Its been over three years since I moved to Northern Virginia and said good bye to my friends and Alma Mater in New Orleans. How was I to know that 3 months later the world would end and everything New Orleans would be measured in relevance to Katrina. Now, as we welcome in year 3 PK, New Orleans is facing the possibility of another major disaster. It is my hope of hopes that Gustav does not undo all the rebuilding and planning that have happened in the past three years.
If the worst happens and the city is deluged again, I worry that the country will not be as generous as last time; I can already hear them crying on the senate floor for abandonment and rebuilding elsewhere. I can see the talking heads blaming New Orleans for not “learning its lesson,” as if the city had not been flooded numerous times in its past. If the money does come again, I can just imagine the repressive building codes to and flood plane restrictions, all methods of preventing future loss of property. Yet the city would become one big concrete block raised 40 feet in the air.
How can we have rebuilt an entire continent over 50 years ago and then proceed to fly to the moon, but we cannot rebuild or even protect one city from the tempests of fate? It is simple, we’ve gotten to arrogant and stopped innovating. Instead of looking at how to build flood proof buildings and levees to hold back the water, we should be looking at buildings that will adapt to flooding and remember that the yearly flooding of the Mississippi is what raised New Orleans above sea level. Imagine, a city that truly embraces the entity of being Creole; it could be a hybrid of Venice, Amsterdam, and its current state. Improved dikes would protect the most historic neighborhoods, and the newer/rebuilt lower lying areas could be designed to raise and fall with the tide.