Informed Speculation

While watching my main man Bono covort around his digs in the South of France on 60 Minutes Sunday, I was struck by another story, one about the ultimate fate of New Orleans, that was very dire, indeed:

“We should be thinking about a gradual pullout of New Orleans, and starting to rebuild people’s homes, businesses and industry in places that can last more than 80 years,” says Tim Kusky, a professor of earth sciences at St. Louis University and a flood control expert.

Kusky talks about a withdrawal of the city and explains that coastal erosion was thrown into fast forward by Katrina. He says by 2095, the coastline will pass the city and New Orleans will be what he calls a “fish bowl.”

“Because New Orleans is going to be 15 to 18 feet below sea level, sitting off the coast of North America surrounded by a 50- to 100-foot-tall levee system to protect the city,” explains Kusky.

He says the city will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico just 90 years from now.

The New Orleans Time Picayune had a prominent dissenter from that view:

In an interview Monday, Kusky said his projection of the city becoming an island was “based on a statement made by the director of the U.S. Geological Survey” in 2000.

But University of Texas at Austin geology Professor Charles G. Groat, who was then director of the U.S. Geological Survey, flatly disagreed with Kusky’s conclusions.

Groat said Kusky relied on “an off-hand comment that has often been repeated” that was included in a University of New Orleans magazine piece that compared New Orleans to Atlantis.

“No, no, no,” Groat said of Kusky’s island image. “You’ve got a lot of things between the city of New Orleans and the edge of the sea, and they’re not going away.”

He said that in an ultimate worst-case scenario — where global warming were to raise sea level several dozen feet — the city might be flooded, but such a scenario is not endorsed by many scientists.

The controversy is also covered at the CBS News blog Public Eye (and by the way, if you’re not reading it because of ‘bias’ concerns, it’s actually quite good):

Kusky, reached this afternoon, said he expected to be criticized for his comments. “People are in a terrible state down there, emotionally and financially, and they really don’t want to hear that maybe the best option is to leave,” he said. But he is still somewhat surprised that he’s getting emails from people who think he’s making it all up. “The fact that New Orleans is sinking has been in every introductory geology textbook for the last 20 years,” he says. He e-mailed me a list of reference material on which his arguments are based, as well as a number of media reports he says are in line with his thinking. (Here’s one from NPR and another from National Geographic.)

He says his critics are afraid that his comments “will mean there will be less money for reconstructing New Orleans. Hundreds of millions of dollars will go into relocating people, and the contractors won’t get billions of dollars. It’s a pretty big financial issue.”

I certainly don’t have the expertise to resolve the issue…it appears to be a case of dueling experts (though I suspect Kusky is painting a more dire picture than is actually the case). One thing is for certain, however: Katrina may have left the headlines, but New Orleans is still a shadow of its former self. In the same 60 Minutes report, Greg Meffert, the head of city planning, had this to say:

…[B]efore the storm, New Orleans had a population of 470,000-480,000 people. Realistically, he thinks that half of those residents won’t be coming back.

The Lord of the Flies, mass lawlessness aspect of the story may have been overblown…the damage to the city was not. New Orleans will take a generation to recover.