The Death of an American City (?)

Perhaps I'm being somewhat melodramatic, but I wonder if we are watching the demise of one of my favorite cities.

New Orleans has always faced the risk of catastrophic flooding. The city rose up in the depression between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, an average of six feet below sea-level. From its earliest days in the eighteenth century, the surrounding waters would occasionally inundate parts of the city. In an effort to hold back the natural shifting of the Mississippi, artificial levees were eventually built to compliment the natural ones that had formed along the river. The city also adopted a system of powerful water pumps to keep the area drained and dry, but these had the unintended effect of allowing the city to gradually sink even further below the surrounding water levels. Any breach of one of the protective walls would permit all but the highest parts of New Orleans to fill up like a soup bowl. It was a disaster that everyone knew was possible - and perhaps even inevitable.

Now that breach has taken place. Once the authorities can stop the water from rushing into the city, their attention will have to turn to getting all of it back out. It will take weeks, and even when that task is completed, the city will continue to be largely uninhabitable due to health risks posed by disease, animals, and weakened structures. The vast majority of homes in the city will have become structurally unsound and have to be demolished, and given the pervasive poverty of New Orleans' population (one-third of its 500,000 citizens live below the poverty line) the former owners likely will not have the means to rebuild. Just about anyone who had a job in New Orleans will be unemployed for at least three months, and they may come home to find that their employer can no longer stay in business. In the meantime, the tourist and petroleum industries that account for a huge portion of the local economy will be at a complete standstill, meaning that the city and state will face gigantic budget shortfalls.

All of these facts beg a larger question: Should we bother to rebuild the Crescent City? Just as the city's geography made this disaster inevitable, rebuilding on the same site seems likely to invite the exact same disaster at some point in the future. It would be like choosing to rebuild Pompeii on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius with the full knowledge that the thing would probably blow again. Sure, some areas - such as the well-placed French Quarter - could be preserved, but building at any of the lower elevations would just be asking for trouble.

To an extent, New Orleans must exist in some way, shape, or form. The oil and shipping industries need a major port city at the mouth of the Mississippi. My question is whether it might be wiser to abandon most of the city's current location and to rebuild in the surrounding area at higher elevations. Given the fact that I-10 - the only major road to run through the southernmost areas of the United States - is now shattered, we could reshape its course to suit the contours of the city's new location. Essentially, my point boils down to the fact that if you're going to have to rebuild most everything about New Orleans, doesn't it make the most sense to rebuild in the best available place, rather than the most sentimental one?

One more thing has gotten me thinking about this whole situation. New Orleans presents, on a smaller scale, almost the same situation that we would face in the event that a major U.S. city were to be hit with a nuclear weapon. We have hundreds of thousands displaced, an entire city's infrastructure obliterated, power and communications wiped out, transportation systems disrupted, and an area that is practically uninhabitable. Could we eventually use lessons that we will learn from trying to recover from this catastrophe as a template for dealing with future events?

As always, I'm interested to hear peoples' thoughts on all of these ideas.

[ADDITION: 9/2/2005]

Today's Washington Post ran a piece by Rick Bragg, an Alabama native and superlative writer, on the city of New Orleans. You can read it at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090101813.html. And for anyone who would like to read an amazing Southern autobiography, I recommend Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin'.