Interesting piece on the realities of the New Orleans situation:
New Orleans is utterly dependent for its survival on engineered landscapes and the willful suspension of disbelief that technology has allowed its citizens to sustain. As most people know by now, much of New Orleans lies well below sea level and also beneath the Mississippi River, which flows high above the city it helped create. If you visit New Orleans you can’t actually see the river unless you’re willing to climb its steep banks, mini-mountains that jut above the Mississippi’s endlessly flat delta. From the relatively high ground of the French Quarter, you might catch a glimpse of a huge container ship, seemingly levitating above the roofline of most houses. New Orleans is, in other words, a shallow bowl surrounded by a ridge of levees, which are supposed to keep out water from the Mississippi and from Lake Pontchartrain at the city’s rear—and this week didn’t. When the levees fail, as they have many times before, a flood occupies the recessed terrain in the city’s center. Like the people trapped in the football stadium, water has no natural way to leave New Orleans. It must constantly be pumped over the lip of the bowl formed by the levees.
New Orleans’ dysfunctional relationship with its environment may make it the nation’s most improbable metropolis. It is flood prone. It is cursed with a fertile disease environment. It is located along a well-worn pathway that tropical storms travel from the Atlantic to the nation’s interior. From this perspective, New Orleans has earned all the scorn being heaped upon it—the city is a misguided urban project, a fool’s errand, a disaster waiting to happen.
It has become clear that a lot of people simply have never been to New Orleans, and have never stood in the city looking out at the massive bodies of water surrounding the city on many sides. When normally reasonable people like Kevin Drum can’t imagine thousands of dead, I can only attribute this to a complete inability to understand the geographic realities of New Orleans.