New Orleans is Sinking: here's What No One is Talking About!

After seventeen years and fourteen and a half billion dollars, New Orleans finished building the most advanced flood defence system in its history. The fortress meant to make sure Katrina could never happen again is settling into the soft ground beneath it. And the natural defence that was supposed to back it up was just cancelled. So here is the question. Can New Orleans actually be saved? Let’s break it down. This is one of the most irreplaceable cities in America. The birthplace of jazz. A food culture that exists nowhere else. French, Spanish, Caribbean, and African history layered into streets that look like nowhere else on the continent. It sits in a bowl. Below sea level. Wedged between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Every time it rains, the city has to pump water up and over its walls, the way you would bail out a canoe. Most cities are built on solid ground. New Orleans is built on the opposite. The land here is young — river sediment deposited by the Mississippi over thousands of years. Soft, organic, waterlogged soil that does something solid ground never does. It sinks. New Orleans has been an engineered city for three centuries. Even the French settlers of the early 1700s needed levees to keep the river out. Over time the city drained its surrounding swamps to expand — and draining them caused the ground to compact and sink further. Whole neighbourhoods that were once wetlands have dropped as much as three metres over the past two centuries. After Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers built the most sophisticated flood system in the city's history: about 350 miles of levees, floodwalls, gates, and pump stations. A roughly $14.5 billion fortress designed to stop the kind of hundred-year storm that nearly destroyed the city in 2005. One of the largest civil works projects in American history. A genuine engineering achievement. And here is the problem no pump station can solve. The fortress is sinking into the same soft ground the city is built on. And the speed of it is the part nobody expected. Fair Use Disclaimer: This video contains copyrighted material used under the guidelines of fair use. The purpose of this video is to tell a story, and the content is transformative in nature. It is used for educational purposes, with the intention to inform and entertain viewers. All rights to the copyrighted material are retained by the respective owners. If you believe your work has been used in a way that does not fall under fair use, please contact me directly for resolution by emailing me at [email protected] For business inquiries / sponsorships: [email protected]