Levee Finale: "Ain't Dere No Mo"

Levee Finale: "Ain't Dere No Mo"

(New Orleans)

This post is coming to you live from New Orleans, Louisiana herself! Here for Thanksgiving in my favorite place in the world. Before I get down to the nitty-gritty of this final post, I have interviewed my cousin on his opinion of levees here in the city. Just a little tid-bit of what they think of this structure:

“Levees are a good thing. Before and after Katrina thing, I feel like the engineering standards weren’t there. They didn’t do enough research for a standard acceptance of a levee. They did it the way they always did it. After Katrina, there is more of a building of how to make these things sturdy. I don’t know if there’s a better way to keep the water. Dream up of another way and try to make it work. Too expensive.  A city like New Orleans, you can’t just change it. Anybody from their home city isn’t going to want to change their cities or move. Like tornadoes and Oklahoma.”

I don’t think quite along the same lines as my cousin, but I see his point. I see where he comes from. Home cities are always a thing to be protected. Now moving into my final blog post…

I remember from my childhood sitting in the back seat of our family car, staring out the window at the odd ditches with pipes and wheels constructed about that eventually led to large cement walls that you couldn’t see over. I don’t remember the age at which I learned that these less than aesthetically pleasing walls were levees but I do remember wondering what was beyond the ledge I couldn’t see over (little did I know that this was the Tragedy of the Commons, something I learned this semester).

As I grew up and fell more in love with the culture and history and people of New Orleans, I learned that the entire essence of the city relied on these levees. The more I understood their necessity, the less I judged them for contrasting against the beauty of New Orleans. I understood that they kept the water out but I always wondered how such a comparatively small area could keep out the massiveness of the Gulf of Mexico or the Mississippi River.

From doing my blog on the levees of New Orleans this semester, I have perpetuated my opinion that they are only a temporary fix to the problem of the waiting waters surrounding the great city. I still do not understand why the New Orleans government does not seek alternate ways of protecting their city or preserving their culture and people. Especially since Hurricane Katrina absolutely devastated the city and it wasn’t even hit by the worst part of the storm. There are only plans to reinforce the levees and “patch them up”. Patching up the cement walls is a waste of money and only delays the inevitable.

On a lighter note, I also learned that the levees are used as a vital source for producing and supporting the massive seafood industry that makes this city thrive. Levee ponds are actually an ingenious idea despite the fact that they use up what little land New Orleans has.

Engineering risk is one point I would like to make about the New Orleans levees in relation to environment and society. Humans are humans and we are going to continue doing what we have been doing until it comes to a complete end out of our control. Keeping this water out has worked for centuries and therefore it will work for centuries more as far as we’re concerned. I really do not think there is any point in convincing people otherwise. The probability of someone listening that can do something about it is slim (Yes, yes, I know…so optimistic!). Human beings have a socially constructed concept of be superior to the land. The hard truth is that we aren’t. And engineering any risk out of any environmental situation only buys time. The next natural disaster and New Orleans will completely adopt the phrase "Ain't Dere No Mo".