On moving to New Orleans, a city defined by water 5

Wayne Curtis is a freelance writer who's written for The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, American Scholar, Preservation, and American Heritage, and is the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. He recently traded Maine winters for New Orleans summers.

Thursday, 24 May 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La

Someone once wrote that eating a tomato grown on a fire escape demonstrated the highest order of faith in civilization and technology.

To hell with the tomato. If you really want to show your faith, move to New Orleans.

My wife and I did just that, buying a house about a year after Hurricane Katrina knocked holes in shoddy levees and left the city to stew for weeks in an unsavory broth of salt water and toxic sludge. (Our faith was not without limits: we bought a house that was unflooded and sat on high ground.)

We moved from Maine, where we had lived on a coastal island for nearly a decade, and where we had structured our life around the ferry and learned to accommodate the moods of the ocean. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on the concept of being surrounded by water.

I didn't know the half of it. New Orleans is an island, and then some. The Mississippi River wraps in a wide arc around one side of the city, and two saltwater lakes border much of the rest of it. But the city also literally sits atop water: we learned that houses here don't have basements because water lurks just below the surface. Digging down evidently provokes it.

Perhaps most surprising to me was the discovery of how much water the skies can hold. Torrential rains are quite literally part of the ebb and flow of city life, often producing what New Orleanians dismiss with a shrug as "street flooding." Storms stalled over the city have dumped 14 inches (1927), 12 inches (1995), and nine inches (1978), amounts that still are inconceivable to me. Earlier this month, on May 4, a storm released more than five inches of rain in a matter of hours. One of my neighbors, apparently quite at peace with it all, hauled out a canoe and paddled down Prytania Street, a minor artery overarched with live oaks and lined with elaborate homes.

A freighter at rest.

Photo: iStockphoto

New Orleanians deal with street floods the way people in Maine deal with two-foot snowfalls: they prepare for it, then wait it out. Many older houses, including ours, sit atop brick piers designed to let the water in, and then let it out just as easily.

But getting the water out of the city is where that great faith comes in. Left to its own devices, water will loiter here, pooling in the lowest neighborhoods, like Broadmoor and Gentilly. About half of the city sits below sea level, so there's nowhere for water to flow without human intervention. The lower neighborhoods were mostly developed in the early and mid-20th century, when they were carved out of drained cypress swamps. Stout levees of earth and grass -- the pinnacle of medieval technology -- and more reliable mechanical pumps had made widespread flooding seemingly a thing of the past. The city is still dependent on the descendants of these pumps, although they're rather less revered since Katrina stormed the gates and overwhelmed them.

When watery incursions do occur -- such as on May 4 this year -- 21 brawny pumping stations and a network of massive pipes nearly large enough to race a Mini Cooper through give water the bum's rush, ushering it to the far side of the levees that encase the city like a 15th-century wall. Along the riverfront near the French Quarter, the Mississippi River levee is augmented with a concrete and steel floodwall with gates that slide into place when the river threatens, like a portcullis ready to shut out the Visigoths.

Fire up your Mini.

Photo: Wayne Curtis

Of all the water around New Orleans, the Mississippi River is most closely linked to the city, and for an obvious reason: without the Big Muddy, the Big Easy wouldn't exist.

The French laid out the original network of swampy streets here in 1718, putting it as close to the mouth of the river as feasible in order to control this critical avenue into the middle of the continent both militarily and commercially. The gamble paid off: the French, the Spanish, and, finally, the Americans oversaw a New Orleans that in the 19th century would become one of the greatest and most prosperous of American cities.

Given the rich history of city and river, I'll admit I felt a bit cheated when I first moved here. The river is not terrifically impressive as it flows past downtown. It's actually quite narrow between the French Quarter and Algiers Point, a historic part of the city connected by ferry and bridge. (It is, however, massively deep -- about 200 feet.)

And with the levees flanking it on either side, the Mississippi lacks a certain nobility -- the cafe au lait color, the plastic flotsam floating by, the rundown industries flanking the river, the rusty barges yawing past. It lacks the thick forests and tumbling falls of the Potomac above Washington, D.C., or the heroic Palisades along the Hudson above Manhattan. The Mississippi feels captive and underappreciated, like an old lion kept too long in an ill-tended zoo.

"We live in an engineered environment, there's no doubt about it," said Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network.

Rota was one of the people I spoke with over the past few weeks in trying to get my arms around New Orleans' relationship with all this water. And over the next several months, I'll be reporting back on what I've learned about my soggy new home.

But I already know this: I've been here long enough to view New Orleans as the New Atlantis. As is often the case here, the city got things turned upside down and inside out. Because this isn't a mythological place that slipped beneath the waters, but a nearly mythological place that has improbably emerged from the waters, more than once, and has always bounced back.

At least so far.

Drink Me

Tuesday, 26 Jun 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La.

I was hiding out from New Orleans' early summer heat in a Magazine Street bar last week, when a woman walked up and asked for a cocktail and a water. "Bottled or tap?" the bartender inquired.

"Tap," she answered.

"Wow, you're brave," he said.

"It's not for me," the woman said theatrically, and everyone along the bar laughed.

Sort of.

New Orleans has long been estranged from its own water. Having just moved to the city, I feel like I've wandered into a complicated domestic dispute. I figured I should try to sort it out before I develop any unfortunate drinking habits.

The first thing I learned was that the city gets its water from the Mississippi River. Now let me repeat that: The city gets its drinking water from the big brown thing that flows past the city.

Muddy, may I?

Photo: iStockphoto

The Big Muddy rolls past at the rate of some 600,000 cubic feet per second -- that's about 8 million six-packs every second. Even by New Orleans standards, that's a lot of liquid. Some of it gets diverted just a few miles upriver of my house at an intake plant. The famous mud is settled out, and the water filtered, treated, and sent on its way to my kitchen faucet. (Much of it goes elsewhere.)

The best thing about having tap water from the river is that when visiting friends ask to see the Mighty Mississippi, I can walk over to the sink, turn the spigot with a flourish, and say, "With ice or without?" The worst thing about getting drinking water from the Mississippi is ... well, where to begin?

How about with the fact that the river drains some 40 percent of the continental United States. That's home to many millions of people, and all of them pee and poop in the river daily. OK, perhaps not directly in it, but in the watersheds whose rivers run into it.

Granted, New Orleans is not alone -- some 18 million people in the 2,500-mile valley get their drinking water out of the Mississippi. But we're very nearly at the end. If you view the serpentine river as the nation's digestive tract, that's us way down in the lower intestine. We can almost see daylight.

Furthermore, upriver of the intake station is one of the world's greatest collections of chemical plants, oil refineries, smelters, sewage treatment plants, and other impressive human-made structures that constantly flare and belch with great toxic eructations -- about 350 such facilities in all. Half have federal or state discharge permits to dump things in the river.

A few years ago the state set something up called the Early Warning Organic Compound Detection System to let us know if a problem has surfaced upriver. I don't know if it involves sirens or what, but in any event it's not very comforting. Nor is this sentence from the FAQ page of the city's water authority: "Very infrequently, tap water has had a taste or odor due to industrial discharges in the river." No further elucidation is offered.

Well-off New Orleanians have bottled water delivered to their houses; the Kentwood water trucks making their rounds are a part of the landscape in the better neighborhoods. "Uptown they get Kentwood," a local aphorism goes. "Downtown they get cancer."

I've taken to asking everyone I meet, especially those involved in water issues, whether they drink the city's tap water. Surprisingly, many say they do, and none of these people, to my eye, is visibly afflicted with cancer. Often, they issue a caveat of one sort or another -- they only cook with the water, for instance -- or they employ some sort of voodoo. "I use a Brita filter to make me feel better about it," Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network, told me. "But I recognize that it doesn't do anything."

The water, of course, is regularly tested by the state and by the city's Sewage and Water Board. The city says the water is perfectly fine when it leaves the plant. Strikingly, nobody seems to argue otherwise. Chalk it up to the mighty powers of dilution of the Mississippi and modern cleansing technology.

But still, you have to wonder, particularly in the wake of Katrina. After all, billions of gallons of putrid, brackish water poured into the city and sat there for weeks. The flood swept up automobiles and their fluids; paint thinner that had been stored in sheds; and the sewage that backed up when power was knocked out to the 82 pumping stations that keep effluvia moving up and out of this bowl-shaped city.

No surprise: the sediment the flood left behind is proving a bit nasty. A study recently published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that fecal microbes of the sort commonly found in sewage have turned up in much of the sediment. The "good news" -- and New Orleanians are always looking for good news -- is that the authors think this may have been an issue prior to the storm. Anyway, no problem. Don't drink storm runoff, I say to myself. The city's water pipes are below ground and sealed up, safe from contamination.

Or not.

It turns out that Katrina's winds and waters ruptured an estimated 20,000 water pipes. As trees blew over, their roots acted like great levers, prying open underground pipes. Then the spongy New Orleans soil settled erratically after the floodwaters were pumped out, causing still more water pipes to burst.

By some estimates, about 100 million gallons of water per day were leaking out in the months after the storm. By late 2006, the loss had been reduced to about 40 million gallons per day -- but that's still a lot of six-packs.

New Orleans is full of unpredictable sights, and among these today is the abrupt appearance of great chasms in the city streets as errant water washes away the soil beneath. In my neighborhood, a concerned citizen deposited an old queen-sized mattress in one fissure as a marker, like a flag in a golf hole. It was scarcely visible.

If the system's integrity was that compromised, might one worry that stuff -- like that nasty flood sediment -- was getting back into the pipes?

One might, but the news here is surprisingly upbeat. The most recent testing at the kitchen taps was performed last September by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which tested tap water from 30 sites around the city. Only one produced signs of coliform bacteria, and that happened on a retest. The bad news? It was the site seven blocks from my house.

The good news: That tap didn't produce any evidence of E. coli, which, the report reassures, "means any coliform present were a non-fecal type." And while Non-Fecal Drinking Water lacks a certain allure as a brand name, I have to say at this point it sounds pretty good to me.

So do I drink the tap water?

Sure. Sometimes you just gotta have faith.

Death Wish

Tuesday, 7 Aug 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La.

It's summertime in New Orleans. Time slows. Backyard gardens demand to be weeded nearly hourly. The smell of a passing garbage truck seems to linger in the heavy air for hours, an olfactory postcard tacked to an invisible street corner bulletin board.

And the dead come back to life.

Well, technically, it's the "dead zone" that comes back to life.

Corn fed, but still dead.

Image: usda.gov

"It varies, but it's basically the size of Rhode Island or Connecticut," says Matt Rota, water resources program director at the Gulf Restoration Network, which is based in New Orleans. "Every summer nutrient pollution gets washed down from the breadbasket, and when it hits the warm, salty gulf waters, it basically creates a dead zone where the oxygen is so low that the critters either need to swim away or they die."

The mighty Mississippi transports a lot of soil and silt as it flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. And plenty more, including about a million metric tons of nitrates and 137,000 metric tons of phosphorus, which are flushed into the gulf each year. Much of that comes from agricultural lands well-lavished with fertilizers.

Where exactly do those substances go? About 70 percent of the Mississippi's volume flows past New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico through what's poetically called the birdfoot delta. (Look at a map to see why.) Nearly a third of the river flows out through the Atchafalaya Basin, thanks to a vast diversion dam built for flood control. Between the two outflows, the nitrates and phosphorus end up lingering along the broad, shallow coastal shelf that runs from New Orleans hundreds of miles to the west.

These nutrients promote a boom in algae growth. And as the algae blooms and dies, the dead cells drift to the bottom, where they decay and voraciously consume oxygen in the process.

The effect is amplified during the summer months for a couple of reasons. For one, the prevailing gulf currents during warmer months tend to hug the coast while moving slowly westward toward Texas. And seasonal wind conditions contribute to increased stratification in the water column -- not much vertical mixing of the gulf occurs during the summer to bring oxygen down from the surface, so the hypoxia (the technical name for oxygen depletion) grows and grows at the lower levels.

Thus the dead zone comes to life; and fish, eels, and crabs either die or migrate away.

Zone of contention.

Photo: noaa.gov

While hypoxia can occur anywhere that nutrients promote algae growth, the dead zone in the northwest gulf is the largest known in U.S. waters. And researchers report that this summer's dead zone is among the top three ever mapped in the Gulf of Mexico.

It doesn't have to be this way. The federal government some years ago embraced a goal of shrinking the dead zone, with the idea of reducing it about two-thirds from its current size. A formal plan, the result of meetings among dozens of government officials, environmentalists, farmers, and other stakeholders along the Mississippi, was developed in 2001.

So what happened? The plan spawned some conferences and further discussions and elaborate organizational charts, but it never received the promised federal funding to move from page to process. "No money has been given to this project, and the dead zone has not been reduced," Rota says. "And the feds are now revisiting the plan with the idea of trimming it back."

Rota notes that solutions are especially difficult in this case, since the pollution is mostly the result of nonpoint sources -- thousands of farmers, sewage treatment plants, and other small-scale contributors create this nutrient overload. In comparison, coping with industrial plant pollution is in many ways much simpler, since the source is clear and any sort of regulation can be narrowly targeted.

But efforts to coordinate among the different states and jurisdictions along the river to develop consistent guidelines for runoff have been, Rota says, "a bureaucratic nightmare."

And future prospects don't look much better.

While ethanol produced from corn has been widely heralded as a way to move the country away from its dependence on oil, the unintended consequences have cast a dark shadow over the Gulf of Mexico.

"It's really frightening to us from a nutrient pollution standpoint," Rota says, "because they're taking all these areas that were in less fertilizer-intensive products -- like soybeans and cotton -- and they're shifting it all into corn production."

"Ethanol is not the be all and end all," adds Dan Favre, campaign organizer with the Gulf Restoration Network.

What's more, Rota says Louisiana's shuttered fertilizer plants -- closed when demand fell off in previous years -- are looking at reopening to supply the booming demand among corn producers. And Louisiana may be looking at a large-scale shift from sugar to corn production to meet the demand. (Ethanol can be made from sugar, but federal tax incentives encourage the production of ethanol from corn.) All of this portends the dumping of even more fertilizer into the Mississippi.

"So we're going to be producing more fertilizer that we ship up into the breadbasket, and then those nutrients are going to wash right back down here and create even more dead-zone problems," he says.

The Mississippi has always been famous for its grand loops and oxbows, whose uncontrollable whims defined the meandering river in the 19th century. Today the river appears increasingly famous for another sort of loop -- the feedback loop. Build a levee here, and flooding gets worse there. Move away from oil here to encourage a more sustainable energy future, and the dead zone grows over there.

"Without policies to reduce and capture this fertilizer runoff," Rota says, "I fear that this trend toward larger dead zones is going to continue."

The Best Defense Is a Good ... Marsh

Wednesday, 29 Aug 2007

NEW ORLEANS, La.

A couple of weeks ago, the Army Corps of Engineers made available a downloadable set of Google Earth overlays that depict post-2011 flooding forecasts for New Orleans. By then, the Corps will have improved the city's levees -- making them taller, better anchoring them to the ground, and partially armoring some against erosion with concrete. (Strategy for the next four years: Pray. Or cross your fingers if you're a Christopher Hitchens reader.)

Naturally, I downloaded the set, then occupied what could have been an otherwise productive afternoon by clicking the toggles and soaring like Superman across the city while watching the water rise and fall. It was more fun than anything by Nintendo.

Of course, this all seemed a little less fun when I zoomed in on my own block and found our house under six to eight feet of water. Yikes! After a few moments of harried mouse clicking, I realized I had forgotten to untoggle the pre-Katrina, one-in-500-year-storm forecast, the scenario in which basically the whole city gets the full Atlantis treatment.

So I clicked off the offending toggle, and discovered that not only was our neighborhood going to be high and dry through pretty much any future storm, but that the whole city looked pretty safe. Just a little puddle or two, really, would form here or there during a post-2011, once-a-century hurricane. (For the record, Katrina was a once-in-397-year storm. My advice: don't live here in 2402.)

This was all very heartening. But then it occurred to me: this compelling bit of computer wizardry was constructed by the same people who constructed the levees. The levees that, you may recall, overtopped, eroded, and breached during Katrina two years ago this week -- despite repeated assurances that they were safe.

Fortunately, the levees that surround the city are our second line of defense. Unfortunately, the first line of defense is the marshland that has historically served as a buffer between the city and the Gulf of Mexico. And the marshes are in even worse shape than the levees.

Drive across one of the bridges over the Mississippi from the city center and, after some cursory cruising through suburbs, you'll find yourself in the marshes. To a newcomer like me, there's not much difference between one marsh and another, any more than there is between one Iowa cornfield and the next. The chief impression is that they're endless and flat.

Flat as they may seem, though, the marshes are, in effect, New Orleans' version of elevation. They protect this low-lying city from storm surges and hurricane winds by absorbing much of the energy of the wind and water. Having more marsh is like setting the city on a small hill. Having less marsh is functionally lowering it into the water.

Concern about the decline of Gulf of Mexico wetlands was a topic without much urgency around New Orleans prior to Katrina. After the storm, it attracted attention among a wider cadre. But it took a series on the coastal wetlands in the Times Picayune last March to really focus public attention. Suddenly, "marshes" was more commonly overheard in city coffee shops than "levees."

The three-part series contained a deluge of disheartening information about the pace of coastal erosion. Perhaps the one thing that cast it into sharpest relief was the large color photograph that led the series. It was an aerial shot looking south from just north of the central business district. It showed the instantly recognizable roof of the Superdome in the foreground, then the river, then a bit of marsh, and then the dappled Gulf of Mexico glistening in the spring sun.

To which everyone wondered: what the hell what was the gulf doing there?

New Orleanians have grown accustomed to telling people that the city lies about 60 miles from the sea. But here were those faraway waters, knocking at the back door.

Why the gulf has come visiting has little to do with global warming and rising seas -- at least not yet. It has everything to do with our efforts to control and exploit nature, and the blowback that's resulted.

Another aerial view puts in perspective not only the problem, but the cause. Each time I fly in or out of the city I peer out the jet window and see marshes extending to the encroaching gulf. But it's not an unmarred sea of grass. The marsh looks like a chessboard here, a gridiron there. Indeed, some 20,000 miles of canals have been sliced and diced to facilitate oil and gas vessels that cruise the marshes looking for deposits, and that want easier access to lay pipelines between the oil-rich gulf and fuel-processing facilities along the river.

This reckless network of canals, built over decades, caused a major breach in our defense, just as if someone had carved little ditches through the levees. The canals allowed salt water to invade freshwater marshes, killing the vegetation that had been keeping the alluvial silt in place. And the silt is the land here -- 10,000 years ago this was all sea; the soil-heavy Mississippi has been building up the delta ever since, and it's still pretty fragile. When the plants die, the mucky swamp soils rapidly erode into the gulf. Louisiana loses the equivalent of a football field about every 38 minutes. Between the hurricanes Katrina and Rita -- the disagreeable sisters of 2005 -- some 200 square miles of marsh washed away.

Gulf hurricanes are nothing new, of course. They have washed away marshes for centuries. But historically, the marshes would have replenished with silt carried by the Mississippi when it overflowed its banks. Today, the river sits straitjacketed by the levees that encase it for much of its length. Instead of spreading out across the wetlands during flood times, the Mississippi River dumps its great load of silt off the continental shelf and into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico, benefiting no one.

The map of Louisiana in that atlas on your shelf? It's likely drawn from data compiled more than a half century ago. Much of that marshland depicted on maps at the mouth of the Mississippi -- it's poetically called the birdfoot delta -- is gone. Your atlas is like an old family album showing ghosts of the past.

Among the more stunning points in the newspaper series was this: scientists say we've got just one decade -- a scant 10 years -- to reverse coastal erosion or it will be too late. Too late meaning that the ocean will be flowing into the backyards of New Orleans suburbs, and levees designed to keep out the infrequent flood will be employed full-time to keep out a permanent gulf intrusion.

It's not that the fix couldn't be achieved more than a decade from now. But the erosion would be so advanced that the cost of rebuilding the coastal wetlands would be prohibitive by almost any measure. As it stands, it's uncertain how much tolerance taxpayers have to fund the many billions already needed to undertake the massive diversion projects that would get the alluvial silt where it needs to be.

The city can't do this alone, and the state can't do it alone. It will require a major effort on the part of the federal government to fix what the oil and gas companies and eager-beaver levee builders have wrought.

A map of the Atchafalaya Basin shows recovered wetlands (in green).

There is some good news. Success has been marked in the Atchafalaya Basin to the west of New Orleans, where about one-third of the Mississippi River flows into the gulf. In the past 20 years, thanks to river diversion projects that allow the outflow of the Mississippi to rebuild eroding wetlands, the landmass is growing, and the landscape is healing. It can be done.

As I wrote in the first dispatch, to move to New Orleans post-Katrina is to show your faith in technology. Actually, that's not wholly correct. The technology is there, and it's looking pretty good. It's the political will that's more of concern. Getting the ideas from the drafting table to the bulldozers takes cash and political influence -- things our city doesn't have in much surplus these days.

The second anniversary of Katrina is being marked this week with a great flurry of stories in newspapers, magazines, and television about the recovery, both good and bad -- and there's plenty each to report. Next week, the hordes will leave and a late summer silence will fall upon the city as the media chases the next story. (What has Lindsay Lohan been up to the last month, anyway?)

But the slow process of healing and protecting this extraordinary city will push on, one day at a time. The ultimate destination? Unknown.

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