How Humans Sank New Orleans
Below sea level. It’s a universally known topographical factoid about the otherwise flat city of New Orleans, and one that got invoked ad nauseam during worldwide media coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its catastrophic aftermath in 2005. Locally, the phrase is intoned with a mix of civic rue and dark humor.
It’s also off by half. Depending on where exactly one frames the area measured, roughly 50 percent of greater New Orleans lies above sea level. That’s the good news. The bad news: It used to be 100 percent, before engineers accidentally sank half the city below the level of the sea. Their intentions were good, and they thought they were solving an old problem. Instead, they created a new and bigger one.
Three hundred years ago this spring, French colonials first began clearing vegetation to establish La Nouvelle-Orléans on the meager natural levee of the Mississippi River. At most 10 to 15 feet above sea level, this feature accounts for nearly all the region’s upraised terrain; the rest is swamp or marsh. One Frenchman called it “Nothing more than two narrow strips of land, about a musket shot in width,” surrounded by “canebrake [and] impenetrable marsh.”
For two centuries after the establishment of New Orleans in 1718, urban expansion had no choice but to exploit this slender ridge—so much so that many patterns of local history, from urbanization and residential settlement geographies to architecture and infrastructure, spatially echoed the underlying topography.
This might seem paradoxical to anyone who’s visited the Crescent City. What topography? In one of the flattest regions on the continent, how can elevation matter so much? But that’s exactly the point: The lower the supply of a highly demanded resource, the more valuable it becomes. Unlike most other cities, which may have elevational ranges in the hundreds of feet, just a yard of vertical distance in New Orleans can make the difference between a neighborhood developed in the Napoleonic Age, the Jazz Age, or the Space Age.
Understanding how these features rose, and why they later sank, entails going back to the end of the Ice Age, when melting glaciers sent sediment-laden runoff down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. Starting around 7,200 years ago, the river’s mouth began pressing seaward, dumping sediments faster than currents and tides could sweep them away. The mud accumulated, and lower Louisiana gradually emerged from the Gulf shore.
Areas closest to the river and its branches rose the highest in elevation, because they got the most doses of the coarsest sediment. Areas farther from the river got just enough silt and clay particles to rise only slightly above the sea, becoming swamps. Areas farthest out received scanty deposition of the finest particles amid brackish tides, becoming grassy wetlands or saline marsh. The entire delta, under natural conditions, lay above sea level, ranging from a few inches along the coastal fringe to over a dozen feet high at the crest of the Mississippi River’s natural levee. Nature built lower Louisiana above sea level, albeit barely—and mutably.
Native peoples generally adapted to this fluidity, shoring up the land or moving to higher ground as floodwaters rose. But then European imperialists came to colonize. Colonization meant permanency, and permanency meant imposing engineering rigidity on this soft, wet landscape: levees to keep water out, canals to dry soil, and in time, pumps to push and lift water out of canals lined with floodwalls.