Sunken+JG

The Sunken City Joline Gaudet This is an excerpt from McPhee’s 1987 piece, Atchafalaya. What’s most interesting is that this excerpt, which focuses on the sinking of New Orleans and what would happen if there was a flood, was republished in The New Yorker in September of 2005, just one month after Hurricane Katrina. I think the New Yorker chose to publish this excerpt then because nearly 20 years before the hurricane, McPhee made some pretty startling predictions about what would happen to New Orleans if a natural disaster were to hit the city. Some of the most striking quotes are: “Nowhere is New Orleans higher than the river's natural bank. Underprivileged people live in the lower elevations, and always have. The rich-by the river-occupy the highest ground. In New Orleans, income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp. The Garden District and its environs are locally known as uptown. ” As we know now, when the hurricane did hit, and much of the city was underwater, it was the poor, mostly black people of New Orleans who were hit the hardest by the disaster.I found it interesting that the social class differences were so clearly defined in 1987 when McPhee wrote this piece, and that nothing changed in nearly 20 years. “Among the five hundred miles of levee deficiencies now calling for attention along the Mississippi River, the most serious happen to be in New Orleans. Among other factors, the freeboard-the amount of levee that reaches above flood levels-has to be higher in New Orleans to combat the waves of ships. Elsewhere, the deficiencies are averaging between one and two feet with respect to the computed high-water flow line, which goes on rising as runoffs continue to speed up and waters are increasingly confined. Not only is the water higher. The levees tend to sink as well. They press down on the mucks beneath them and squirt materials out to the sides. Their crowns have to be built up. "You put five feet on and three feet sink," a Corps engineer remarked to me one day. “ Again, we know now that this observation McPhee made in 1987 was still true in 2005, when the levees broke, which lead to the flooding of New Orleans. It’s kind of shocking that there were problems with levee maintenance back then, and that in twenty years they didn’t get the construction they needed. After reading this(admittedly very short) excerpt, I really want to read the original, full article, Atchafalaya. I find it fascinating that McPhee’s observations were so accurate, and I think reading the article will reveal even more of these “hindsight is 20/20” examples.