But before the options can be weighed, several unknowns will have to be addressed. One is precisely how the current defenses failed. To answer that, LSU coastal scientists Paul Kemp and Hassan Mashriqui are picking their way through the destroyed city and surrounding region, reconstructing the size of water surges by measuring telltale marks left on the sides of buildings and highway structures. They are feeding these data into a simulation of the wind and water around New Orleans during its ordeal.</p> "We can't say for sure until this job is done," says Day, "but the emerging picture is exactly what we've predicted for years." Namely, several canals—including the MRGO, which was built to speed shipping in the 1960s—have the combined effect of funneling surges from the Gulf of Mexico right to the city's eastern levees and the lake system to the north. Those surges are to blame for the flooding. "One of the first things we'll see done is the complete backfilling of the MRGO canal," predicts Day, "which could take a couple of years."
4 m' [. e/ G+ T5 G The levees, which have been provisionally repaired, will be shored up further in the months to come, although their long-term fate is unclear. Better levees would probably have prevented most of the flooding in the city center. To provide further protection, a mobile dam system, much like a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, could be used to close off the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. But most experts agree that these are short-term fixes.( B- w' q6 R% |. Z9 o- G
The basic problem for New Orleans and the Louisiana coastline is that the entire Mississippi River delta is subsiding and eroding, plunging the city deeper below sea level and removing a thick cushion of wetlands that once buffered the coastline from wind and waves. Part of the subsidence is geologic and unavoidable, but the rest stems from the levees that have hemmed in the Mississippi all the way to its mouth for nearly a century to prevent floods and facilitate shipping. As a result, river sediment is no longer spread across the delta but dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. Without a constant stream of fresh sediment, the barrier islands and marshes are disappearing rapidly, with a quarter, roughly the size of Rhode Island, already gone.4 U) w( R3 l s/ b4 h6 K
After years of political wrangling, a broad group pulled together by the Louisiana government in 1998 proposed a massive $14 billion plan to save the Louisiana coasts, called Coast 2050 (now modified into a plan called the Louisiana Coastal Area project). Wetland restoration was a key component. "It's one of the best and cheapest hurricane defenses," says Day, who chaired its scientific advisory committee.
9 @# H; [% d) G. w* ?) f. E& { Although the plan was never given more than token funding, a team led by Day has been conducting a pilot study since 2000, diverting part of the Mississippi into the wetlands downstream of the city. "The results are as good as we could have hoped," he says, with land levels rising at about 1 centimeter per year—enough to offset rising sea levels, says Day.; t8 [* N6 p3 L8 w. r0 X2 |4 m
Even if the wetlands were restored and new levees were built, the combination of geologic subsidence and rising sea levels will likely sink New Orleans another meter by 2100. The problem might be solved by another ambitious plan, says Roel Boumans, a coastal scientist at the University of Vermont in Burlington who did his ph.D. at LSU: shoring up the lowest land with a slurry of sediment piped in from the river. The majority of the buildings in the flooded areas will have to be razed anyway, he says, "so why not take this opportunity to fix the root of the problem?" The river could deposit enough sediment to raise the bottom of the New Orleans bowl to sea level "in 50 to 60 years," he estimates. In the meantime, people could live in these areas Venice-style, with buildings built on stilts. Boumans even takes it a step further: "You would have to raise everything about 30 centimeters once every 30 years, so why not make the job easier by making houses that can float."7 ` L( [* v) `/ d2 W
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