Why New Orleans' Geography SUCKS

New Orleans is a city that is almost completely surrounded by water on all sides. To the North is Lake Pontchartrain, in the center is the Mississippi River, into the South and East is the ever-encroaching sea water from the Gulf of Mexico.

To make matters even worse, 65% of the New Orleans metropolitan area is located either at or beneath sea level, a greater percentage than even the Netherlands which is only about a third beneath sea level. This means that when you take a look at New Orleans from the side, it's effectively just a big bowl that's surrounded on nearly all of its edges by water and whenever the water tips over the sides from either the river or the lake, the city drowns.

And to make matters even more severe, New Orleans placement directly at the Gulf of Mexico's edge, makes it the most frequent target of hurricanes in America. With an 11% risk of being slammed by one every single year, hurricanes make the flooding problem in the city even worse, but that's still not all.

Due to a variety of reasons that I'll get into later in the video, Louisiana's coastline has been losing the war against the water for the greater part of a century now. Over the past hundred years, two thousand square miles of land has been conquered by the ocean in Louisiana South, that's twice the size of Luxembourg and the ocean's advances are accelerating to the tune of about one football field worth of land, every hour. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, this is putting the ocean and its waters dangerously closer and closer to New Orleans.

Every single hour and it's placing the city on a time bomb. Southern Louisiana is slowly drowning, and it ultimately begs the question. Since nature seems to think that settling a city here was such an obviously terrible idea, then why didn't humans? The answer to that is because, of course it never really seemed like a bad location until fairly recently. In fact, for most of America's and even humanity's history, the area around New Orleans was without a doubt, one of the most important locations on the entire planet to control.

Take a look at the map of the world, pretend that you've just begun a game of civilization where you're low on the tech tree, and look at where the best locations to build a wealthy city are going to be. On the North American continent, I would argue for the area around New Orleans being historically the number one pick for one incredibly important reason.

Despite all the risks of flooding and natural disasters, New Orleans sits near the mouth of the Mississippi River, and by setting up a choke point here, one can fully control all of the trade and transportation flowing into and out of it. This is vital because by entering the Mississippi here, you can travel throughout almost the entirety of the North American interior by way of the Mississippi River basin. Every single one of these creeks streams and rivers eventually all flow into the Mississippi, and find their way down to New Orleans and the ocean. Until the advent of modern technology like railroads planes or highways, it was rivers and waterways all across the world which served as humanity's high-speed transportation and trade arteries. And the Mississippi is the biggest and the most important system of them all, anywhere on the planet.

In fact, the greater Mississippi River basin has more kilometers of navigable internal waterways than the entire rest of the world all combined has. This fact is enormous, because it was basically the world's largest natural transportation system on any continent, that today flows through 31 U.S States and two Canadian provinces. This system literally connected almost the entire North American continental mainland to the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of the world from there.

And all of it could effectively be dominated by whoever controlled just this small choke point right near the entrance to the Mississippi River. The French were the first big empire who recognized this area's immense strategic value. A little over 300 years ago, they founded the small settlement of New Orleans, here along the river's curve where it created a natural levee about one and a half meters above sea level, comparatively higher than the surrounding swamplands that were beneath sea level. The initial small settlement fared well against floods and hurricanes and a century later, found itself under the possession of a new and future global empire, the United States.

The Mississippi River and all of its various tributaries stretching as far as Denver, Minneapoli, Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City and Oklahoma city, enabled millions of American settlers to venture out and conquer the west. And they could reach all of these places via New Orleans, and all of the goods they would end up producing would flow back to New Orleans.

As America expanded westwards, the Mississippi River became roughly the dividing line between east and west within the continental states, and the importance of New Orleans became ever more apparent. If any enemy power were to gain control of it, they could shut the entire river down and effectively cut America in half, and block all of the massive volume of trade flowing down it from the dozens of other states that were making New Orleans one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

In fact, by the 1840s, New Orleans was America's third biggest city behind only New York and Baltimore. And by the time of the civil war, it was easily the South's largest and most important city. Riverboats and barges easily transported luxury goods like cotton from southern states like Mississippi and industrial goods from northern factories up in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. And in New Orleans was that the zenith of her power and influence.

But after the civil war, the city's fortunes would dramatically reverse. The invention of new technologies like the railroad introduced new transportation and trade routes that largely bypassed New Orleans location down in the southeast. As more and more railroads and later interstate highways for trucks and cars and airports for planes were built, the crucial importance of the Mississippi and its various riverways diminished.

By the 20th century, the Mississippi no longer had a monopoly on middle America's transportation and trade, and in New Orleans monopoly over in minutes to that system no longer mattered quite as much. By World War II, New Orleans had plummeted from America's third largest city to only her 15th. Despite reaching the height of her population in 1960, with about 620 000 people, she was no longer even the biggest city in the American south, with cities like Dallas and Houston having passed her up with their much more rapid growth.

Thereafter, New Orleans would enter into a slow and steady decline, with economic opportunity moving on to other parts of the country. New Orleans lost 18% of her population in only 30 years, between 1970 and 2000. Faced with a serious demographic crisis like this, the leaders of the city at the time decided that they needed to encourage more growth by developing more land.

But the problem with that is that New Orleans was founded as an 18th century outpost, and its expansion from those borders into a modern sprawling city was always doomed to be severely limited by simple geography. As New Orleans developed around her colonial-era core that was on some of the highest ground available in the area, she had no other choice but to expand further into the swampy and flood-prone lands that were closer to and eventually even beneath sea level, which was a dangerous decision.

In order to develop the swampland even further, the city began draining out all of the water, which caused the soil beneath to compact and led to the modern city above sinking. Today, parts of New Orleans are sinking by as much as five centimeters a year. When you remember that most of the city is already beneath sea level, and right next to several major bodies of water, you can understand why this is all catastrophically dangerous.

What makes matters even worse, is the fact that sea levels are only rising as time goes on, which is making the bold shape of New Orleans surrounded by precarious water on all sides, more and more dangerous as the 21st century continues.

With all of that in mind, let's analyze all of New Orleans contemporary geographic issues. First up Lake Pontchartrain, I want you to look at this map of the elevation levels throughout New Orleans. And now I want you to look at this map that shows the areas with the most severe flooding from hurricane Katrina in 2005. These really are different maps but they look almost identical, and the correlation is plain to see. When Katrina struck, its powerful winds rapidly shoved water from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain and overflowed it, the levees that were designed to contain it were not built up to standards high enough to overcome this, and many failed. As a result, the water spilled into the bowl that is New Orleans and the city was devastated. Over 1800 lives were lost, over 150 billion dollars in damage was caused and because of the mass exodus of refugees escaping all of the chaos, the city's population was reduced by more than half of what it had been before.

The year after Katrina in 2006, New Orleans had been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self, it was then only the 94th largest city in America, and it was the lowest population the city had ever had since the 1870s. Over the years since, New Orleans has managed to admirably rebuild, but her population has still to this day not ever managed to recover beyond her pre-Katrina 2005 population, it was a catastrophic blow, but hurricanes in the lake are but one of the many problems that the city is facing.

The next is the Mississippi River itself, over thousands of years, the Mississippi's path has constantly wandered across the landscape of Louisiana, the Mississippi as we know it today has basically only existed since the middle ages, and when the French settled the city in the 18th century, they weren't exactly aware of that.

Beginning around 1900 the Mississippi's natural wandering course began to change again, had it been left to its own devices without any human intervention, the Mississippi would have by now shifted its primary path over here to the Atchafalaya River, and what remained of the river through New Orleans would have effectively just become a stream in comparison, this would have destroyed New Orleans drinking water supply, and rendered her strategic location at the mouth of the Mississippi pretty much obsolete. So rationalizing that it would have been pretty expensive to pretty much abandon the city and push everybody over to the Achafalaya River.

Engineers decided instead to construct a massive series of river control structures, further up the river to guarantee that the water would continue flowing into the Mississippi as we know it today. However some geologists believe that if a future flood is catastrophic enough, the system could be overwhelmed and the Mississippi will find its way over to the Atchafalaya and around New Orleans anyway, and the Mississippi poses much more threats to New Orleans than simply diverting itself around it. Like Lake Pontchartrain. The Mississippi also likes to flood a lot and is higher up than a significant amount of New Orleans, so artificial levees were constructed along its banks to try and contain it.

However this also had a lot of unintended consequences, chief among them was the destruction of Louisiana's coastline, you see the Mississippi River is chock full of sediment, which is why the river always looks so brown. But over thousands of years, the river continuously deposited these sediments into the Gulf of Mexico and compounding over time, created newer and newer marshlands, immediately before the European discovery of America, this is roughly what the Louisiana coastline naturally looked like. But after New Orleans was established and the levees were constructed along the river's banks throughout the 19th century, the sediment-rich water could no longer reach and replenish any of these wetlands, and when combined with rising sea levels in a myriad of other man-made causes, they began to rapidly shrink.

In the past hundred years alone, Louisiana has lost thousands of square miles to the ocean, and it's getting even worse all the time. Since New Orleans itself is sinking by about five centimeters a year, and sea levels are rising by about 3.6 to 4 millimeters a year, the water is creeping faster and closer to the New Orleans bowl all the time.

Over the next 30 years, by 2050, Louisiana is projected to lose about another 5 800 square kilometers of wetlands, and the ocean itself will be pretty much on New Orleans doorstep. At this point, New Orleans will be even more surrounded by water than she is today on all sides, which will only increase the odds of catastrophic floods in the future.

Historically Louisiana's wetlands have provided some kind of barrier of defense between New Orleans and hurricanes rampaging in from the gulf, but in the future without them, New Orleans will increasingly experience more and more direct impacts from hurricanes that right now, have an 11% chance of hitting every single year, but because of climate change, hurricanes are happening more and more frequently, so the odds of another big one hitting New Orleans are only going up while at the same time, her defenses are growing weaker and weaker.

With geography abandoning her, New Orleans has been forced to result more and more to higher numbers of man-made defenses to overcome her now exposed and poor location, like higher and stronger levees, floodgates, pumping stations, river controls and dredging up new artificial land to replace their natural wetland defenses.

But the really big problem that New Orleans is going to have to overcome, is that rising sea levels and flood risks are not a unique problem faced by them alone. But by dozens of other cities across the United States as well, such as New York, Miami and others who because they all have bigger populations and economies, will probably be priority targets for any kind of federal flood protection funding.

So in the end, Louisiana itself is one of the most impoverished states in the United States. Without a lot of external federal funding, any man-made structures they build still just might not end up being enough compared with the overwhelming firepower that nature is bringing to the table.

Save for taking New Orleans and pushing it somewhere else like near the Atchafalaya where the Mississippi is bound to probably just end up anyway, sometime in the next thousand years. I'm unsure of New Orleans future and how long the city has left, which is a tragedy because I love New Orleans. But ultimately in the end, there isn't any amount of technology that can overcome the simple fact that, New Orleans is technically located within a bowl that's surrounded by water, that's getting deeper and deeper and even more surrounded by water with every passing hour.

New Orleans future is sadly not certain. A couple weeks ago, Louisiana fell victim to its second most destructive hurricane on record behind Katrina, while the total cost of the damage has not yet been accurately calculated. It will certainly be in excess of 50 billion dollars. The storm's devastation left over a million people across Louisiana without power and brought widespread flooding throughout the state and yet, the levees of New Orleans held firm in their defense.

As always, thank you so much for watching.