No? Isn’t this a discussion thread about the topography of Louisiana? What better place could there be?
You very may well know a lot better than me, but I was surprised to see you say that “only” 5% of the state (which is still a lot, really) currently lives below sea level when I’ve seen a lot of different sources saying that roughly 50% of the land in the greater New Orleans area is below sea level. But land isn’t people, of course, so that statistic may be misleading. What’s a good resource for seeing how many people live where?
The part of your post that comes across as really wrong (and kind of insulting) is the “always”. Most of ~5% of residents living below sea level are in areas that used to be above sea level (due to subsidence, not ocean rise).
Louisiana had no say in the design of the levee system. It was understood before it was built 150 years ago that it would worsen flooding by raising the river level while stopping the natural sediment deposits that south Louisiana is made of. For a century and a half congress and the Corps of Engineers have refused to address the problem. The land is eroding and sinking and the sea gets closer, endangering new areas. It is wrong to say that much of inhabited Louisiana has always been below sea level; this is relatively new and man-made
In response to your last comment: yes, almost half of New Orleans area is below sea level. Most of the low land is undeveloped (or abandoned) and everything older than 100 years is above sea level (and again, the city is lower now than when it was built). About 200,000 people are now living below sea level (which is a lot). But the post was about the state, and roughly 80% of the state (population and land mass) is 30 feet or higher above sea level. That’s similar to the rest of the country in terms of people in danger of rising seas.
As a Dutchman, there are additional differences but I do feel it’s good to point out the general lack of hurricanes in the Netherlands.
(The highest point in the Netherlands is Vaalserberg, in the southeast of the country. Like Driskill Mountain it is technically a hill at 322 meters above sea level. The lowest point is something like -17 meters.)
Ok, but the “always” part is at least true for neighborhoods like the sprawling postwar suburbs of New Orleans East that were first built up mostly starting in the 1950s, right? Something like 85,000 people live there, mostly on reclaimed land that could only be built on because of levees and draining.
New Orleans east is the biggest stretch of land below sea level. It goes on forever, but people only live in a small part of it and since Katrina a lot have left.
The East has been sinking (0.5-2 inches a year). So areas that are now 5 feet below sea level (and below lake level which is the more immediate danger), were a little above sea level when they were developed.
So even if we take “always” to mean since WWII in a region where people have lived for millenia and in a city in its 4th century, no it hasn’t always been below sea level.
