Posted on 04/21/2007 9:43:08 AM PDT by macmedic892
A yearlong topographic and demographic study of New Orleans arrives this month like the latest installment of the television series "MythBusters" -- and may forever change the notion of the Big Easy as a below-sea-level city.
"Contrary to popular perceptions, half of New Orleans is at or above sea level," according to the study by Tulane and Xavier universities' Center for Bioenvironmental Research.
(SNIP)
"Innumerable media reports following Hurricane Katrina described the topography of New Orleans as unconditionally below sea level," the study notes. "This oversimplification is inaccurate by half, and its frequent repetition does a great disservice to the city."
(BIG SNIP)
"LIDAR elevation data show that 51 percent of the terrestrial surface of the contiguous urbanized portions of Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes lie at or above sea level (with the highest neighborhoods at 10-12 feet above mean sea level), while 49 percent lies below sea level, in places to equivalent depths."
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Meanwhile, I’m donning my asbestos underwear . . .
So, is the glass half full or half empty?
If it is at sea level, this means it will still flood if the levees go. Above sea level isn’t all that great either if it is only a few feet. So what we really have is more than half of NO is at or below sea level, this is a more realistic way of saying it. At sea level means under water!
But I bet the parts above sea level don’t smell too good when the other half is under water. It’s rather difficult to get around just on streets that are above sea level.
Yes... and on average, a person residing in the city of New Orleans has one testicle and one ovary.
Averages are meaningless.
And so, NOLA wasn’t really devastated after all if only 50% was underwater. I want my money back.
It's all of the suburbs that have been built below sea level behind levies, and those are the areas that flooded.
So technically, most of the "city" of New Orleans is above sea level, but most of the greater metropolitan area of New Orleans is below.
I like the joke about digging a canal along the US-Mexican boarder, and using the dirt to backfill New Orleans.
Who exactly was it that was saying the entire city was below sea level? Even if you had never looked at a map of the elevations, which many of us have, it was clear after Katrina that the entire city was not under water. I guess I’m missing the point here, which wouldn’t be the first time.
“I like the joke about digging a canal along the US-Mexican boarder, and using the dirt to backfill New Orleans.”
What joke? Use the dirt to backfill NO and use the water to build a moat on the US-Mexico border. And don’t forget to put in the moat seabass with frikin laser beams on their heads.
Yes, ill temperes seabass.
“Averages are meaningless.”
I guess you failed statistics.
I thought Barney Frank was from Massachusetts?
“Who exactly was it that was saying the entire city was below sea level?”
Who hasn’t? I hear this all the time.
-—ah yes —and then there’s “storm surge”—
Nope. Alligators. The joke said to put all the excess Florida gators into the moat.
On Rebuilding New Orleans:
Well, if you’ve been reading many of the New Orleans threads you might have seen some ideas.
For example, the one I advocate is turning New Orleans into a giant garbage tip.
Because of it’s location at the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, it is ideally located to accept garbage from the entire Mississippi basin and Gulf Coast.
Fill in the entire Crescent City area with enough garbage, mine tailings, slag, and fly ash to build it up to 30 feet above sea level.
Cover it with 10 feet of dirt, incorporating underground utility grids, a few feet of topsoil, and rebuild on top of that.
Tel New Orleans would become the South’s new ‘Shining City on a Hill’.
Fund the entire project with fair market rate disposal fees.
The notion that these findings “may forever change the notion of the Big Easy as a below-sea-level city” is ridiculous. Of course, NO officials and La. officials hope that people will take this study at face value. The problem remains that NO is actively sliding into the sea—which is why the level of the levees will always be sinking as well. Is there enough money on the planet to pay for maintaining NO’s habitability?
Now you went and did it; the muslims are on their way to claim it for their prophet...
He has a testicle?
That means that half the city is below sea level. Just depends on how one wants to spin the story.
At high tide. or low tide? How tall were the waves?
So is the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain
The only way to handle this is to can the city government and bring in Dutch engineers to run the place.
The foundation that the Dutch are building on is something like a thousand years of fighting the North Sea, which is capable of hurling the equivalent of a hurricane at them at any time.
The normal elevation of Lake Pontchartrain is about 11 feet. Pretty much the whole city is below that.
The bottom line is that metropolitan New Orleans outside of the French Quarter is built on land that even the French were not stupid enough to build on.
Wow! A whole half!
Excellent idea.
LOL! Now that’s a point I can relate to.
If HALF is at or above sea level, then by the process of usual elimination, the other half is BELOW sea lavel.
What “myth” is being busted here?
I thought we were told for months that “ONLY A PART” of NO was below sea level.
This seems to indicate that much more is below sea level than we had been told.
This is not just a discussion of a “glass half full” or a “glass half empty”.
This is serious money being spent to rebuild where nothing should have been built in the first place, IMO.
I like the joke about digging a canal along the US-Mexican boarder, and using the dirt to backfill New Orleans.”
You forgot the part about putting water and relocating alligators from Florida into the ditch/moat/canal.....
The “news” reporting of this report is MISLEADING, and puts a more positive spin on the data than the actual data would give you.
However, that spin was not put there by the “news” media, they are simply reporting the spin provided by the “scientists” at “CBR” (the Tulane/Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research), which produced the study.
The major element of that spin is all the references to the “at or above sea level” percentage.
When it comes to any sizable storm, even less than hurricane strength, in a low-lying, wetland area at the ocean-end of a river, like New Orleans on the Mississippi, the difference between “below sea level” and “at sea level” is next to nil.
And, if “at sea level” is combined with “below sea level”, which I believe it should be, then, from data I inferred from the graph provided by CBR, you start to get a very different picture, because it means that 59% is “AT OR BELOW SEA LEVEL” and just 41% is “ABOVE SEA LEVEL”. (See my final note in the data).
Further, the CBR “reporting” of their “report” takes little interest in how much land “above sea level” requires protection by levees and will depend for its safety on the levee system.
How much New Orleans land is more than one foot above sea level? Only 34%; 3 feet, 27%; 4 feet, 22%, 5 feet, 17%; 6 feet, 13%; 7 feet, 10%; 8 feet, 7%; 9 feet, 5%, 10 feet, 4%.
The highest recorded point in the Katrina storm surge on Lake Ponchitrain was 6.8 feet, before the gage failed (http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mob/0805Katrina/psh_lix.shtml);
the Katrina report from the National Climatic Data Center at NOAA reported the level of the Mississippi at New Orleans on August 29th to be above 14 feet
(http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/katrina.html)
Even a storm surge of half that strength would leave only 10% of New Orleans above a level that needs protection from the levees.
The “spin” in my view is how the report (1)combines the “at sea level” data with the “above sea level” data and (2) how it ignores the implications of the data, which demonstrate that most (64%) of the “above sea level” area (which is only 41% of the total area) IS NOT ABOVE LEVELS THAT REQUIRE THE SAME PROTECTION FROM THE LEVEES THAT ALL THE “AT AND BELOW SEA LEVEL” REQUIRES, MOST OF THE TIME.
Now then, the scientists who produced the CBR report itself did not report the actual data points (height of land relative to sea level), other than in the summary averages of them that they wanted to talk about.
They produced a graph only. It plotted the data in 30 data points in 1 foot increments from “more than 14 feet above sea level”, to “sea level”, to “below 13 feet below sea level”.
I had to discern (visually) approximate data point values from the graph (which can be found using the link to the PDF form of the report “Above-Sea-Level New Orleans: The Residential Capacity of Orleans Parish’s Higher Ground” at: http://www.cbr.tulane.edu/.
To my pleasant surprise, my first-cut attempt produced summary averages of “below sea level” and “at or above sea level” exactly in the amounts stated in the CBR report. I am fairly confident that my estimation of the increments will not vary greatly from the actual data CBR made their graph with. If anyone wants those data points, I will be glad to share them.
Sorry champ, forgot the /sarc tag on my comment - thought it was obvious. I also thought that this was perhaps the most ignorantly written article I've seen this month.
Sometimes I get lost and ping people in the future.
How’s that working for you sparky?
But wait - is this the real sea level or the ALGORE sea level??
Well, that settles that.
Gators in the moat would be better.
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