- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- usa@midwest.social
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Much better article from a local source without clickbait headlines.
I lived there in the late 90s and early 2000s, dated the daughter of one of the engineers that helped design, build, and maintain the levies and pumps that kept it from being unlivable. He said back then that it was going to fail in years, not likely decades, and that climate issues aside he wouldn’t want to stay if he was young. That was a major reason I left. That and the constant floods and crazy amount of drugs/alcohol. At some point it just became a bad idea for me to stay, and that point was 9/11. When I was getting used to lockdowns where we all armed ourselves because of fears houses would get looted, I knew I wanted a more normal life.
I went on vacation in 2018 or so, after the scars of Katrina started to heal a bit (but still very evident) and my SO and I talked long and hard about coming down, buying one of the renovated shotgun houses in the harder-hit wards, and starting a life there. When we came home and started researching it, we quickly realized it wasn’t a safe place to move to anymore, climate-wise. In fact, that started a larger conversation in the house about how we planned to cope with climate change that would be worse than what we were initially told - not just living in a place with resources that will be there in 30 years, but about finding meaning in life as we prepare to witness mankind truly pay for its follies. 8 years later and we still haven’t wrapped our heads around it, but projects are started to prepare our house for it.
Yeah, my wife is in denial, so I have been preparing the property and our lifestyle bit by bit as long as we’ve been in this location, I do it everywhere I live. She knows I’m concerned but she doesn’t understand the scale and severity of what’s coming. She also thought I was nuts when I prepped for Covid when I read about it far before it was being talked about around the coolers… she told me she thought I was nuts and then found great relief when she noticed everyone starting to panic. It’ll be the same again, she’ll come around. Just wish everyone would take it seriously and slowly prepare so we have communities in place already, and not just panicking competitors.
Good luck to you, it’s hard being a cassandra there’s no doubt, especially in your own family.
They designed it like that knowing it was gonna fail in years? Were they limited by resources/money/corruption or did they just not care?
The Army Corps of Engineers has been trying to keep the city afloat for centuries, with a lot of levee works there going back a while.
The problem is that the old system has design flaws and no one wants to pay to upgrade the old system because of the cost.
They were limited by the sheer reality of New Orleans being under sea level in a swamp on a shoreline. No amount of pumps and walls can solve that problem when storms exist, especially when they’re known to be getting worse thanks to climate change. Even if you built for storms 50 years out, it still wouldn’t matter.
The resource havers never cared incapable of long term planning offended by it
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I actually had a kind of mental breakdown / existential crisis, a few years back.
I was playing RDR2.
I realized, while ambling around St. Denis, that that was the closest I was ever going to get to ever seeing New Orleans.
… because the real one was gonna be underwater before I could ever afford to visit it.
This was a discussion after Katrina, where there was a forced motivation to do something. Choices have been made. The ocean doesn’t care either way.
At minimum, it was suggested to abandon large parts of the low lying city and build up on the bit of high ground remaining. The problem with that was that most of the city’s poor lived in the low lying areas.
Turns out the cost of rebuilding left the low lying areas half abandoned instead of fully abandoned.
