A unifying theme of this year’s extremely active Atlantic hurricane season, which officially concludes on Saturday, has been the disbelief echoing from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Ozark plateau. “I had always felt like we were safe from climate change,” an Asheville, N.C., woman told The Times after Hurricane Helene. “But now this makes me question that maybe there’s nowhere that’s safe.”
To which the obvious rejoinder is: You’re right. Nowhere is safe.
But some places are less safe than others. Atop the list of unsafe places is New Orleans. But unlike the other major cities that appear on such lists (Phoenix; Norfolk, Va.; Tampa Bay, Fla; New York), New Orleans has a striking competitive advantage. It knows that every hurricane season poses an existential threat.
I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.
The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.
Saul Bellow wrote that “no one made sober decent terms with death.” But cities can. New Orleans has. What does it mean, for a city, to make sober decent terms with death? It means living in reality. It means doing whatever it can to postpone the inevitable. It means settling for the best of bad options. But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate.
The shrewdest product of this line of thinking is the Coastal Master Plan, Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat, developed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The most impressive aspect of the master plan is not its advertised $50 billion cost (likely a gross underestimate), nor its relentlessly forward-looking framework: It renews every five years, rendering it a 50-year plan in perpetuity. Nor is it the plan’s Genesis-like ambition to make dry land appear out of the gathering waters, harnessing the force of the Mississippi River to build tens of thousands of acres of land to buffer against future storms.
No, the most impressive part of the plan is its honesty. For the authors of the plan freely acknowledge that, even in the best-case scenario, the plan will fail.
It will fail, that is, to stop the coast from receding. It will fail to create enough land to offset the acres that continue to slough into the sea. And it will fail to guarantee New Orleans’s long-term survival. The genius of the master plan is that, by building and restoring marshland, levees and barrier islands, it will fail more slowly — much more slowly than the second-best plan, which is to hope for the best, while the storm-pummeled coast, undermined by saltwater intrusion and shipping pipelines and oil wells, continues to atrophy. The grace period bought by the plan is intended to be the difference between a deliberate, gradual retreat over generations and a sudden one marked by chaos and excessive suffering.
The same astringent honesty underlies the $14.5 billion post-Katrina flood protection system. A marvel of modern engineering, if not as ambitious as the system Louisianans pushed for after Hurricane Katrina, it claims to reduce risk from 100-year storms. This may sound reassuring until you realize that risk reduction means something very different from risk prevention, and that, by the end of the century, New Orleans can expect to experience a 100-year flood as frequently as once every five years. Like the master plan, the fortress defending greater New Orleans is not a solution. It is the last line of defense.
The Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan, another enlightened water management strategy that has been broadly endorsed by the city’s leadership, aims not to banish water from the city, but to cohabitate with it more peacefully; the plan is called “Living With Water.” New Orleans’s own office for emergency preparedness acknowledges that its pumping system is overmatched by even modest storms. “The annual probability that New Orleans will experience flooding,” the city declares, “is 100 percent.”
New Orleans is not only living with water — it is living with huge tropical storms, with floods, with power outages. It is living, in other words, with eyes wide open. Nobody in New Orleans assumes the city and its residents are too rich to become a “gradual Atlantis”; the high rate of poverty (23 percent) prevents many people who might leave from doing so. Our flood maps largely correlate to our property values. (If Miami property owners took climate change into full account, Coral Gables would be priced like Hialeah.) Nor do we fantasize, as Phoenix boosters recently have, that the state government will easily solve our problems through wise resource management.
A few years ago, when a Tulane University study found that the disintegration of the coastal marsh had already crossed an irreversible tipping point, and its lead author predicted that New Orleans, in the best-case scenario, would one day be an island in the Gulf of Mexico, some 30 miles off the coast, the headline in The Times-Picayune read, “We’re Screwed.” Other major American cities don’t talk like this. Other cities don’t live like this. But one morning, not very long from now, they will. On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.
The expert quoted by the newspaper was Torbjorn Tornqvist, a geology professor at Tulane and a leading authority on the Louisiana coast. When I asked him at the time whether, as a resident of New Orleans, he was terrified by his own findings, his answer surprised me. New Orleans was not in immediate existential peril, he said. The worst of what he foresaw would not occur within his lifetime, though decisions made now would dictate the region’s future. He was optimistic about the master plan. He even mentioned that he was busy renovating his house.
Quoting Ben Strauss, the chief executive of Climate Central, Mr. Tornqvist said another thing I’ll never forget: “People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. But why don’t we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite, doesn’t mean that they’re worthless.”
The knowledge of our own mortality does not condemn us to fatalism or nihilism. It does not mean that we give up on self-improvement, on reversing injustice, on re-examining our history, on celebrating our culture, on behaving with moral purpose, on setting a positive example for our children. If anything, we love best what we most fear losing. We cherish what we have because we know it won’t last forever. It might not even last beyond the next hurricane season. But for now we live.
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