At Cajun Fishing Adventures, Barth clicked through slides showing where the Mid-Barataria Diversion would go and how it would be constructed. An animation of the process revealed it to be almost incomprehensibly complex, involving relocating a rail line, rerouting Route 23, and assembling the enormous gates out of floating sections. Once the structure was completed, Barth explained, it would allow CPRA to simulate flooding. When the river was running high and carrying the most sand, the gates would be opened. Sediment-rich water would rush across Plaquemines into Barataria Bay. After a few years, enough sand and silt would be deposited that terra semi-firma would start to form. The diversion would be powered by the river itself, instead of by pumps. In contrast to projects like BA-39, it would continue to deliver sediment year after year.
“When we talk about a sediment diversion, what’s the main purpose?” Barth said. “It’s to maximize the sediment and minimize the fresh water.”
A man in the corner of the room raised his hand. “I assume you’re going to build it,” he said of the Mid-Barataria project. “But what is the damage going to be?” Despite Barth’s assurances, the man was worried about how much fresh water would be directed into the basin and how that would affect recreational fishing. “Speckled trout will be done,” he declared.
“If this were a natural crevasse, I’d be all for it,” he said. “But when we as humans intervene, it rarely turns out well. That’s why we are where we are today.”
* * *
—
Soon it would be too hot.
It was another sticky day and I’d circled back to New Orleans to meet with a coastal geologist named Alex Kolker. Kolker teaches at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and, as a pedagogical sideline, he sometimes organizes bike excursions around the city. In contrast to more conventionally popular tours, which feature ghosts, voodoo, and pirates, his emphasize hydrology. He’d agreed to take me on one, though he’d warned we’d have to leave early. By noon, the streets would be a sauna.
“This city was built largely by the river,” Kolker observed as we set out from the Garden District, which was still sound asleep. “The short story is that the high ground is near the river and the low ground is old swamps and old marshes.” We pedaled north on Josephine Street, away from the Mississippi and imperceptibly downhill. Lofty mansions gave way to shotgun houses in various states of renewal and disrepair.
Kolker braked at an enormous pothole. It had been patched with asphalt, and this patch had developed a new pothole of its own. “Subsidence happens on a couple of different scales,” he observed. “You have the big scale, where the old marshes are degrading. And then you have smaller-scale features, like this.” A bit farther on, we came to a manhole cover sticking up out of the street like a turret.
“The manhole is probably anchored so it doesn’t sink, or at least it doesn’t sink as fast as the ground around it,” Kolker explained. A sign nearby read Evacuation Route.
In the sunny accounts aimed at tourists, New Orleans is called the “Crescent City,” for the curve of the river it was built along, or the “Big Easy,” for its laid-back vibe. In a less upbeat context, residents refer to it as the “bowl.” By now, most of the bowl lies at or below sea level—some spots as much as fifteen feet below. When you’re in the city, it’s hard to imagine the entire place sinking underneath you, yet it is. A recent study that relied on satellite data found some parts of New Orleans dropping by almost half a foot a decade. “That’s one of the fastest rates on earth,” Kolker noted.
After a few more stops to admire various swales and depressions—“There’s a sinkhole over there!”—we arrived at the Melpomene Pumping Station. By this point we were in Broadmoor, a low-lying neighborhood sometimes called “Floodmoor.” The station was locked, but through its windows I could see a series of what looked like rockets resting on their sides. These were Wood Screw Pumps, named for their inventor, A. Baldwin Wood. Wood patented his design in 1920, a moment of particularly grandiloquent confidence in the power of engineering.
“New Orleans’ drainage problem is a terrible one,” a front-page article in the Item observed in May of that year. “To meet the problem, New Orleans has constructed the greatest drainage system in the world.
“Man every day is surpassing Nature,” the article declared. “He has thrown back the giant Mississippi and made it go where it listeth not.”
In 1920, New Orleans boasted six pumping stations, including the Melpomene. These allowed “the old swamps” to be drained and converted into new communities, like Lakeview and Gentilly. Today there are twenty-four stations, which together operate one hundred and twenty pumps. During a storm, rain is funneled into a Venice’s-worth of canals. Then it’s channeled into Lake Pontchartrain. Without this system, large swaths of the city would quickly become uninhabitable.
But New Orleans’s world-class drainage system, like its world-class levee system, is a sort of Trojan solution. Since marshy soils compact through dewatering, pumping water out of the ground exacerbates the very problem that needs to be solved. The more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks. And the more it sinks, the more pumping is required.
“Pumping is a big part of the issue,” Kolker told me, as we climbed back onto our sweaty bicycles. “It accelerates subsidence, so it becomes a positive feedback loop.”
* * *
—
As we cycled on, the conversation turned to Katrina. Kolker moved to New Orleans about eighteen months after the storm hit. He recalled that for several years, the “bathtub ring”—the citywide stain left behind by the floodwaters—was still clearly visible on the sides of most buildings.
“Here we’re getting into areas that had five to eight feet of water,” he told me at one point.
An unusually large storm, Katrina was far from a worst-case scenario. As it churned north in the early-morning hours of August 29, 2005, its eye passed to the east of the city. This meant the strongest winds also passed to the east, over towns like Waveland and Pass Christian, in Mississippi. Briefly, it seemed that New Orleans had been spared.
But the storm was driving water into a network of channels along the city’s eastern edge. These channels—the Industrial Canal, the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway, and the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (popularly known as “Mr. Go”)—had been dug for shipping, to provide a shortcut between the river and the sea. Around 7:45 a.m., the levees on the Industrial Canal failed, sending a twenty-foot-high wall of water crashing through the Lower Ninth Ward. At least six dozen people in the predominantly Black neighborhood were killed.
Water was also surging into Lake Pontchartrain. As the hurricane pushed inland, this water was forced south, out of the lake and into the city’s drainage canals. The effect was like emptying a swimming pool into a living room. Soon the floodwalls on the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals gave way. By the next day, eighty percent of the bowl was underwater.
Hundreds of thousands of people had evacuated New Orleans ahead of the storm. With the city inundated, it was unclear when they would return, or if they should. The Case Against Rebuilding the Sunken City of New Orleans, ran a headline in Slate a week after the hurricane.
“It is time to face up to some geological realities and start a carefully planned deconstruction of New Orleans,” declared an op-ed in The Washington Post. As a temporary fix, the op-ed’s author, Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist and an expert on risk management, suggested that some of New Orleans could be converted “into a city of boathouses.” The Mississippi could then be allowed to flood again, “to fill in the ‘bowl’ with fresh sediment.” (Jacob went on to warn, in 2011, that New York City’s subways would flood during a major storm, a prediction fulfilled the following year by Superstorm Sandy.)
An advisory group appointed by New Orleans’s mayor recommended that only the highest areas of the city—those along the river and atop the Gentilly and M
etairie Ridges—be resettled. A public planning process should then be conducted to determine which low-lying neighborhoods to reoccupy and which to abandon.
Proposals to allow parts of the city to revert to water were floated and then, one by one, rejected. Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter. And so the Corps was charged, yet again, with reinforcing the levees, this time against storm surges from the Gulf. South of the city, the Corps erected the world’s largest pumping station, part of a $1.1 billion structure called the West Closure Complex. To the east, it built the Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, a concrete wall nearly two miles long and five and a half feet thick that cost $1.3 billion. The Corps plugged the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet with a nine-hundred-fifty-foot-wide rock dam and installed massive gates and pumps between the drainage canals and Lake Pontchartrain. The pumps at the foot of the 17th Street Canal were designed to move twelve thousand cubic feet of water per second, a flow greater than the Tiber’s.
These pharaonic structures have kept the city dry through several recent storms, and, from a certain perspective, New Orleans now appears substantially better protected than when Katrina hit. But what looks like a defense from one angle can look like a trap from another.
“You must have a replenished coast,” Jeff Hebert, a former deputy mayor of New Orleans, told me. “Because as goes the coast, so goes New Orleans.” Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot. If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher.
“Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork,” Horace wrote in 20 B.C., “yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph.”
Toward the end of our subsidence tour, Kolker and I cycled through the French Quarter, where, though it was still early, tourists armed with drinks were jamming the streets. In Woldenberg Park, we got up on top of the levees and looked out over the Mississippi, toward Algiers.
I asked Kolker how he saw the future. “Sea level will continue to rise,” he said. The diversions planned for Plaquemines would add some land back to the marshes south of the city, and so, too, would more-conventional dredging projects, like BA-39. “But I think the areas that don’t get restored will flood more and more frequently. There will be continued wetland loss.” The city once known as L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans would, in coming years, Kolker predicted, “look more and more like an island.”
* * *
—
Isle de Jean Charles, in Terrebonne Parish, lies fifty miles southwest of New Orleans and a few decades ahead of it. The island can be reached by a single, narrow causeway, which used to ride over land. Time it right and you can now fish from your car.
“In the springtime, there’s always water on the road, whenever there’s a south wind,” Boyo Billiot told me. We were standing in the backyard of the house he had grown up in, which his mother still occupied. It teetered above us on twelve-foot pilings. Several American flags fluttered from the aerial porch. It was winter and the tail end of deer-hunting season. Billiot was dressed in camouflage. His phone kept dinging with messages from hunting buddies wondering where he was.
Billiot is a broad man with a gravelly voice and a salt-and-pepper goatee. He can trace his ancestry back to Jean Charles Naquin, who gave the island its name in the early 1800s. (The eponymous Jean Charles was an associate of the pirate Jean Lafitte.) Naquin had a son, Jean Marie, who married a Native woman and escaped to the island after his father disowned him. Jean Marie’s children, in turn, married descendants of three tribes: the Biloxi, the Chitimacha, and the Choctaw. Most of their children remained on the island, where they formed their own tightly knit, largely self-sufficient society.
“They went for years and years and nobody knew there was anybody living here,” Billiot told me. “When they had the Great Depression, they didn’t know anything about it over here, because it didn’t affect them.”
Billiot grew up on Isle de Jean Charles in the 1950s, speaking a mixture of Cajun French and Choctaw. “Everybody knew each other from one end of the island to the other,” he recalled. People still earned a living mostly from fishing, oystering, and trapping. His father had had a shrimp boat that he’d docked right in front of the house. In those days, a deep bayou ran the length of the island, and people crabbed in it. The road, which had just been built, didn’t get much use, because the island had its own grocery stores.
Today, the stores are all gone. There are about forty houses left, most of them raised up on pilings and many of them abandoned. Since Billiot was a child, Isle de Jean Charles has shrunk from thirty-five square miles to half a square mile—a loss in area of more than ninety-eight percent.
The island is disappearing for all the usual reasons. It’s part of an ancient delta lobe whose soil is compacting. Sea levels are rising. In the early part of the twentieth century, it lost its main sources of fresh sediment to flood-control measures. Then came the oil industry, which dug canals through the wetlands. The canals pulled in salt water, and, as the salinity rose, the reeds and marsh grasses died. The die-off widened the channels, allowing in more salt water, causing more die-off and more widening.
“It’s almost like when we used to have video players and you’d hold down the fast-forward button to get where you wanted to in a movie,” Billiot’s daughter, Chantel Comardelle, told me. She was sitting in the kitchen of the elevated house with Billiot’s mother, whom she calls Maman. The walls were lined with family photos. “Those canals just held the fast-forward button on the problem.”
After back-to-back hurricanes in the 1980s flooded the trailer they were living in, Billiot and Comardelle and the rest of their immediate family moved off the island. With each successive storm, another chunk of land was lost, and more families left. In the early 2000s, a ring of levees was erected around the remnants of Isle de Jean Charles. These turned the bayou where people had once fished and crabbed into a narrow, stagnant pond. Inside the levees, land loss slowed. Outside and along the road, it only got worse.
Even at this point, steps could have been taken to preserve what remained of Isle de Jean Charles. Plans for a massive hurricane-protection system, known as the Morganza to the Gulf project, were being drawn up and could have been extended to include the island. But in this case, the Corps recommended against more engineering. Building the extension would have added $100 million to the project’s billion-dollar price tag and preserved just three hundred soupy acres. For that much money, you could buy five times as much land in, say, Chicago.
Residents of the island, as well as the families that have moved off it, are virtually all members of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe. Comardelle is the band’s secretary, Billiot is a deputy chief, and the band’s chief is Billiot’s uncle. When it became clear that the road and then, ultimately, the island itself were going to be allowed to wash away, a plan was drawn to move the entire community inland. For the first phase of construction, the band applied for a $50 million federal grant, which was awarded in 2016. At the time of my visit, though, the money had become tied up in state politics, and no one was sure what was going to happen.
As I wandered past empty homes plastered with No Trespassing signs, I could see the economic logic of the island’s “planned deconstruction.” At the same time, the injustice was pretty glaring. The Biloxi and the Choctaw had come to Louisiana after they’d been dispossessed of ancestral lands, farther east. The Isle de Jean Charles Band had been able to live peacefully on the island only because it was too isolated and commercially irrelevant for anyone else to take an interest in. The band had had no say in the dredging of the oil channels or in the layout of the Morganza to the Gulf project. They’d been excluded
from the efforts to control the Mississippi, and now that new forms of control were being imposed to counter the effects of the old, they were being excluded from those, too.
“It’s kind of hard to imagine that no one’s going to be living here,” Billiot told me. “But I’ve watched it erode away.”
* * *
—
From a distance, the Old River Control Auxiliary Structure looks like a row of sphinxes attached at the ears. The structure is four hundred and forty feet long and a hundred feet high. When you get close enough, you can see that the heads of the sphinxes are really cranes and the haunches steel gates. If there’s a single feat of engineering that can stand in for the centuries-long effort to dominate the Mississippi—to make it “go where it listeth not”—the Auxiliary Structure might be it. Unlike a levee or a spillway, built to stop the river from flooding, it was put up to stop time.
The Old River Control Auxiliary Structure
The Auxiliary Structure sits on a broad plain about eighty miles upriver of Baton Rouge. Near this spot, some five hundred years ago, the Mississippi went on a bender, creating a kind of hydrological, as well as nomenclatural, hairball. The meander took the Mississippi so far west that it ran into the Atchafalaya, at the time a distributary of a different river, the Red, which itself was a Mississippi tributary. The Atchafalaya is a good deal shorter and steeper than the last few hundred miles of the Mississippi, and the tangle presented the water in the larger river with a choice. It could follow its old path to the Gulf, via New Orleans and the Bird’s Foot, or it could switch routes and take the faster path offered by the Atchafalaya. Until the mid-1800s, an enormous logjam on the Atchafalaya, which was dense enough to walk across, complicated this choice. But once the jam was removed—by, among other means, nitroglycerine—more and more water began flowing out of the main stem of the Mississippi. As the flow on the Atchafalaya increased, it widened and deepened.
Under a White Sky Page 5