The Bush Administration is Ignoring Equally Dire Warnings About How Every Coastal City In America Could Soon Become A New Orleans

By Mike Tidwell, Author of Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast

It’s now clear the Bush Administration helped create the calamity in Louisiana by ignoring evidence of danger and pleas for help stretching back several years. But of the many shocking stories emerging from Katrina, here’s the most shocking: Right now, with similar irresponsibility, the Bush Administration is ignoring raw data and reports from its own agencies that say every single coastal city in America – from New York to Savannah to Los Angeles – could soon become a New Orleans. Within a short generation or two, the same sort of flooding and storm damage and death toll and economic ruin we see in the Crescent City could become an annual occurrence in some other U.S. city, spread across some other American coastline. Why? The answer lies in a phenomenon called the “law of unintended consequences.” In Louisiana we built huge levees that for centuries kept the lower Mississippi River from flooding. The unintended result, however, was that the entire coast of Louisiana – including New Orleans – began rapidly sinking, dropping 2-3 feet in the 20th century alone (more on this later). Worldwide, meanwhile, a different dynamic but with similar catastrophic potential is playing out. Year after year, we burn massive amounts of fossil fuels – oil, coal, and natural gas. The result is that we’ve profoundly warmed our planet’s atmosphere. This change in climate, according to the Bush Administration’s own reports, will in turn lead to 1-3 feet of sea-level rise worldwide by 2100. Here’s the crux: Whether the land sinks three feet per century (as in New Orleans) or the oceans rise three feet per century (as in the rest of the world), the result is the same for America’s 150 million coastal residents and the three billion shoreline inhabitants worldwide: Record storm surges, inundated infrastructure, massive human relocation, economic disruption, and untold suffering and death.

How did New Orleans drown?

In all the recent coverage, the media seem to have uncritically accepted the very weird fact that the city of New Orleans lies below sea level. Why in the world is it below sea level? The answer is the levees. The huge earthen river dikes that have kept the city dry and inhabitable for 300 years have also created the giant bathtub we now see full of putrid water each night on TV. That’s because every great river delta in the world is shaped by two unforgiving geological phenomena. The first involves flooding. The annual, repeated overflow of the sediment-rich Mississippi River is what created Louisiana’s vast deltaic coast to begin with, depositing water-borne sediments and nutrients flowing down from two thirds of America over the past 7,000 years. The second major deltaic feature is “subsidence” or sinking. Those deposits of alluvial soil are extremely fine and unstable. Over time they compact, shrink in volume, and sink. Historically along the Louisiana Coast it was new flooding, new annual deposits of sediments, that counterbalanced the sinking and in fact led to net land building. But by corseting the river with levees right out to the precipice of the Gulf’s Continental Shelf, we are left only with subsidence. Every day, even without hurricanes, 50 acres of land in coastal Louisiana turns to water. Every ten months, an area of land equal to Manhattan joins the Gulf of Mexico. It is, hands down, the fastest disappearing land mass on Earth. THIS is why Katrina happened. THIS is why people have drowned, lost their homes, fled to refugee shelters or died of diabetic shock at the Superdome for lack of doctors. When French colonists first settled Louisiana 300 years ago, there were vast tracts of dense hardwood forests between what is today New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. There were extensive fresh-water marshes and endless saltwater wetlands and a formidable network of strong barrier islands. Today, all that land is essentially gone. Because of the dikes and the law of unintended consequences, New Orleans is a sunken, walled city essentially jutting out like an exposed chin toward the fast-approaching fist of the Gulf. Had Katrina struck two hundred or one hundred or even fifty years ago, the destruction would not have been the same. In 2005, there simply were no land structures left to slow Katrina’s sledgehammer blow.

A Ray of Hope

The good news is there’s a plan to recreate much of that lost land. A detailed restoration scheme has been on the table since the 1990s to literally “re-engineer” the coast, according Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco. The plan is to build up to a dozen dam-like “control” structures right into the levees of the Mississippi. These would then release the sediment-thick water into canals or pipelines that would surgically direct the liquid soil toward the barrier islands and the buffering marshlands that need immediate restoration. This so-called “Coast 2050” plan (visit www.crcl.org) will take many years to fully implement, but the cost is ridiculously cheap at $14 billion. That’s just two weeks of spending in Iraq or the cost of Boston’s “Big Dig.” Yet tragically, like Louisiana’s pre-Katrina requests for federal help bolstering insufficient levees in New Orleans, the Bush Administration has spent four and a half years repeatedly refusing even modest investments in the larger coastal restoration efforts. Given the horror of Katrina, one can only assume the President will now reassess his budgetary priorities. As a nation, our first responsibility is to address the storm’s great humanitarian crisis of this storm. Beyond that, however, it would be criminally irresponsible of us to fix a single broken window in New Orleans or pick up a single piece of debris or fix a single cubic foot of levee without simultaneously committing – as a nation – to the massive plan to rebuild the entire Louisiana coast. To do one without the other is to simply set the table for the next nightmare hurricane.

Global warming: We all live in New Orleans now

But even this multi-billion dollar coastal rehabilitation effort will be in vain unless we immediately address another facet of the law of unintended consequences: global warming. First off, please remove from your mind any thought that global warming is a junk “theory” peddled only by Greenpeace extremists. No less an authority than the Bush Administration itself has confirmed this crisis to be real. Soon after taking office in 2001, Bush asked the nation’s premier scientific body – the National Academy of Sciences – to look into the issue. Their report back to the President: global warming is happening, it’s driven by our use of fossil fuels, and one major consequence will be 1-3 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. (The rise is from melting glaciers and the “thermal expansion” of the world’s warming oceans). The President’s own 2002 “Climate Action Plan” drew the same conclusion: 1-3 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. Most recently, in an August 2004 letter to Congress signed by the Secretary of Energy, the Administration again confirmed that fossil fuels are driving global warming, with all the implications for serious sea-level rise. Pause for a moment and let that fact sink in fully: Up to three feet of sea-level rise worldwide. That means battered and fragmenting barrier islands WORLDWIDE on a par with those sinking in Louisiana at a rate of 2-3 feet per century. It means vanishing coastal marshes worldwide, the need for massive hurricane and flood levees worldwide. It means vu
lnerable ports and other imperiled infrastructure. It also means the risk of massive human suffering, death, and staggering refugee problems along every shore. If you want to know what will consume the attention and resources of all the world’s great coastal cities in the not so distant future, turn on your TV right now. Look at New Orleans. Tomorrow is on full display at the 17th Street Canal and the littered Convention Center. It’s there in the 9th Ward rooftop evacuations and the military occupation of historic streets. Global warming, left unchecked, will spread New Orleans like a curse to every community within earshot of waves and tides. Yet just like the Administration’s blatant underfunding of levee repairs in New Orleans and the cold shoulder it gave to barrier island restoration, the Administration now blatantly refuses to join Japan and Europe and the rest of the world in pushing for greenhouse gas reductions under the Kyoto Protocol. Over and over again, the President refuses even to discuss modest plans to address global warming while his own reports create the paper trail that future historians will use for their harsh, harsh condemnations.

One Last Chance

If only we could turn back the clock 25 years and rebuild Louisiana’s marshes and barrier islands exactly the way those lonely activists – warning of an approaching Katrina – had been asking for over and over and over again. If only we could go back just a year or two and at least reinforce a few New Orleans levees. But we can’t go back. The clock has run out. The nightmare has come in full. But for all the world’s other coastal cities, there’s still time. We can avoid the mistakes of New Orleans or at least dramatically minimize them. We don’t need massive new levees right now to protect Miami. We need a rapid global switch to modern windmills for our electricity. We don’t need sea walls to save San Diego. We need hydrogen fuel cell cars and energy efficient appliances and bio-fuels. The Kyoto Protocol is just too expensive for our country to adopt, George Bush says, presumably the same way bolstering the 17th Street Canal levee was once deemed too expensive. We’re now spending billions of dollars and burying thousands of people because of that mistake. How much, in the end, will global warming cost us?