The Fragile Gulf

If you want to get a true sense of how thoroughly Hurricane Katrina punished the Gulf Coast last week, a flyover by helicopter or Air Force One won't do it. The real picture doesn't resolve itself until you go 450 miles up, where a flock of Earth-observing satellites have been training their cameras on the Gulf of Mexico and beaming what they see back home. Researchers at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge began studying the first portfolio of pictures taken since the hurricane hit last week, and what they saw was a shock. Entire barrier islands are missing. Coastal marshes have been shredded. A Native American encampment to the south of Port Sulphur seems to have vanished. Everywhere, dark watery splotches appear in the spots where the overloaded levees failed and burst.

"The city," says oceanographer Nan Walker, staring dourly at an image of New Orleans, "has turned to water."

New Orleans, of course, has always been more or less waterlogged. It sits in a bowl that averages 9 ft. below sea level, with Lake Pontchartrain brimming to its north, the Mississippi River running to its south and the Gulf of Mexico crashing at its door. Keeping a place like that dry would be a city planner's nightmare in the best of circumstances. But New Orleans' circumstances have never been ideal; the city was built in the center of one of the most hurricane-prone spots in the world. "New Orleans naturally wants to be a lake," says Timothy Kusky, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at St. Louis University. Apparently, the city got its wish last week.

Which raises the inevitable question: If New Orleans is such a dangerous place, what in the world are we doing there--or, for that matter, anywhere else on the perilous Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas? Soggy soil, eroding shorelines and sudden storms make the whole region an unstable mess even without human intervention. And the more we build there, the worse we seem to make things, clawing away the natural river routes and marshlands that replenish the land and sucking out the oil and other subterranean resources that hold up the surface. Now, many experts warn, with greenhouse gases raising global temperatures, we are spawning more and deadlier hurricanes, ones that could kill a city in a single blow--if Katrina hasn't already done that to New Orleans, Gulfport and Biloxi.

But if the cities on the Gulf Coast have always been potential deathtraps, they have always been gold mines too--great natural ports on a warm-water gulf, perfectly situated to profit from the traffic moving up and down one of the world's most important shipping lanes: the Mississippi River. The port of South Louisiana moves more tonnage each year than any other in the nation. Add to that the commodities the Gulf produces, including nearly 30% of the nation's oil, 20% of its natural gas and a third of its fish and shellfish, and it is clear--as many have pointed out since last week--that even if New Orleans were completely leveled, we would have to build something in its place.