The Big Easy - New Orleans
November 18, 2023
New Orleans (NOLA) was very fascinating because of its history, culture, and city life which are all tightly intertwined with water. My first stop was a visit with Dr. Alex McCorquodale, professor emeritus, at the University of New Orleans. He is a Canadian who came for a job and stayed 30 years to work on the city’s engineering-related water challenges. He also worked on the original building of the Mactaquac Generating Station back in Fredericton, NB. We spent the day touring NOLA’s flood protection infrastructure and chatting about the Mactaquac Dam. Spoiler alert, troubles were brewing at the Mactaquac Dam from the beginning. He showed me several of Hurricane Katrina’s levee breach sites explaining in detail why they failed, and several new barriers and systems redesigned to address the harsh lessons learned. He also showed me how high the flood waters reached on his kitchen wall.
Much has been written about Katrina. The short story is that the levee failures and flooding were a low point in American engineering history: poor understanding of levee foundation materials, poor design and construction of barrier walls, poor monitoring of the state of infrastructure, and in the crushing words of one legal judgment, “…the Corps cast a blind eye, either as a result of executive directives or bureaucratic parsimony…Such egregious myopia is a caricature of bureaucratic inefficiency”. Sadly, the failure of the infrastructure was predicted many times over by many organizations. While inadequate protection against hurricanes and other flood events in New Orleans is undoubtedly a consequence of poor human judgment and decision-making, these water events are reminders that Nature always wins. We can never engineer guaranteed protections from the natural water cycle, especially when we ignore common sense about living near active water, i.e., choosing to live on a flood plain or beside an ocean, and failing to accept that our climate is becoming more extreme, regardless of the reason why. Here is an interesting twist; the original city planner, Pierre le Bond de La Tour, didn’t want to build where the current French Quarter or former Vieux Carré sits because, in part, it was a swamp where built levees were needed already in the 1700s.
There are amazing water stories around every corner in NOLA. Water rules here, so there are few cellars or basements because these would be swimming pools, they use crypts for the dead because coffins pop back up when buried underground, and streets are mangled because tree roots and saturated ground win in battles with concrete and asphalt, physically and financially.
I met some truly fascinating people too. New Orleanians love their city and they are quick to talk about the city’s quirky urban things like beignets (a.k.a. donuts), go-cups (you can walk the streets with open alcohol – sadly it is all plastic), their star chefs like Emeril “Bam” Lagasse, their famous dead and entombed residents, their Mardi Gras Indians, and the famous people who visited, fell in love with the city, and moved in next door. I recommend you visit the city and take every tour possible; I will be going back for more. And as an aside, skip Bourbon Street which is silly tourist fluff and head over to Frenchman Street where the locals prefer to hang out.
I was in NOLA for a week waiting out another storm. I experienced my first storm surge when WW almost slid on top of the dock with the rising water one night, and then dropped and slightly hung off the dock as the water level fell. My time in NOLA was entertaining, but a new tempest was brewing and it was time to head east.
Poking along the Gulf Coast,
Allen
Gulfport, MS
