In The Inflation Hurricane, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., wrote that mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, and eventual repopulating of the city until the next major hurricane happens along, “serves as an unrealistic and irritating substitute for organizing a city in a way that actually makes sense in light of the predictable hazards it's exposed to.” Forcing people to desert their homes, indeed, seems an unsatisfactory policy, but Mr. Jenkins doesn’t specify what kind of “organizing” he thinks “makes sense in light of the predictable hazards” that the Big Easy faces.
I hereby suggest that what’s needed is not a superior organization of New Orleans, but rather a reason why people who abandon the place shouldn’t even have to return. The truth is that the site of New Orleans is just not a good one for a city, especially one of such size.
Many things can legitimately be blamed on the French these days, but the founding of Nouvelle Orléans is not really to their discredit. This establishment took place in 1718, whereas geologists concluded only in the 1950’s that, for the great volume of water conveyed by the Mississippi, the natural path to the ocean is no longer that mighty river but rather a distributary (a stream that flows out of a larger watercourse, as opposed to a tributary, which flows into the same) called the Atchafalaya. Since the Mississippi is very slow-moving by the time it enters Louisiana, particularly the southern portion of the State, much of the silt that it has carried from higher elevations is deposited there rather than far out at sea; this process is what has formed the Mississippi delta, on which New Orleans rests. (The swift-flowing Congo, by contrast, has no delta.) The gradual buildup of silt as the river “ages” has made the bed more nearly flat, and because water flows down a steep grade more readily than it does down a gentler slope, it now wants to reach the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Atchafalaya, which, being “younger” than the Mississippi, is more rapid. Similar scenarios have played out in other parts of the world; the mouth of China's Yellow River, for instance, is hundreds of miles from where it was in previous centuries.
The Army Corps of Engineers has created a system of levees and other works where the Atchafalaya has its origin, to prevent it from drawing away more than 30% of the Mississippi’s water; at a cost of many millions of dollars yearly, the corps also does constant dredging in the area. The purpose of this building and dredging, however, is not preventing floods but preserving the economic importance of the region from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Instead of resisting nature, a better way for the government to spend (our) money would be to found a new city, in the vicinity of the Atchafalaya’s mouth, to take over the function of Baton Rouge - New Orleans; it ought to be constructed over a high, very large landfill, in order to head off the problems of New Orleans, which sits on what is basically a mud flat six feet below sea level. People wouldn’t be forced to leave the older city, but it would naturally shrink with its decrease in importance. I know that there would be strong resistance to such a plan—indeed, it wouldn’t be carried out at all, because of the current vested interests—but other storied cities, e.g., Babylon, have either dwindled to insignificance or disappeared. Except for God, nothing lasts forever.
