Word: rivering
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...quickly learned that they would have to build carefully, particularly in low-lying New Orleans. Eighteenth century settlers established the famed French Quarter on some of the highest ground they could find, one of the reasons it remained relatively dry last week. As the Gulf, the lake and the river periodically overflowed, the growing city retreated behind an ever expanding web of soil, concrete and metal levees. Today there are 350 miles of those barricades snaking through the city and 22 massive pumping stations that are supposed to kick into action whenever the water sloshes over the walls. Having constructed...
...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...
Geology has only made things worse. Gulf land is squishy stuff, made mostly of silt deposited by eons of free-flowing rivers and periodic floods. When the high water recedes, the sedimentary layer remains, growing heavier and heavier and ultimately subsiding under its own weight. The only way to keep the land from sinking altogether is to let the soil replenish itself with each flood. Human beings have done just the opposite, walling off New Orleans and re-engineering the Mississippi River to flow around the growing metropolis, effectively choking off the silt supply...
...natural flooding also causes barrier islands, which line the Gulf and protect the coast, to shrink. The Mississippi in its naturally flowing state spilled silt into an intricate delta, spreading sediment east and west and fortifying the islands. Walled and dredged all the way to the Gulf, the river now dumps that silt right over the edge of the continental shelf. Geologists report that the Chandeleur Islands--a healthy necklace of sandy barriers about 70 miles from New Orleans--appeared to have been wiped out by Katrina, leaving one more stretch of the city's coast dangerously exposed...
...Rodents are indigenous to the Charles River,” he says...