Stepping away from Santa Fe for the time being...
About Last Night | Live from Katrina
The Times-Picayune
Boing Boing | Email attributed to NOLA rescue worker
The Map Room | Before & After
Salon | Excerpt from "Atchafalaya," from John McPhee's The Control of Nature
The last time I went to New Orleans I had just revisited McPhee's essay "Atchafalaya" (The Control of Nature, 1989), about our efforts to harness the untamable Mississippi River. I've been thinking about it quite often the past several days. An excerpt here; I discovered Salon also provides a larger section, above:
Something like half of New Orleans is now below sea level—as much as fifteen feet. New Orleans, surrounded by levees, is emplaced between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi like a broad shallow bowl. Nowhere is New Orleans higher than the river's natural bank. Underprivileged people live in the lower elevations, and always have. The rich—by the river—occupy the highest ground. In New Orleans, income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp. The Garden District and its environs are locally known as uptown.
Torrential rains fall on New Orleans—enough to cause flash floods inside the municipal walls. The water has nowhere to go. Left on its own, it would form a lake, rising inexorably from one level of the economy to the next. So it has to be pumped out. Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the city's subsidence. Where marshes have been drained to create tracts for new housing, ground will shrink, too. (...)
The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway. Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, is on high ground with respect to the rest of New Orleans, but even from the benches of Jackson Square one looks up across the levee at the hulls of passing ships. Their keels are higher than the Astro Turf in the Superdome, and if somehow the ships could turn and move at river level into the city and into the stadium they would hover above the playing field like blimps. (...)
Among the five hundred miles of levee deficiencies now calling for attention along the Mississippi River, the most serious happen to be in New Orleans. Among other factors, the freeboard—the amount of levee that reaches above flood levels—has to be higher in New Orleans to combat the waves of ships. (...) Not only is the water higher. The levees tend to sink as well. They press down on the mucks beneath them and squirt materials out to the sides. Their crowns have to be built up. "You put five feet on and three feet sink," a[n Army] Corps [of Engineers] engineer remarked to me one day.
I remember sitting on a bench above Jackson Square early one morning, after having a beignet at Cafe du Monde. Activity on the river was well underway, while the city was still quietly resting way below.
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