Katrina's warning unheeded?
They're still struggling to rebuild New Orleans, four years after Hurricane Katrina dunked the Crescent City and other low-lying areas in southern Louisiana and Mississippi. The costliest storm in US history hit Aug. 29, 2005.
Now come two coastal scientists who warn that what's being rebuilt is likely to get flooded again - and that other waterfront communities, including Baltimore, face the risk of similar watery calamities as global warming raises sea levels across the planet.
In "The Rising Sea," Orrin Pilkey and Rob Young argue that "the world is poised on the edge of a cliff (of its own making). We must act now by responding to the challenges of sea level rise in a planned and rational way, taking a long-term view. If we don't start planning now, a huge 'natural disaster' is facing us."
Their book, published by Island Press, focuses on New Orleans and Miami and other cities frequently in the cross-hairs of hurricanes. But in a telephone interview, the authors say the Chesapeake Bay and Baltimore will not escape the rising seas, either. We do get hit by the occasional storm - just six years ago, Tropical Storm Isabel flooded the Inner Harbor, as seen at right, as well as City Dock in Annapolis and other low-lying communities around the bay. But Pilkey and Young say even without storms, the bay will continue to creep inexorably inland, as it has for decades.
"One of the interesting problems you guys face is your port facility," said Pilkey, professor emeritus at Duke University and a long-time critic of coastal development. As the seas rise over the next century, he says, "you can bring in bigger ships, but your docks will be inundated."
Some may wonder what the fuss is about when even the United Nations-backed scientific study two years ago projected that sea level would rise somewhere between 7 and 23 inches by the end of this century But Pilkey and Young point out the scientific congress low-balled its estimate because it couldn't agree how much the seas would rise as ice sheets and glaciers melt in frozen Greenland and west Antarctica. Other scientists since have suggested that that melting ice could dwarf the cautious official projections, by several feet. Pilkey and Young suggest planners might want to assume as a worst case that sea level could actually climb 7 feet by next century.
A scary scenario, to be sure. But, they argue, sea level rise is already under way, and no one in authority is taking the gradual threat seriously enough yet, particularly in cities like Miami, with high-rises crowding the beachfront.
Projections are that sea level rise likely will accelerate as the planet warms and more ice melts. But even if it continues to creep upward at the rate of 2.5 to 3.5 millimeters a year - as it has for the past decade - that spells "a big heap of trouble" for barrier islands and communities like Miami, says Young, geosciences professor at Western Carolina University and a native of Newport News, Va. Around the Chesapeake, the water has risen about a foot in the past century - half from rising sea level, the rest from sinking land.
The two say they're not advocating an abandonment of an already heavily developed coast. But they say government should absolutely stop letting anymore high-rises be built close to the water - and should stop subsidizing redevelopment of storm-ravaged areas.
"This is America," Young says. We don't like retreat. We don't like telling people what to do. But at the very least, they should be planning for where people could be relocating or retreating after the next storm hits and the community is destroyed."
They acknowledge there may be good cultural and political reasons to rebuild a city like New Orleans, but they also say engineers and politicians alike need to be honest about the likelihood the water will be back. They say they fear that Louisianans, in particular, have been misled to think that restoring the wetlands along the Gulf coast will shield them from future storms. Those assurances are based on shaky science, they warn.
"The jury is still out to what degree - if any - wetlands may mitigate storm surge," Young says. Yet just last week environmental groups upset with the Army Corps of Engineers pace of wetlands restoration hailed the Obama administration for vowing to take a stronger hand. The green groups repeated the oft-stated assertion that Katrina's damage was so severe because Louisiana has lost about a third of its original coastal wetlands.
Though Young and Pilkey says they support environmental restoration, they say it needs to be done for the right reasons - and in places where it will last.
"One has to question spending billions of dollars on environmental restoration in an area that's going to be under water in decades," Young says.
A couple native Alaskan fishing communities are already planning to relocate at vast government expense as the sea encroaches on their land. So are isolated communities hugging low-lying atolls in the Pacific. Here in Maryland, Smith Island is at obvious risk - taxpayers must ask themselves whether they want to pay for seawalls to try to hold back the rising tides, or to pay for relocation to higher ground.
"You don't have to be alarmist to be concerned," Young concludes. Even if you're being extremelyl conservative .. these are issues that are going to have to be tackled."
What do you think? Are you willing to contribute your tax dollars to replenishing the sand on eroding beaches in resorts like Ocean City? When the waves get high enough, would you be willing to pay for sewalls that keep the water off the boardwalk, most of the time? Do you mind paying for roads, schools and other public infrastructure in flood-prone areas when it gets damaged by storms?
For more on the mid-Atlantic coast's sensitivity to sea-level rise, you can find a federal science report here. Or check out the report of the Maryland Climate Commission here.
(Photos of Isabel flooding in downtown Baltimore, Sept. 2003, by Amy Davis of The Baltimore Sun.)
Comments
Thanks for this thoughtful article. I develop Earth Science textbooks, so I'm well acquainted with the problem of sea-level rise. I look fwd to reading Pilkey's book; he's a fine author and real expert. // I visited Smith Island's Inn of Silent Music for 7 years, falling in love with it & the crabbing village of Tylerton, and its people. They are living history and natural beauty manifest. I watched the Corps of Engineers build the protective seawall, which gives Tylerton another 25 years, maybe, before it slips beneath the waves as the Bay subsides & the glaciers melt. Francis Bacon said it all in 1620: "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
Posted by: fred schroyer | September 1, 2009 10:37 AM
Having lived in North Carolina and Florida, and staying for one hurricane in each state *note**just ONE hurricane* I learned that evacuate means evacuate! I was lucky enough to have somewhere to go to escape the wrath of mother nature. The lesson to be learned from Katrina I'm wondering about, is if city and state officials have a plan for evacuating those who don't have the ability or $ to leave during an emergency or catastrophe.
Posted by: Jennifer Wilfong | September 1, 2009 11:02 AM
The article would be interesting except for the following:
1) Battling 'mother-nature' isn't new, it's been going on forever.
2) Man-made global warming is not fact, it is very easily debated and debunked. Only the ideologically rigid continue to deny this reality ... debate all you want, but DO NOT present GW as if it is foregone agreed upon fact.
3) Relying on ANY report from the U.N. is simply hysterical and illustrates incredible naivete. The U.N. has never been correct about anything ... they simply spew anything and everything that supports more global govt. and control of people, without of course actually HELPING anyone.
4) Lots of us out here have been doing the 'right' things for years, like the outdoors just as you do, but we don't need to insert the words ECO and GREEN into every sentence we utter. If I see one more package or product with GREEN on the label, I'm going to deliver some Linda Blair green of my own.
5) Guess what ... KATRINA's HAPPEN. TSUNAMIs HAPPEN, VOLCANOS HAPPEN ... there is no running away folks, all these problems can be dealt with more effectively using better engineering and some sense, so stop wringing your hands over what 'might' happen in 25, 50 or 100 years from now.
Posted by: Alistair Sinclair | September 1, 2009 5:50 PM
These area will be flooded again. Rather than build new levees, the government should buy the land. I would even surmise that buying the land would even be cheaper than a massive engineering effort.
Unfortunately, we also suffer from crisis of the moment mentality. Katrina hits so we create a massive effort to re-build, however as the years pass, other crises hit and the Katrina re-building program is slowly stripped into a none program.
Areas prone to periodic natural disaster should be bought and converted to open space. We should NOT rebuild.
Posted by: Steve R. | September 2, 2009 9:04 AM
We should not rebuild. Further, we should stop federal insurance programs for oceanfront development. We should also leave disaster response to an all-volunteer force paid for by coastal communities.
If you are dumb enough to build in a flood plain, then being broke is your destiny.
If you live in a desert, don't complain when the river drys up.
Self sufficiency is the motto for the 21st century.
If you thought the response to Katrina was bad, wait for the next big one to hit Miami or Charleston.
Not gonna be any response.
Posted by: Earl_E | September 2, 2009 1:06 PM
Global Warming and Cooling happen. We as humans are of little or no significance. The earth's orbit around the sun and sun activity are the cause. If you want to watse money throw money away on something else. Like building another wall around the beltway. As we head into another cooling phase which is happening now, I am willing to bet the GW people will say it was their efforts that stopped GW. What a hoax. It is just about time for the oil people to claim this winter will be colder than usual, so expect prices to go up. They have done this the past couple of winters while the GW people have said the opposite. Follow the money! Who is getting paid for the claims they make.
Posted by: StanT | September 7, 2009 9:12 AM
For skeptics like Stan who believe humans have little influence on earth's climate, there was a study published in the journal Science last week that seems to further debunk the argument that recent temperature trends are just a natural variation.
As reported in the Los Angeles Times, a team of scientists headed by climatologist Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University found that the Arctic is farther from the sun in summertime now than it was 2,000 years ago, thanks to an anomoly in earth's orbit around the sun. That extra distance should have reduced the amount of solar radiation the region receives and made for colder temperatures up north. But instead the past decade has been the warmest of any in the past two millenia, with average temperatures increasing by more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past
20 years alone.
You can read the Times story at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-arctic5-2009sep05,0,3388515.story
And here's a link to an abstract of the study in Science (sorry, must be a subscriber to read the full text): http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5945/1236
Climate scientists have pointed out before that there's been no appreciable increase in solar irradiation of the earth as a whole since about 1950, the time of the greatest increase in greenhouse gas emissions and highest average global temperatures. You can read more about that here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/did-the-sun-hit-record-highs-over-the-last-few-decades/
Posted by: Tim Wheeler | September 7, 2009 12:04 PM
There are some myths in the article and many more in the comments.
First and foremost, the response was only a very small part of the disaster. The disaster was the federal flood. Our city suffered the worst engineering catastrophy in the history of the United States.
Do people know that 90% of the metro area evacuated before the storm? It was the most successful evacuation of a metropolitan area in this country’s history. Could their city do as well?
Do they know that 50% of New Orleans is above sea level?
Did you know ships must travel 96 miles upriver from the Gulf to reach New Orleans? - we are not a ‘coastal’ city.
Do they know that the Lower Ninth Ward is but only 2 of the 140 urban square miles (in just Orleans Parish) that flooded when flood control structures fell down.
Do they know that 70% of New Orleans home owners had flood insurance? - a rate higher than almost anywhere else in the country.
Do they know that the flood, proportionally, killed just as many rich, middle class and poor as well as black, white, Hispanic and Asian New Orleanians? The only demographic that suffered more than the rest were our elderly who suffered the worst, by far. Did you know many thousands of New Orleanians died in the months after the storm from stress and depression, and are still dying?
Do they know the Corps is mostly responsible for the losses of our wetlands that use to serve as a storm surge buffer for New Orleans?
Do outsiders know that New Orleans has a higher percentage of residents that remain lifelong residents of their home town than nearly any other major metropolitan area in the US?
Do they know the vast majority of New Orleanians are honest, hard working, tax paying, law abiding US citizens and deserve their respect?
There are thousands more commonly believed myths about New Orleans and its people. Most don’t matter, but many do us harm.
The myths seemed to stem from journalists parachuting in with preconceived notions and lazy but flowery language and they typically reported it all wrong. Countrymen and politicians used our problems as partisan political fodder. New Orleans and its residents have been ruthlessly slandered like no American city has ever experienced. Lazy media reported a ‘natural’ disaster and too many of our countrymen feel we deserved our disaster and should even be denied the right to exist. It is plenty enough to hurt your feelings. Our fellow US citizens don’t care that all the misinformation has seriously disillusioned and disturbed so many.
By far, the biggest myth is that our disaster was natural.
Our outfall canal floodwalls fell down without even being overtopped by storm surge water (at less than half their design loads) because of negligent engineering in the design of those floodwalls’ foundations by engineers employed with the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in the official levee failure investigation reports and reported to Congress by Corps leadership in June of 2006 and as decided by US 5th District Judge S. Duval in January 2008.
It is really very simple, technically. West of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, in the heart of the city (as well as the Lower Ninth Ward along the IHNC), the US Army Corps of Engineers used steel sheet-piles driven to only 17.5 feet below sea level when 60 foot below sea level was required to avoid failure had the water risen to the top of the walls. They did this because they made gross mistakes in their design calculations. It was pure engineering negligence. The barge entered the Lower Ninth Ward through an existing breach.
The levee failures and subsequent flooding were NOT because of ‘maintenance’ or our corrupt local levee boards and politicians or because of weak soil, barges, wind, rain, land elevation, levee heights, subsidence, budgets, democrats, republicans, crime, an act of God, school busses, our culture, environmentalists, neighborhood groups. It wasn’t even caused by FEMA, our Sewage and Water Board or our state’s Department of Transportation, or our poverty, lack of education or any of the other RED HERRING issues very successfully promoted by so many. It was not the fault of flood victims.
Blaming levee and floodwall failures on Katrina is like saying a bridge collapse was because of traffic. And, it seems many outsiders would even blame the drivers?
New Orleans and New Orleanians deserve vindication on these issues.
Posted by: crescentCityRay | October 2, 2009 3:18 PM