Scientists Weigh Options for Rebuilding New OrleansAs experts ponder how best to rebuild t

Scientists Weigh Options for Rebuilding New Orleans

As experts ponder how best to rebuild the devastated(毁坏) city, one question is whether to wall off—or work with--the water.

Even before the death toll from Hurricane Katrina is tallied, scientists are cautiously beginning to discuss the future of New Orleans. Few seem to doubt that this vital heart of U.S. commerce and culture will be restored, but exactly how to rebuild the city and its defenses to avoid a repeat catastrophe is an open question. Plans for improving its levees and restoring the barrier of wetlands around New Orleans have been on the table since 1998, but federal dollars needed to implement them never arrived. After the tragedy, that's bound to change, says John Day, an ecologist at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. And if there is an upside to the disaster, he says, it's that "now we've got a clean slate to start from."

Many are looking for guidance to the Netherlands, a country that, just like bowl-shaped New Orleans, sits mostly below sea level, keeping the water at bay with a construction of amazing scale and complexity. Others, pointing to Venice's long-standing adaptations, say it's best to let water flow through the city, depositing sediment to offset geologic subsidence---a model that would require a radical rethinking of architecture, Another idea is to let nature help by restoring the wetland buffers between sea and city.

But before the options can be weighed, several unknowns will have to be addressed. One in precisely how the current defenses failed. To answer that, LSU coastal scientists Paul Kemp and Hassan Mashriqui are picking their way through the destroyed city and surrounding region, reconstructing the size of water surges by measuring telltale marks left on the sides of buildings and highway structures. They are feeding these data into a simulation of the wind and water around New Orleans during its ordeal.

"We can't say fur sure until this job is done," says Day, "but the emerging picture is exactly what we've predicted for years." Namely, several canals--including the MRGO, which was built to speed shipping in the 1960s--have the combined effect of funneling surges from the Gulf of Mexico right to the city's eastern levees and the lake system to the north. Those surges are to blame for the flooding. "One of the first things we'll see done is the complete backfilling of the MRGO canal," predicts Day, "which could take a couple of years."

The levees, which have been provisionally repaired, wilt be shored up further in the months to come, although their long-term fate is unclear. Better levees would probably have prevented most of the flooding in the city center. To provide further protection, a mobile dam system, much like a storm surge barrier in the Netherlands, could be used to close off the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain. But most experts agree that these are short-term fixes.

The basic problem for New Orleans and the Louisiana coastline is that the entire Mississippi River delta is subsiding and eroding, plunging the city deeper below sea level and removing a thick cushion of wetlands that once buffered the coastline from wind and waves. Part of the subsidence is geologic and unavoidable, but the rest stems from the levees that have hemmed in the Mississippi all the way to its mouth for nearly a century to prevent floods and facilitate shipping. As a result, river sediment is no longer spread across the delta but dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. Without a constant stream of fresh sediment, the barrier islands and marshes are disappearing rapidly, with a quarter, roughly the size of Rhode Island, already gone.

After years of political wrangling, a broad group pulled together by the Louisiana government in 1998 proposed a massive $14 billion plan to save the Louisiana coasts, called Coast 2050 (now modified i

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