Louisiana experts have long warned that without a “major reengineering” of the Gulf of Mexico coastline, the disaster that devastated New Orleans this week was nothing short of an inevitability.
Emergency workers were bracing for a similar disaster last year when Hurricane Ivan brushed up against the Mississippi Delta. Emergency workers had reportedly stockpiled 10,000 body bags, a fraction of what they anticipated needing if Ivan struck New Orleans.
According to the reports last September, emergency officials were well aware that the port-city levees were only designed to withstand a category 3 hurricane. At its strongest, Katrina ranked as a category 5, the highest standard for hurricanes, with winds exceeding 249 km/h.
“New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen,” Mark Fischetti, a contributing editor at Scientific America, wrote nearly four years before hurricane Katrina hit the southern shores of Louisiana. “Only a massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.”
Mr. Fischetti's article, “Drowning New Orleans,” is hauntingly prophetic about what actually transpired this past week.
“If a big, slow moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water,” he wrote nearly four years ago. The article also predicted that surging water could fill Lake Pontchartrain, which would cause a flood of epic proportions in the city.
Citing several experts in Louisiana, most of whom are now out of reach due to massive telecommunication breakdown, Mr. Fischetti detailed how marshlands of the Mississippi Delta, which acted as a buffer dividing the city from the sea, have receded as a cost of human development.
The thrust of Mr. Fischetti's article is that levee building, draining wetlands, dredging channels, and cutting canals through marshlands to accommodate human settlement has dropped the city far below sea-level, creating a gigantic city-sized bowl that could easily be filled by a storm of a much smaller scale than Katrina.
The levees have also prevented the muddy Mississippi River from spreading sediment around the Louisiana barrier island, which brace the city from the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana has been losing about 44 square kilometres of coastal marshes and barrier islands every year.
The average beach recedes about 60 centimetres a year, according to the report. Some areas of the Delta recede by up to 15 metres a year, the fastest in the country.
The salt water from the Gulf has been seeping into the marshlands and killing the vegetation, which acts as a buffer to the city against coastal storms.
Throughout the 1990s Louisiana was only receiving $40,000 a year to combat their receding wetlands.
In 1998, Louisiana Department of Natural Resources drafted a coastal restoration plan to combat the receding marshlands, in an attempt to mitigate any damage that may be caused by a strong coastal storm.
The plan called for a $14-billion (U.S.) investment to restore the region, which handles nearly a third of U.S.'s oil supply and acts as wintering ground for 70 per cent of migratory birds in the U.S., according Mr. Fischetti's article.
The plan called for the Mississippi River to be diverted in order to restore wetlands and rebuild the southern barrier islands, among other necessary measures to prevent a disaster.
Despite the desperate pleas for funding, the plan was slashed by the Bush administration in 2003 by $200-million. A senate committee then authorized only $375-million in spending.
The funding, let alone the plan, were nowhere near complete when Katrina hit last week.
The nightmare that so many emergency officials feared nearly a decade ago, was realized when Katrina took a direct hit on New Orleans leaving hundreds, if not thousands dead.
