We're rebuilding New Orleans in the same spot and not thinking about moving it? It turns out New Orleans is sinking by as much as one inch per year.
Everyone has known New Orleans is a sinking city. Now new research suggests parts of the city are sinking even faster than many scientists imagined — more than an inch a year.
That may explain some of the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina and it raises more worries about the future.
The research, reported in the journal Nature, is based on new satellite radar data for the three years before Katrina struck in 2005. The data show that some areas are sinking four or five times faster than the rest of the city. And that, experts say, can be deadly.
"My concern is the very low-lying areas," said lead author Tim Dixon, a University of Miami geophysicist. "I think those areas are death traps. I don't think those areas should be rebuilt."
The blame for this phenomenon, called subsidence, includes overdevelopment, drainage and natural seismic shifts.
For years, scientists figured the city on average was sinking about one-fifth of an inch a year based on 100 measurements of the region, Dixon said. The new data from 150,000 measurements taken from space finds that about 10 percent to 20 percent of the region had yearly subsidence in the inch-a-year range, he said.
Guess what? Levees that have subsided by several feet over the years cannot stop the water. This on top of faulty construction over a period of decades are all what contributed to the disaster Katrina caused. The new levee construction is not taking this increased subsidence into consideration.There will be another, worse disaster in the future.
Tell me again why we're rebuilding New Orleans in the same spot and not thinking about moving it?
