Will New Orleans’ new levee system catastrophically fail within decades due to subsidence and sea level rise?

[SeekerOfTruth007]

Land in New Orleans is sinking from 1inch per year to 2 inches per year now due to pumping of well water and oil in the region. This is especially true of the NEW hurricane protection levee system, which is sinking 2 inches per year in some locations. This means over the next century you could see from 100 to 200 inches of subsidence in New Orleans, which may seem preposterous but has happened before in California. That's between 8'4" and 16'8" of SINKING LAND in the next 100 years. This does not count the face the mean sea level is rising 5 inches per decade in the Gulf of America now. This suggests NOT ONLY NOLA, but many, many Gulf coast cities will be totally inundated over the next 100 years. That also does not take into consideration that the rate of sea level rise is itself accelerating. So over the 100 years that rate could double again, as it has doubled several times in the past 30 years alone.

This suggests sea levels could rise 8 feet in the Gulf of America over the next 100 years (2126). The highest point in South Florida is only about 9 feet above sea level, which implies most of Florida and must of Louisiana will be completely destroyed by then.

This does not count the next 100 years worth of Hurricane damage. This is just MEAN SEA LEVEL RISE plus subsidence.

New Orleans levee system is likely to suffer catastrophic failure AGAIN within the next 20 years or so at this rate of undermining the system. Most likely, it will happen during another major hurricane.

[Anonymous]

It will fail eventually. There are certain places you shouldn't build on. Like some of those islands in the Pacific that were rocked by a giant tsunami a few years ago. 100 years ago there was nothing built on that side of the islands for a reason because the same disaster kept on happening

[SeekerOfTruth007]

Yes. I know. I live in Louisiana on the Northshore and even here we get rocked by the strongest hurricanes.

Indonesia has been populated by humans for around 100,000 years or so. They got rocked 73,000 years ago by the Toba Super Eruption and nearly wiped out. Now they have a population as large as the USA and growing.

You are right though, it's totally foolish to keep building and rebuilding in certain high risk environments.

The Toba Super Eruption was so powerful, if it happened today, it would reverse man-made global warming for about 100 years. In comparison, Pinatubo only stopped global warming for about 1 year, while Tonga actually accelerated global warming due to increased water vapor..

[Opinion Owner]

Its like my husband and I were going to buy a new house and we'd settled on this new house and we showed his father. His father works for building control and he was quickly able to tell us that the housing estate was built on a flood plain beside the river. That is a piece of land that naturally and has a history of flooding. The river is supposed to flood in times of heavy rain, snow or thaw. There is flood defences but one day they will fail as all flood defences do is hold back the rising levels of water and send it on down river until the river busts its banks somewhere. So thats why you see building on flood, plains, drained, swamps, drained marches, bogs, mangroves, salt marshes etc are doomed to flood as those are places that excess flood water is meant to go and when they are gone the flooding is worse.
They blame climate change for a lot of modern flooding but its more a case of urbanisation where weve created giant concrete cities that catch rain water and send it into rivers so that they overflow and when there's nowhere for the rain water to go as the river is above the sewer system urban cities are flooded.

[SeekerOfTruth007]

Yes, I agree with you on this information too. Poor choice of environments to build in is a critical factor in Disaster situations.