Flooding In New Orleans

Craig E.Colten’s book centers on a familiar problem that New Orleans city constantly faces, the flooding. In particular, the book focuses on the genesis of the flooding danger. In reference to Colten’s book, this essay will attack the statement “The environmental elements, as opposed to human actions, fully account for New Orleans’ problem with water”. The rationale of opening up unusable land by draining waters and construction of levees to contain Mississippi River water led to serious flooding during heavy downpour. After raising the levee systems to the desired levels in 1920s, the issues of drainage become apparent and the heavy rainfalls became the main cause of the wave of flooding in New Orleans. The thunderstorms –spawned rain replaced Mississippi River as the greatest threat. The water problem in New Orleans emanated from the human behavior of destroying natural conditions in New Orleans through natural environment modification to accommodate residential and commercial housing. From the foundation, New Orleans faced flooding threat, first from the Mississippi River and then downpour floods. Colten (2005) maintain that human wrested New Orleans site from nature resulting in continual struggle with water and floods.

New Orleans flooding risks originated from its location characteristics in proximity of Mississippi River. Since its foundation up to 1927, New Orleans water and flooding threats originated from Mississippi River but human activities had contained this by 1930s. Regrettably, this led to additional water problems. Accordingly, the critical changes to the New Orleans environment originating from the human development worsened the water problems in area caused by the floods. In particular, the growth in ...

... middle of paper ...

... to blame because they could have worked around the difficult environment surrounding to reduce flooding. The local authorities could have developed buildings in areas sitting in higher grounds to provide a safer living for the residents. Such actions would have reduced flooding because more space in the city would have provided adequate space for drainage, as well as for water run-off. New Orleans is not “unnatural metropolis” per se, but it depends on the natural setting that fails to bend to all human efforts to repossess it. All human actions lead to a series of water problem from urbanization, levee construction, bowl-shaped location, and failure to create a sound drainage system. Based on this argument, the New Orleans water problems center more on the human actions and to less extent, on the environmental elements including heavy downpours and flooding.