The article says federal government is funding ($40M so far) the program that in part educates people on climate change and rising waters and people are appreciating the honesty.
It also talks about oil and gas exploration as one of the reasons for coastal erosion. Lastly they'll force people and their properties out but still allow commercial development on the property(I guess more oily and gassy things?).
I am not sure what to make of it all but at least they're doing something about it.
“Commercial development would still be allowed, but developers would need to put up bonds to pay for those buildings’ eventual demolition.”
This is actually an extremely sound policy Louisiana has put forth for handling a situation they have little control over. I’d expect it to become a model for other coastal states who will be facing similar issues as sea level rises (with exceptions for very wealthy communities, such as Miami Beach, where they can fund hundreds of millions of dollars in preventative measures for the moment).
"...preventative measures for the moment..." doesn't sound particularly reassuring when making long term real estate investment decisions. But I suppose people who buy property in Miami Beach don't really care about losing the 10 million they put into that condo or whatever. That's probably a rounding error for those people. And I'm pretty sure there is no critical infrastructure in Miami, so it wouldn't matter to the rest of us anyway.
Places like New Orleans, Norfolk, Portland, Houston, New York etc should probably take priority. Those are the places where if they disappeared tomorrow, people in other places in the US would definitely feel a pinch. Not just the US either... if some of those ports disappeared, it would directly affect the nutritional intake of children in other parts of the world.
After what has happened in recent years with Katrina (even if it's a 100 year storm in an area that gets them yearly), Houston (more familiar with hurricanes but not as clueless as New Jersey) and Sandy (hitting a totally unprepared area in the worst way we've had in my lifetime) I'm surprised there isn't so much more emphasis on prep for future natural disasters. I, obviously, worry that climate change denial and other science denial is preventing the masses from believing that these types of storms won't become more frequent or scarily the norm. I say that it can't hurt to better prepare if not over prepare and I scratch my head wondering why it barely seems like steps are being taken to do so.
I can only speak for my local area but New York City and New Jersey were not prepared at all. I was in a pretty good physical location when the storm hit, all things considered, but we were without power for 10 days. Luckily we had a gas station within walking distance and they gave priority to people who walked up with gas cans over cars in the mile long line idling around our neighborhood.
There were a bunch of news stories about people stealing generators. Necessities were sold out basically everywhere with little chance of restocking. Things got hairy, for sure.
The amount of people who scoffed at warnings were most likely the ones depending on a handy neighbor who was better prepared and better suited to calming down and making the best of the bad situation. I think it was a much needed, although terrible, wake up call for unprepared folks.
It was really nice to see so many people band together but the main takeaway I got from it was that I've never seen my area so close to complete breakdown and eventually mass chaos.
Why we aren't doing more to prevent that exact type of fallout from something we KNOW is coming? It feels like the definition of insanity to do otherwise. After witnessing it first hand and having no idea what it would be like to live in a hurricane or natural disaster-prone area, having to deal with it yearly, I NEVER want to deal with that again. Since I really have no say in what mother nature does, all I can do is say I NEVER want to be as unprepared for another disaster as I was before.
I also realize it's not so simple to pack your entire life up and move to a "more safe" location but there has to be some sort of graph where the cost of paying out insurance, cleaning up the mess, restoring supply chains, and all the other costs that come with a natural disaster equalizes with the cost of preparing as best as possible.
Thank you. Living in a successful metro area as I do, I'm fairly sure that the _entire area_ is one or two failures away from Mad Max-level hysteria. It doesn't take much (a few days without potable water or gasoline, say). And yet, we're balls-to-the-wall consumer capitalism all the way, baby. A bit of planning would make months of difference.
>the _entire area_ is one or two failures away from Mad Max-level hysteria
That hits the nail on the head about what I was trying to say. Thank you for saying it much more succinctly!
New Jersey got hit in striations of severity so while 1/2 of the state was in maximum emergency mode the other 1/2 of the populous wasn't affected what so ever. They were awake Monday morning competing with all of the folks struggling to survive except they were on their normal routine of heading to work. They acted as if everyone else experiencing trouble were inconveniencing them, also. It was really shocking to see the cognitive dissonance of that group of people during Sandy.
That striation of severity was odd although not impossible to conceive. It caused a sort of suspicion that things really couldn't have been that bad for "neighbors" considering the unaffected people had no damage, no flooding, no power outages, and no felled trees in their yard or local roadways.
My area, on the other hand, was an utter disaster. I was living a bit away from my parents but my first thought after securing my home was to head to my parents house and ensure they were warm and taken care of. There are about 15 different routes I could have taken to get from my area to my parents area. Two were main roads and the other ~13 were back roads and other arteries that cut through the main routes I'd usually take. It took me 9 tries to find a route that wasn't completely blocked off by fallen trees. Once I finally did find a route to make it to my destination it was, of course, the steepest route. The entire roadway was covered in a thin layer of black ice and my poor front wheel drive Honda Civic was barely gripping that ice to get me to the top.
Of course it was my luck to get behind a big SUV. That SUV had no trouble climbing the hill but the real problem was that SUV's decision to brake -- for no reason at all -- before the top of the hill. The slow down in momentum for me killed my climb and I wound up having to pull off onto the shoulder. I slammed on my horn out of fury but I doubt the SUV driver realized what trouble they caused me. It took me 15 minutes of dropping my automatic car into "1st gear" and slamming the gas pedal until my hot tires melted some black ice which gained me the traction needed to gain my momentum back. I was all but 75 feet from the top of a .75 mile hill. It was really shitty, for lack of better words.
That scenario was playing out all over New Jersey since 1/2 of everybody was locked indoors and the other 1/2 was "free" to act normally. Quite an odd scenario. I hope I never have to live through another storm so wicked with a fallout so near Max Max-level, as you said.
I guess the value of the land isn't all that high. It's already a particularly empty part of the pretty empty US.
And as far as protecting land value, that shouldn't be funded at a national level (it could be somewhat subsidized by cheap loans or something), it should be funded by the owners of the land.
For some definition of "value". The reality seems to be that much of Louisiana is terribly polluted. People are stuck in homes which have lost much of their value due to both encroaching industrial plants and (thus) poor environmental quality. I just finished reading Strangers in Their Own Land, and the author goes into a lot of detail about this.
I had never heard of salt dome storage until reading this book. Scary stuff.
You just can't really build dikes around southern Louisiana in a way that makes any sense. Soon enough you'll be seeing similar issues in eastern Carolinas and Florida.
you’re talking about protecting houses from the ocean and from the biggest river in North America.
Storm surge is like a slow tsunami, driven by weather instead of techtonics. And the Mississippi clears nearly the entire Midwest. Flooding anywhere along the tributaries ends up in Louisiana eventually.
No mention of the cause: Diverting the Mississippi River. In the 20's / 30's The Army Core of Engineers built a series of levees to redirect the Mississippi to flow east of its natural course. Before then, the river would seasonally shift back and forth (think of the end of a garden house spraying left and right).
It naturally wanted to flow into the Atchafalaya Basin, instead all the silt and sand that would've gone into building the wetlands is being diverted and dumped directly into Gulf.
Look at a map sometime and you can clearly see it, the "toe" of Louisiana (south of New Orleans) is growing out into the gulf, this is the trillions of tons of silt and sand. Meanwhile the "heel" is shrinking, as the Gulf slowly erodes it.
Note: This is not an anti ACoE diatribe. Its just that anytime this story gets national coverage they fail to mention the cause, which is locally well known and well understood.
The issue is that, even under your ideal scenario, where the Mississippi flows into the Atchafalaya Basin...
we'd still be evacuating, we would just be evacuating that area instead. This is a problem for EVERY port, and coastal area, that we built below sea level. As the sea level rises, a new reality takes shape. There's nothing particularly novel about Louisiana in this regard. In fact, that's the entire reason we hope to use the Louisiana experience as a blueprint for our plan of action in other areas.
I'm not actually advocating one way or the other. Its understandable why the ACoE did what they did. I'm simply saying this is the result of that decision.
They do mention a cause in the article: "...due to a mix of rising seas and sinking land caused in part by oil and gas extraction". I don't know anything about this topic, but I'd wager that since your explanation is boring and the one chosen by Bloomberg is vague, politically charged, and hedged, that you're more likely to be correct.
Geologist here: while overly managing of the Mississippi does make a difference, that only controls where new sediment gets deposited. Even if new sediment was deposited in sinking urban areas, it wouldn’t ameliorate the problem of subsidence because it would be deposited on existing infrastructure, burying it.
The real reason for the subsidence is that the sediment that makes up river deltas slowly compacts under its own weight, expelling pore water and becoming more dense. This is natural and unavoidable, although it might be marginally enhanced by oil and gas extraction (it is a bigger problem with groundwater withdrawal in other areas).
You’re the expert, but I thought subsidence (land sinking because of fossil fuel extraction) and compaction were two different phenomemons. Plus erosion (loss of coastline) and rising ocean, there’s multiple factors involved.
They are related phenomena. Basically, sand and mud have pore space in between the grains that is filled with fluids (water, oil or gas). When those fluids are extracted, the rock contracts because the pore pressure decreases, causing an increase in density (compaction) and a decrease in volume, which leads to subsidence. Some of this is recoverable, and some of it isn't, because the grains will find a more efficient packing arrangement.
You are completely correct in that there are many different factors involved that are all causing problems; unfortunately they are all interrelated.
We send people to risk their lives to save homes in fire risk areas. That’s already a pretty profound bailout on the part of the government and her citizens.
This is a classic river delta problem. Look at the Nile delta. Just can't build long-term on low ground.
Objections from the right can be answered with this:
Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 91.0 ms ] threadIt also talks about oil and gas exploration as one of the reasons for coastal erosion. Lastly they'll force people and their properties out but still allow commercial development on the property(I guess more oily and gassy things?).
I am not sure what to make of it all but at least they're doing something about it.
This is actually an extremely sound policy Louisiana has put forth for handling a situation they have little control over. I’d expect it to become a model for other coastal states who will be facing similar issues as sea level rises (with exceptions for very wealthy communities, such as Miami Beach, where they can fund hundreds of millions of dollars in preventative measures for the moment).
Places like New Orleans, Norfolk, Portland, Houston, New York etc should probably take priority. Those are the places where if they disappeared tomorrow, people in other places in the US would definitely feel a pinch. Not just the US either... if some of those ports disappeared, it would directly affect the nutritional intake of children in other parts of the world.
I can only speak for my local area but New York City and New Jersey were not prepared at all. I was in a pretty good physical location when the storm hit, all things considered, but we were without power for 10 days. Luckily we had a gas station within walking distance and they gave priority to people who walked up with gas cans over cars in the mile long line idling around our neighborhood.
There were a bunch of news stories about people stealing generators. Necessities were sold out basically everywhere with little chance of restocking. Things got hairy, for sure.
The amount of people who scoffed at warnings were most likely the ones depending on a handy neighbor who was better prepared and better suited to calming down and making the best of the bad situation. I think it was a much needed, although terrible, wake up call for unprepared folks.
It was really nice to see so many people band together but the main takeaway I got from it was that I've never seen my area so close to complete breakdown and eventually mass chaos.
Why we aren't doing more to prevent that exact type of fallout from something we KNOW is coming? It feels like the definition of insanity to do otherwise. After witnessing it first hand and having no idea what it would be like to live in a hurricane or natural disaster-prone area, having to deal with it yearly, I NEVER want to deal with that again. Since I really have no say in what mother nature does, all I can do is say I NEVER want to be as unprepared for another disaster as I was before.
I also realize it's not so simple to pack your entire life up and move to a "more safe" location but there has to be some sort of graph where the cost of paying out insurance, cleaning up the mess, restoring supply chains, and all the other costs that come with a natural disaster equalizes with the cost of preparing as best as possible.
>the _entire area_ is one or two failures away from Mad Max-level hysteria
That hits the nail on the head about what I was trying to say. Thank you for saying it much more succinctly!
New Jersey got hit in striations of severity so while 1/2 of the state was in maximum emergency mode the other 1/2 of the populous wasn't affected what so ever. They were awake Monday morning competing with all of the folks struggling to survive except they were on their normal routine of heading to work. They acted as if everyone else experiencing trouble were inconveniencing them, also. It was really shocking to see the cognitive dissonance of that group of people during Sandy.
That striation of severity was odd although not impossible to conceive. It caused a sort of suspicion that things really couldn't have been that bad for "neighbors" considering the unaffected people had no damage, no flooding, no power outages, and no felled trees in their yard or local roadways.
My area, on the other hand, was an utter disaster. I was living a bit away from my parents but my first thought after securing my home was to head to my parents house and ensure they were warm and taken care of. There are about 15 different routes I could have taken to get from my area to my parents area. Two were main roads and the other ~13 were back roads and other arteries that cut through the main routes I'd usually take. It took me 9 tries to find a route that wasn't completely blocked off by fallen trees. Once I finally did find a route to make it to my destination it was, of course, the steepest route. The entire roadway was covered in a thin layer of black ice and my poor front wheel drive Honda Civic was barely gripping that ice to get me to the top.
Of course it was my luck to get behind a big SUV. That SUV had no trouble climbing the hill but the real problem was that SUV's decision to brake -- for no reason at all -- before the top of the hill. The slow down in momentum for me killed my climb and I wound up having to pull off onto the shoulder. I slammed on my horn out of fury but I doubt the SUV driver realized what trouble they caused me. It took me 15 minutes of dropping my automatic car into "1st gear" and slamming the gas pedal until my hot tires melted some black ice which gained me the traction needed to gain my momentum back. I was all but 75 feet from the top of a .75 mile hill. It was really shitty, for lack of better words.
That scenario was playing out all over New Jersey since 1/2 of everybody was locked indoors and the other 1/2 was "free" to act normally. Quite an odd scenario. I hope I never have to live through another storm so wicked with a fallout so near Max Max-level, as you said.
That family is probably on the lower end of the buyout cost, but it puts the total cost of a buyout in the range of $1 billion or $10 billion.
So then the question is how much flood protection can be built for a similar cost.
I think there's also issues with flood controls for one area making flood control in other areas more difficult. So drawing a line can help with that.
Articles should show the maps.
Polders and Dikes of The Netherlands for comparison: https://www.thoughtco.com/polders-and-dikes-of-the-netherlan...
Of course they are allowing commercial developments to continue, check this out:
Louisiana – Other Oil & Gas Infrastructure: http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/images/oilgas/refineries...
Louisiana – pipelines and platforms: http://www.dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/images/oilgas/refineries...
And as far as protecting land value, that shouldn't be funded at a national level (it could be somewhat subsidized by cheap loans or something), it should be funded by the owners of the land.
I had never heard of salt dome storage until reading this book. Scary stuff.
https://thenewpress.com/books/strangers-their-own-land
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terp
Storm surge is like a slow tsunami, driven by weather instead of techtonics. And the Mississippi clears nearly the entire Midwest. Flooding anywhere along the tributaries ends up in Louisiana eventually.
It naturally wanted to flow into the Atchafalaya Basin, instead all the silt and sand that would've gone into building the wetlands is being diverted and dumped directly into Gulf.
Look at a map sometime and you can clearly see it, the "toe" of Louisiana (south of New Orleans) is growing out into the gulf, this is the trillions of tons of silt and sand. Meanwhile the "heel" is shrinking, as the Gulf slowly erodes it.
Note: This is not an anti ACoE diatribe. Its just that anytime this story gets national coverage they fail to mention the cause, which is locally well known and well understood.
we'd still be evacuating, we would just be evacuating that area instead. This is a problem for EVERY port, and coastal area, that we built below sea level. As the sea level rises, a new reality takes shape. There's nothing particularly novel about Louisiana in this regard. In fact, that's the entire reason we hope to use the Louisiana experience as a blueprint for our plan of action in other areas.
I'm not actually advocating one way or the other. Its understandable why the ACoE did what they did. I'm simply saying this is the result of that decision.
The real reason for the subsidence is that the sediment that makes up river deltas slowly compacts under its own weight, expelling pore water and becoming more dense. This is natural and unavoidable, although it might be marginally enhanced by oil and gas extraction (it is a bigger problem with groundwater withdrawal in other areas).
You are completely correct in that there are many different factors involved that are all causing problems; unfortunately they are all interrelated.
the dangling incentive will artificially sustain coastal developments
frankly if we are going to bail out home owners on coasts, why not home owners near fire risk areas?
Solution to being assumed a ddos attack agent
Objections from the right can be answered with this:
Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.
Matthew 7:24-27