ninety-eight producing wells in town. The pay was good and regulation nonexistent. Blowouts routinely rained sulfur and brine onto the houses, into the cisterns, over the trees. Tin roofs corroded and vegetable gardens shrivelled up. When the wells ran dry, oil production moved offshore and Leeville was again deserted. There were no more jobs, and the town itself had begun to wash away. Where once men in straw hats picked oranges and harvested rice, today there is mostly open water.
A few months ago, I went to visit the remains of Leeville with Windell Curole, the director of the South Lafourche Levee District. Curole, as it happens, is a descendant of Peter Lee, and also a member of a swamp pop group that calls itself the Hurricane Levee Band. He is a trim man of fifty-four, with thick gray hair and dark, deep-set eyes. Seven of his eight great-grandparents grew up in Caminadaville, and three of his four grandparents lived in Leeville. Curole and his wife are raising their two children in Cut Off, thirty-five miles from the coast.
“That movement of my family reflects the communities of southern Louisiana,” he told me. It was a dull autumn day, threatening rain that never came. “We have retreated, and we continue to retreat.” As we made our way south along the bayou, Curole kept pointing out landmarks from his childhood. “That’s where my grandfather’s trapping camp was,” he said, gesturing toward a stretch of boggy marsh. “When I was a baby, I could sit down in the front yard and not get my pants wet. When my mama was a kid, you had oak trees.” Curole receives checks for an oil lease on a plot that he inherited from his grandparents. The plot is now submerged. In Leeville, we passed a bait shop, a gas station, and a cluster of mobile homes perched, like birds’ nests, on narrow wooden pilings. We wandered down to a dock, which had a view of one of the last remnants of the old town—a cemetery. Leeville’s dead had not been buried but entombed in vaults. Waves lapped at the caved-in bricks. A porpoise jumped out of the water, then slipped back in.
Over the years, a great many plans have been drawn up to protect the Louisiana coast; these range from building up barrier islands with pumped sand to digging an alternative route for the Mississippi River—the so-called Third Delta Conveyance Channel. Katrina and Rita have inspired a whole new generation of proposals. Curole, who since the hurricanes has made several trips to Washington to testify before Congress, has, for example, been advocating a series of thirteen-foot levees that would loop around from the Lake Pontchartrain basin through Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes to Morgan City, stretching more than a hundred miles. All of these plans rest on the same assumption, which is that something can be done to halt, or at least dramatically slow, land loss. If this can be accomplished, there are many possible futures for southern Louisiana. If it can’t, there is only one.
On a hot, bright-blue day a few weeks after Katrina, I went with Dokka to attend a meeting with officials in Plaquemines Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. There was heavy traffic—since the hurricanes, the roads that are still functioning have been carrying nearly twice as many cars—so we were late getting to the parish-council office, in the town of Belle Chasse. As we arrived, helicopters carrying sandbags were thumping overhead. In the parking lot, we met the parish president, Benny Rousselle, who was walking in the opposite direction. He pulled Dokka aside.
“Let me ask you, this is not going to affect my rebuilding by more than a foot?” he said. His tone suggested that he was not so much asking as telling. “I can live with a foot or so.”
Dokka nodded silently, then, when Rousselle was out of earshot, muttered, “You wouldn’t have to live with it, but your people might die from it.” We headed into the building, which was faced with wooden planks, like a Western saloon. A half-dozen people were sitting at computers in a makeshift command center. Water was dripping from the ceiling into an orange plastic bowl. A six-hundredand-sixty-six-pound blue marlin was mounted on the wall, next to a satellite photograph of the parish: a long, skinny leg of land twisting out into the Gulf of Mexico. The photograph was pasted with fifteen little red triangles marking the spots where the parish’s levees had been breached. After Katrina, many of the breaches had been sealed, only to be reopened by Rita.
Dokka’s study, which he published in July, 2004, under the title “Rates of Vertical Displacement at Benchmarks in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Northern Gulf Coast,” showed that for decades elevations in coastal Louisiana had been systematically overstated. Heights had been calculated on the basis of “benchmarks” that were supposedly stable but which, it turned out, were themselves subsiding. Dokka’s calculations showed that the fastest-sinking areas, among them the southern part of Plaquemines Parish, were losing elevation at the rate of more than an inch a year. In his study, he labelled this phenomenon an “inexorable slow disaster” whose economic effects would eventually “be felt by the entire country.”
“These heights that we’re providing, we would recommend very highly that those would be the only ones that you would use for reconstruction or rebuilding,” Taylor told the men around the table. They looked glum.
“You need to specify, ‘Thou shalt only use these numbers,’ ” Dokka emphasized.
Taylor went on to note that the new elevations, which were based on 2004 data, were probably themselves already out of date, as most of the benchmarks had continued to subside. Dokka suggested that the figures be thought of as having expiration dates, like milk cartons. In a few years, new “new” elevations would be issued.
“I don’t want to be the person who pulled the rug out from under southern Louisiana,” Dokka said later, as we walked back to the car. “But ultimately it’s going to get so bad over here—in fifty to a hundred years, maybe sooner—that this is going to go under water.”
“I like what you’ve done with this place,” Osborn told the guard. Smiling wanly, the man waved us through.
Plaquemines Parish is one of the youngest parts of Louisiana, and has sections that are so new they do not show up on nineteenth-century maps. The parish is bisected by the Mississippi, and at its tip the river finally ends its 2,350-mile journey, splaying out into a formation that resembles the toes of a chicken and is called the Birdfoot. Highway 23 follows the contours of the river along its west bank. The road is protected by levees on both sides, but during Katrina water came in from all directions. Just beyond Myrtle Grove, we came to a spot where two barges that had been lifted by the storm surge were sitting on top of a river levee. Piles of dead fish lay on the grass. We passed a grove of citrus trees, which were turning brown from saltwater exposure, and a mobile home that had been deposited on top of a minivan. Dokka, Osborn, and Taylor had all brought cameras. At each new scene of devastation, they would lean out of the car windows and click away. In some spots, the floodwaters had receded, or been pumped out, but in others back yards and pastureland were still submerged, and water lapped at the shoulder of the highway.
As we continued south, the destruction grew more complete. In Port Sulphur, so named for its now abandoned sulfur mines, most houses had been reduced to construction debris. The few buildings still standing had lost their outer walls, so that you could look right through, into what had once been kitchens and living rooms and dens. The trees were draped with an astonishing assortment of household goods: jackets, tires, chairs, bicycles. It became something of a contest to see who could find the most amazing item in the branches. Except for an occasional Humvee full of National Guard members and some Spanishspeaking workers, we were the only people in the area. It was eerily still. (A New Orleans Times-Democrat account of the Mississippi flood of 1882 described this sort of post-diluvian silence as “the quiet of dissolution.”) Near the town of Empire, two fishing boats, the Sea Falcon and the Sea Wolf, both a hundred and fifty feet long, had landed across all four lanes of Highway 23. After a round of picture-taking, Osborn maneuvered the car off the highway and around their hulls.
“This area is living on borrowed time,” Dokka said. “I mean, it is.” To check on his G.P.S. receiver, we had to climb onto the roof of a deserted school. Apparently, there had been food in the refrigerators when Katrina hit, because when we made our way through the lunchroom the smell was nauseating.
Finally, after more than two hours, we reached the Coast Guard station in Venice, just north of the Birdfoot. The building was largely intact, but insulation was draped over the sides, like Spanish moss, and the parking lot was filled with overturned boats. Osborn opened the back of the car and pulled out some M.R.E.s. Each meal had to be heated by placing it on top of a little pouch and then pouring water over it to produce an exothermic reaction. We ate and stuffed the wrappers into a plastic bag.
On the way back to Empire, Dokka spotted a dead cow hanging in a tree. The cow’s body was hollowed out, but its head was bloated, making it look like something from a Surrealist painting or a nightmare. We pulled over so that everyone could take pictures. It was agreed that Dokka had won the contest.
The clay is imported, too, only on a different time scale. In some form or another, the Mississippi has been flowing for tens of millions of years, and all the while it has been carrying great loads of sediment—in the eighteen-hundreds, some four hundred million tons per year—which tended to settle out where the river, slowing, emptied into the sea. In this way, what is now the Louisiana Gulf Coast was formed out of bits and pieces of Missouri and Arkansas and Kentucky and Iowa and Illinois and Minnesota.
The buildup of southern Louisiana and its wasting away are flip sides of the same deltaic process. Over time, sediments naturally compact and consolidate—or dewater—with recent layers, which are wetter, losing volume more rapidly. Once enough sediment has been deposited, the load begins to depress the earth’s crust, a process known as down-warping. (Down-warping occurs so gradually that the earth is still responding to sediment deposited tens of thousands of years ago.) In areas where accretion exceeds subsidence, new land is created. But the process works against itself. When too much sediment builds up at its mouth, the river, seeking a faster route to the sea, switches course, like a hose flopping around in the grass. A new bulge of land, or delta lobe, starts to form, while the old one slowly continues to sink and compact under its own weight. In the past eight thousand years, the river has built five major lobes, some of them overlapping. Western Terrebonne Parish is what remains of the delta lobe built during the time of the Assyrians; Lafourche Parish is what’s left of the lobe laid down during the Roman Empire. Many still more ancient delta lobes are now submerged. The Mississippi fan, an enormous cone of sediment that was laid down during the ice ages, now lies under the Gulf of Mexico; it is larger than the entire state of Louisiana and in some places ten thousand feet thick.
The city of New Orleans sits on a lobe—the St. Bernard—that came into being around the time of the Pyramids. To early white explorers, the spot seemed uninhabitable—“I do not see how settlers can be placed on this river,” Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville wrote to the French Minister of Marine and Colonies, the Comte de Pontchartrain, in 1708—and at the same time irresistible. (Bienville would go on to found New Orleans, in 1718.) The first sections to be settled were, not surprisingly, the highest—ridges formed, paradoxically, by flooding. Before the river was reëngineered, it overflowed its banks virtually every year—sometimes more often. Heavier sediments settled out first, creating natural levees. (The term comes from the French levée, meaning “raised.”) The French Quarter is built on such a natural levee, and so is the Garden District.
The Mississippi swung into its present course—and began to lay down Plaquemines Parish and the Birdfoot—approximately a thousand years ago. At this point, it is ready to switch direction yet again. For several decades, the river has been trying to jump its banks to follow a steeper gradient that leads to the Gulf of Mexico through the Atchafalaya River Basin, between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. The Old River Control Structure, which is twelve hundred feet long and consists of an elaborate series of dams, locks, and sluices, has prevented this from happening. But while the control structure has preserved New Orleans’s viability as a port—were the river to change course, the city would face out onto slack water of the sort found in Bayou Lafourche—it has done nothing to solve the problem of land loss. Indeed, just the reverse. Instead of going into delta-building, most of the Mississippi’s sediment today gets dumped beyond the Birdfoot and off the continental shelf.
A few weeks after my trip to Plaquemines, I hitched a ride to Caernarvon with some officials from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources who were heading into the wetlands to take post-Katrina measurements. It was another bright-blue day, with temperatures in the mid-eighties. (By this point, in mid-November, southern Louisiana was suffering from a drought.) At Caernarvon, we met up with a second group of officials, from the Army Corps of Engineers and the Geological Survey, who were there for the same purpose. We all got into airboats with flat bottoms and maddeningly loud propellers mounted on the back. Soon, we were zipping along through the water, which was dark and bubbly and reeked of swamp gas. The wetlands were filled with birds—egrets with long, pointed beaks; ibis with long, curved beaks; roseate spoonbills, with beaks shaped like ice-cream paddles—and also teeming with alligators. They lifted their snouts to gaze at us with bored malevolence.
The fundamental problem of southern Louisiana—the fact that making the area suitable for permanent settlement also tends to make it that much more impermanent—has been understood for many decades. In the nineteen-twenties, Percy Viosca, a Louisiana naturalist, warned that flood-control and land-reclamation efforts were “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”; he advocated that the state adopt policies to reëstablish the “natural conditions” conducive to healthy marshes. Instead, though, virtually all the practices that exacerbate land loss were allowed to continue and, in some cases, even encouraged. Swamps were drained to create agricultural fields and housing developments; this caused the peaty marsh soils to oxidize and shrink, like a drying sponge, resulting, in many instances, in new expanses of open water. Navigational channels like the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet were dug; these carried salt water into what had been freshwater marshes, killing trees and grasses and inviting erosion. Thousands of miles of canals were cut into the wetlands to facilitate oil and naturalgas exploration; much like the navigation channels, these canals wreaked havoc on the local hydrology. Where oil was found, the process of extraction caused some areas to slump—Louisiana “floats on oil like a drunkard’s teeth on whiskey,” A. J. Liebling once wrote—further contributing to subsidence.
Meanwhile, efforts to reverse or merely forestall wetland loss have been halting. The history of the Caernarvon project illustrates the difficulties encountered even by what is, compared with the magnitude of the problem, a relatively modest endeavor. The project was approved by Congress beginning in 1965; owing to bureaucratic inertia and state budget cuts, it was not completed until 1991. Almost as soon as it began to operate, a new set of problems arose. Although almost no one lives in the wetlands affected by Caernarvon, some areas are leased to oyster farmers, who pay two dollars an acre for a claim that lasts fifteen years, and other areas are popular with shrimpers. In 1994, oyster farmers in the area filed a class-action suit against the state, alleging that the project had reduced the value of their leases. While the litigation dragged on, Caernarvon was operated at only a fraction of its capacity. In December, 2000, a Plaquemines Parish jury awarded five of the farmers damages of forty-eight million dollars, a verdict that, applied across the entire class, added up to more than a billion dollars. This verdict was later overturned by Louisiana’s highest court, and then, with the help of Alan Dershowitz and his brother, Nathan, the reversal was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which last year finally put an end to the case by refusing to hear it. At the same time that the oyster-lease case was in litigation, shrimpers were complaining, often vociferously and to their representatives in Baton Rouge, that, because of the changes in salinity, the shrimp had stopped showing up.
Chuck Villarrubia is the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources official who oversees Caernarvon’s day-to-day operations. I happened to be sharing an airboat with him. “We are trying as best we can to mitigate the conflicts,” he told me. “But there’s a lot of people yelling at us.” On more than one occasion, Villarrubia said, he has received Caernarvon-related death threats.
The wetlands in the Caernarvon outfall district are dotted with monitoring stations. On our way to the first, we passed through a large, perfectly rectilinear lake, known as Big Mar. For a short time, it had been a farm; now it was an object lesson in futility. At the station—a white plastic tube sticking up out of the muck—we all clambered off the boats and onto the nearest semi-dry land. Greg Steyer, an ecologist with the U.S.G.S., grabbed hold of an auger that looked like a skinny torpedo and plunged it into the ground. It had a hollow chamber in the middle, and, when he twisted it, it gouged out a core. He pulled the auger up and opened the chamber. There was a layer of dirt, which had the consistency of gruel, and, beneath that, a six-inch layer of clay. Steyer tossed away that core and took a new one. The same clay layer appeared again. It had been laid down, he explained, during the great Mississippi flood of 1927.
For the people who lived in and around Caernarvon—at that time a sleepy hamlet—the 1927 flood was an unprecedented disaster. During the spring of that year, extraordinarily heavy rainfall inundated some sixteen million acres of land in more than a half-dozen states. As the flood crest moved south, influential New Orleanians decided that the best way for the city to avoid catastrophe was to blow up the levee downriver—a decision that made little sense in terms of hydraulics but was nevertheless carried out. (The spot chosen for the dynamiting was just a few hundred yards from where the diversion project now stands.) In the ensuing rush of water, several thousand people—mostly trappers—lost their homes. By the perverse logic of the delta, this wholesale destruction of the human landscape sustained the natural one. Had the flood not occurred, the six-inch layer of clay would never have been deposited, in which case the land we were standing on might well no longer be there.
Katrina, too, flooded the wetlands, but from the opposite direction and thus to opposite effect. Propelled by the hurricane’s counterclockwise winds, Katrina’s storm surges swept north through Breton Sound toward New Orleans, submerging the marshes under twenty-five feet of salt water. The surge lifted mats of grasses and tossed them around like tumbleweed. It scoured away the wet, soupy soil, depositing it no one is quite sure where. All around us was evidence of the destruction. Clumps of marsh grass lay piled up in large mounds, while the plants that were still rooted in the soil had turned brown and brittle—symptoms of salt burn. “Pretty pitiful,” Steyer observed, shaking his head.
The rest of the morning was devoted to visiting more stations. At the second, nothing was growing in what was supposed to be an “emergent vegetation plot.” There were, however, several nutria. These large, ratlike creatures, native to South America, were imported to Louisiana in the nineteen-thirties for the purposes of fur farming, then accidentally released into the wetlands. Nutria routinely indulge in “eat outs,” during which they destroy virtually all the plant life for hundreds of square feet, and so represent yet another cause of land loss. Their droppings look like peanuts.
The day grew hotter, the air stickier. Around noon, we had lunch in the shade of a few scraggly bushes. One of the biologists had brought along an M.R.E., which the others, who were unwrapping half-steamed sandwiches, eyed enviously. As he pulled out the little heating packet, someone mentioned having heard that the exothermic reaction could be initiated with urine.
After lunch, Steyer unfurled a huge pre-Katrina satellite image of the wetlands. Everyone gathered around it. Several of the biologists had brought along post-hurricane images of the area, which had been laminated for use in the field. Even to the untrained eye, the differences were striking. Large areas that on the old map were green now showed up as black, which is to say, under water. Prior to the hurricane, there had been a hundred and thirty-three square miles of vegetated marsh in the area; according to initial estimates, the storm had eliminated thirty of them. There was a chance that some of these areas would eventually bounce back—many of the clumps of brown marsh grass were already sporting tiny green shoots—and it was possible that the soil that had been scoured away from one area would encourage new growth in another. In general, though, Steyer was pessimistic. “I can tell you the amount that we lost in Breton Sound was bad,” he said. “There is not going to be a net breakeven. Not at all.”
Katrina was an extremely large storm—hurricane-force winds extended more than eighty-five miles from its center—and at landfall it registered one of the lowest central pressures on record: nine hundred and twenty millibars. On its approach to New Orleans, Katrina pushed water from the Gulf into Lake Borgne, and from there into Lake Pontchartrain, raising the level in the lake by eleven feet in nine hours. Then, as the hurricane continued north, its winds drove the water to the south, into the canals that link the lake to the city. The effect was like filling a bucket and kicking a hole in it. The flood walls on the Seventeenth Street and London Avenue canals began to fail, inundating low-lying neighborhoods, like Lakeview and Gentilly. At the same time, water from the Gulf was being channelled into the Industrial Canal through MR-GO. As the levees along the Industrial Canal burst open, the Lower Ninth Ward was practically obliterated. The next day, eighty per cent of the city was under water.
Although almost no one in or outside New Orleans seemed prepared for it, Katrina was probably the most comprehensively predicted catastrophe in American history. In the past few decades, storm-surge models have become increasingly sophisticated and the computers they run on increasingly powerful. When researchers began to adapt the models to New Orleans, they became convinced, as one of them put it to me, that “we had this train wreck imminent.” The city’s levees had been designed to protect it from what the Army Corps of Engineers calls a “standard project hurricane”—roughly, a fast-moving Category 3 storm. (Since fast-moving storms have less time to pile up water, they’re generally less dangerous than slow-moving ones.) But not all of the levees met this objective, even on paper. A project to upgrade them, begun in the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy, in 1965, was repeatedly delayed by funding cuts; by 1995, it was still twenty years from completion. Meanwhile, as the levees were slowly being raised, the land underneath them continued to subside. The models showed that, even if New Orleans’s defenses held up, many possible hurricanes could overwhelm them, and that in the fastest-subsiding coastal parishes a relatively minor storm could prove devastating. Joseph Suhayda, a coastal oceanographer at L.S.U. who was working with a model that had been developed for FEMA, became so alarmed by the results he was seeing that he began to buttonhole state and local emergency-management officials.
“I talked about it every place I could,” Suhayda, who is now retired, told me. “It was a proactive effort to get the word out, to make it an issue.” Some griped that he was just scaremongering—“I’ve had people complain, ‘Who the hell is this guy, he’s causing trouble,’ ” Suhayda said—but others began to take notice. In October, 2001, Scientific American ran a story that described New Orleans as “a disaster waiting to happen,” and warned that “only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.” The following year, the New Orleans Times-Picayune published a five-part, fifty-thousand-word series entitled “Washing Away,” which carried much the same message, and, the year after that, Civil Engineering, the official publication of the American Society of Civil Engineers, asked, “Can any defense ultimately protect a city that is perpetually sinking?” Beginning in the summer of 2004, state officials held a series of planning exercises for a hypothetical storm they named Hurricane Pam. Pam was designed as a strong, slow-moving Category 3 hurricane that made landfall slightly to the west of New Orleans, a scenario that put the city on the storm’s more dangerous eastern side. (Katrina, which reached Category 5 strength over the Gulf, had weakened to a slow-moving Category 3 storm by the time it passed to the east of the city.) For the purposes of the exercise, it was assumed that the city’s levees would hold, but the models predicted that Pam’s storm surge would be sufficient to overtop them. According to the script prepared in advance of the exercise, Pam resulted in 61,290 fatalities and 179,890 injuries. It washed coffins out of their vaults and sent them floating down the streets. A follow-up study on Pam was planned but never took place, apparently owing to a lack of funding.
Hurricanes draw their strength from the warm surface waters of the ocean. As sea-surface temperatures rise, more energy becomes available to them. It follows that global warming should lead to an increase in hurricane intensity, but to what extent such an increase could be detected was still very much a matter of debate last spring, when Judith Curry and Peter Webster, climate scientists at Georgia Tech, decided to investigate.
Curry, who is the chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is a small woman with shoulderlength brown hair and a brisk, no-nonsense manner. On the day that I went to visit her, last month, the building where she has her office had been sealed off by the police because of a gas leak nearby. No one had bothered to evacuate the people who were already inside the building, though, so Curry came out and led me around to an unguarded entrance in the back. “Smell that gas?” she asked cheerily, as we made our way under the “CAUTION” tape.
When she and Webster began their study, Curry told me once we were seated in her office, it wasn’t because they expected to find anything very interesting. If storms were growing more violent in one part of the globe, this was, they suspected, probably balanced out by less activity in others. They set about assembling data on every single hurricane—or typhoon, or cyclone—that had formed in the North Pacific, the South Pacific, the Indian Ocean, and the North Atlantic since satellite measurement began, in 1970. (Because the wind shear is too strong and sea-surface temperatures are lower in the South Atlantic, hurricanes do not usually form there; however, in March, 2004, for the first time ever recorded, one did.) The survey revealed precisely the sort of correlation that Curry and Webster had thought didn’t exist. Between 1975 and 2004, tropical sea-surface temperatures increased by roughly one degree Fahrenheit. During this same period, the number of storms reaching Category 4 or Category 5 status nearly doubled. The increase in hurricane intensity was statistically significant in all ocean basins. “It just sort of hits you over the head,” Curry said. “There is no way you can explain this increase in every single ocean by natural, cyclical variability.”
As it happened, at around the same time that Curry and Webster were at work on their study another researcher, Kerry Emanuel, at M.I.T., was conducting a similar study. Although Emanuel was analyzing different data—he used mainly wind-speed measurements taken by aircraft—he reached the same conclusion. His study came out in Nature four weeks before Katrina. Curry and Webster’s paper appeared in Science two weeks after Katrina. The following week, Rita struck. At that point, things “just sort of exploded,” Curry said.
Eventually, Webster stopped by, and the conversation turned to the future of the Gulf Coast. “Are you aware of the size of Katrina’s storm surge?” Webster asked. “On the Mississippi coast, it was twenty-eight feet high. Up the Biloxi River, twenty-four miles inland, I think it was twenty-four feet high. I don’t know if you remember seeing the pictures of the tsunami versus the pictures of the Mississippi coast, but they were exactly the same. Now, that’s going to happen again.
“What we’re seeing now is the base for what’s going to occur in the future,” he went on. “There will be ups and downs, but don’t expect us to go back to a nineteenseventies level of hurricanes.” Webster called rebuilding New Orleans under these conditions “ludicrous.”
Curry pointed out that, thanks to global warming, not only were hurricanes becoming more intense but sea levels were rising, making storm surges that much more dangerous. “What used to be the once-in-a-lifetime flood, you could see every season,” she observed. In terms of rebuilding New Orleans, Curry said, “It’s a complex issue. But, speaking from the climate and the environmental-science perspective, a hundred years from now there’s just no way there’s going to be a city there. You just know that isn’t going to happen. We can fight it. We can rebuild it and wait until it gets wiped out again. If you look at the geological record, these coastal areas come and go. Sometimes they’re under water and sometimes they’re not. Maybe a colossal engineering effort can do something, but at some point that is going to fail. This is just the way geology and climate work. You can’t fight it forever.”
The meeting began with a presentation by John Beckman, a consultant from Philadelphia, who had been hired to work with the commission’s urbanplanning committee. Beckman flashed a series of slides on two huge screens flanking the podium at the front of the ballroom. One showed a map of New Orleans superimposed on a map of Washington, D.C. The area flooded by Katrina covered most of the District, including the White House and Capitol Hill, and sprawled east into Maryland and west into Virginia. Another slide showed southeastern Louisiana, with areas of land loss expected by 2050 outlined in red. New Orleans appeared in brown, surrounded by big red blobs to the east, west, and south. “So we’re in a threatened position,” Beckman said.
The slides kept coming. The Bring New Orleans Back commission was calling for a “complete redesign” of the city’s flood-control system, including a comprehensive program of coastal and wetland restoration, the closing of MR-GO, the relocation of pumping stations to Lake Pontchartrain, the completion of locks on the Industrial Canal, and the construction of new levees to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 storm. It was also advocating the construction of a light-rail system that would crisscross the city, and the creation of a new public authority—the Crescent City Redevelopment Corporation—to disburse federal funds. Finally, Beckman got to a slide titled “Neighborhood Rebuilding Strategy.” The crowd perked up.
The slide showed a map of the city, with some areas colored yellow and others colored tan. Yellow neighborhoods were labelled “immediate opportunity areas.” These areas, which included the French Quarter, the Garden District, and the Central Business District, had little or no flood damage, and the commission was recommending that they be reoccupied right away. All of the “immediate opportunity areas” were, not coincidentally, built on high ground—either the natural levees of the Mississippi or levees formed by now defunct distributaries of the river, like Bayou Metairie and Bayou Gentilly. Tan areas were low-lying neighborhoods, like Lakeview, New Orleans East, Gentilly, and the Lower Ninth Ward, which had taken on several feet of water. These were labelled “neighborhood planning areas.” Neighborhood planning areas would be the subject of four months of public meetings, after which it would be determined—how, exactly, was not specified—whether they should be rebuilt or abandoned. During this four-month period, the commission was recommending a moratorium on building permits for tan areas. After Beckman finished with his slides, there was a rush for the microphone at the center of the room.
“Our neighborhood is ready to come home,” a man who identified himself as the president of the Lakeview Civic Improvement Association declared. “We want to be able to go down to City Hall and get a permit now. We have the means to help ourselves. So don’t get in our way.”
A woman said, “I heard nothing really for the Lower Ninth Ward. Those are my family, my friends, my neighbors. I’ve been down there—yes, I’m telling my age—fifty-nine years, and I know who came and I know who went. I’m here for those persons who could not get back to New Orleans. I don’t think it’s right that you try to take our property. Because, like I say, over my dead body.”
“This is a big, audacious plan,” a second man from Lakeview said. “It was put together by obviously very brilliant people. But guess what? You missed the boat.” By my count, of the twenty-two speakers, twenty-one came out against the commission’s recommendations. The opposition seemed to cut across all racial, ethnic, and class lines.
“Mr. Mayor, I have to tell it like it goes,” a man from New Orleans East said. “If I have to suit up like the Army and protect my land, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to die on mine.”
When the meeting ended, I headed downstairs to a press conference. I had been told that Nagin would be speaking, but that turned out not to be the case. (This was a few days before the Mayor suggested that Katrina and Rita were signs that “God is mad at America” and declared that New Orleans was destined to become a “chocolate” city.) Instead, Joseph Canizaro, the chairman of the commission’s urban-planning committee, fielded questions. During the meeting, Canizaro, a developer, had come in for a great deal of personal criticism—“Mr. Joe Canizaro, I don’t know you, but I hate you,” one man had told him—but if this troubled him, he wasn’t letting it show.
“There’s no question that if you’re going to have two hundred thousand less residents in this community there’s going to be shrinkage,” he said. “People don’t want to hear that.”
One day, I decided to walk from the Quarter to Lakeview. I headed out along Esplanade Avenue, a wide boulevard that follows a natural ridge and is lined with stately nineteenth-century homes. Most of the shops and restaurants along Esplanade had placards in the windows announcing that they were back in business; however, there didn’t seem to be much business going on. Few of the houses appeared to be occupied, despite the lawn signs that read “We’re Home!” or “I Am Coming Home!” or “I Will Rebuild / I Am New Orleans.”
After about two hours, I reached City Park, which was filled with scruffy encampments for workers who had come to help with, or maybe just profit from, the cleanup. There was also a huge tent that announced, “Jesus Cares and So Do We: Free Food/Comidas Gratis.” Inside, the place was mostly empty, but there were enough tables and chairs to seat several hundred. A man standing in front of a display of Bibles explained that the prospect of work in New Orleans had attracted many people who were essentially homeless. “It’s like the gold rush,” he said. I passed the New Orleans Museum of Art, which was closed, and the Botanical Gardens, which were also gated shut.
By the time I got to Lakeview, the sun had begun to set. On an otherwise deserted block, a woman was sorting through the remains of her father’s house. The furniture was piled up on the curb. The floodwaters, which in parts of Lakeview reached a height of ten feet, had turned everything—sofas, dining-room chairs, mattresses—the same sludge-brown color. A taped-up refrigerator was oozing sludge-brown slime. The woman pointed to her own house, across the street. She was living in Texas, and unsure what to do next. “It would be stupid to sink money back into these houses if next hurricane season the same thing is going to happen,” she said. I had been hoping to find a bus or a taxi so that I wouldn’t have to walk back to my hotel in the dark, but the only people driving around were construction workers and cops, so I ended up hitching a ride downtown in a squad car. Before Katrina, it was hard to know what your elevation was, but now the water line around the houses—New Orleanians refer to this as the “bathtub ring”—gives it away. As we drove toward the river, the line gradually dropped lower and lower until, just a few blocks before my hotel, it disappeared entirely.
The following day, I headed east instead of west, and took a walk around the Lower Ninth Ward. During Katrina, the Lower Ninth had remained relatively dry, until suddenly, after what sounded like a series of explosions, the water started rushing in. The explosions were, presumably, the noise of the flood walls giving way, but they led to rumors, which persist to this day, that the levees had been deliberately dynamited, as they were in Caernarvon in 1927.
Walking through the wrecked and silent neighborhood, I couldn’t help thinking of Leeville. Eventually, on Flood Street, I met three men standing in front of a white shotgun house. The house had been washed off its foundation and was sitting about ten feet away from the concrete steps that used to lead up to it. Beside the steps was a small bush, now dead. Two of the men, Percy Johnson and Solomon Johnson, Jr., were brothers. The third, Solomon Johnson, Sr., who owned the house, was their father. Before Katrina, Solomon, Jr., who lives in Jefferson Parish, had picked up his father, and they had driven to Dallas and then all the way to Percy’s home, in Oakland, California. This was the first time since the storm that Solomon, Sr., had been back to Flood Street. He was leaning heavily against a chain-link fence.
Percy and Solomon, Jr., had both grown up in the Lower Ninth, and in 1965 they had ridden out Hurricane Betsy in a two-story house a few blocks away. “Listening to the Mayor saying, ‘Come back,’ once you come back and see this city, you see he’s just saying that stuff,” Percy observed. “It’s hard to fathom.” He gestured toward his father’s house and the house next to it, which had also been swept off its foundation, and a third house, which was listing crazily. “Would you want to rebuild this? I mean, really? What happens next September? Every year, it’s going to be the same thing.”
Percy turned to his father and asked him if he thought he would return. The old man shook his head.
“No,” Percy said. “Let it go.” ♦
