Mississippi River Levees Essay

Many places in the city have been measured at 17 feet below sea level, making New Orleans one of the lowest inhabited spots in the United States of America. It is continuing to sink at an estimated rate of about an inch per year. This sinking is due to several different factors. The flooding of the Mississippi river has been controlled by levees since the late 1800’s. The river used to leave sediment when it flooded. When levees were put in to prevent flooding, the delta downstream was starved of sediment and nutrients. This sediment that the Mississippi river brought during floods used to settle and make more land over time. The sediment also used to formed a buffer between the city and the water whenever storms or hurricanes came towards the city. Due to lack of sediment deposit and formation of new land, Louisiana has lost almost 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930’s (217 of those miles were because of hurricanes Katrina and Rita). Despite the negative results to the land from the insertion of levees, the american government has continued to handle flooding in New Orleans the same way: building the levees up a little
They installed even more levees, spillways, and damns to ‘prevent’ flood losses, but by doing this they encouraged more people to move into a place that was not safe to inhabit. This issue became to be known as the ‘levee effect.’ The project was supposed to be a 13 year and 85 million dollar deal, but when Katrina hit 740 million dollars had been spent, and the project was still 10 years from being finished. There were a vast number of problems in the system that was being created. In 1984, a storm-surge modeler at the National Weather Service named Wilson Shaffer told the officials in charge of the project that the hypothetical storm that was used to test levee designs was too small to correspond with the threat that would be