Watching New Orleans Dissolve

We're all watching New Orleans dissolve right now, first under the rain and wind of Hurricane Katrina; second, when the levee broke and flooded the entire city; and third, in the heat and water and dissolution of social bonds. It's awfully hard to watch.

1. The Weather: The magnitude of the physical forces hitting New Orleans is rather mind-boggling in this satellite image of Katrina from the European Space Agency. The NASA Earth Observatory has images here. There is a terrific list of more web maps and satellite images of Katrina in the Map Room.

2. The News: Google News has 6,150 stories about New Orleans and Katrina. Boing Boing has a partial list of New Orleans blogs and webcams here. Nola.com has a lot of coverage on New Orleans, and a weblog of stories from the disaster.

Most of the articles, like this one, seem disbelieving that this happened to a city, let alone to New Orleans. Looting seems to have begun quickly, and the newscasts I watched tonight all focused on the desperation of people unable to obtain basic food, water, medical attention, or fuel. Transportation in and out of the city is paralyzed by water.

All of the networks and newspapers are there. I usually find the appearance of news reporters in natural disasters kind of ridiculous, since they're dressed in fresh-yet-adventuous cargo pants and military-loop shirts, generally trying to elicit stories from those in dire straits. There are more substantial differences, though, between mainstream media and blogs. Blogs don't seem to have taken up this topic yet, as this is the first day that it is really starting to unfold, and I doubt if anyone is at the scene to record the disaster first hand. Salon and Daily Kos are already out with a comment linking the hurricane flooding with diverted FEMA money for Iraq here.

3. Science: Scientists do seem relatively prescient this time, in particular a Scientific American article in 2001, detailing the effects of a hurricane on New Orleans. It begins:

Drowning New Orleans
A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city.... New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh--an area the size of Manhattan--will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die.

Real Climate addressed the hurricane season this year before it began, after last year's four hurricanes hitting Florida. Global warming is topical here, even if it sounds Pollyannish, flooding of coastal zones is going to be a bigger effect than anyone realizes. As a recent report on the potential effects of global warming on New York City stated:

"Within the next 100 years, global warming due to greenhouse gas emissions may cause worldwide rates of sea level rise to increase 2 to 5 times over present rates within the next 100 years. Low-lying areas and coastal wetlands would be inundated, beach erosion would intensify, and storm flooding would become more frequent. The effects of regional sea-level rise, and associated coastal hazards, including storm floods and beach erosion, have been examined as part of the MetroEast Coast region climate change assessment....

Moreover,

"Climate change will affect people in cities multidimensionally. Heightened frequencies of storm-surges will damage major infrastructure juxtaposed to already threatened coastal wetlands; health impacts cannot be separated from the impacts of augmented heatwaves on energy demand. Finally, since global cities are major sites of international capital and labor flows, climate change impacts may not be limited by a city’s boundaries. For example, a major climate-related disruption of the New York Stock Exchange would have reverberating impacts on global financial markets."

This sounds like exactly what is happening with disruption to oil production, resulting in $70 oil. Again from Scientific American:

As if the risk to human lives weren't enough, the potential drowning of New Orleans has serious economic and environmental consequences as well. Louisiana's coast produces one third of the country's seafood, one fifth of its oil and one quarter of its natural gas. It harbors 40 percent of the nation's coastal wetlands and provides wintering grounds for 70 percent of its migratory waterfowl. Facilities on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge constitute the nation's largest port.

4. What Comes Next? Part of the problem seems to be the sheer density of people in any city -- even a small one like New Orleans -- and they couldn't even get everyone out before the storm, let alone now. I do admire Texas, though, for welcoming in an entire urban population. What happens next? Cities rebuild. The Van Alen Institute in New York had a handy exhibition on how cities rebuild after disasters, two years after September 11th.

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