Friday, February 03, 2006

New Orleans elevation cross-section map

Wikipedia:

posted by Schroeder @ 10:18 AM   2 comments

2 Comments:

At 2/04/2006 10:33:00 AM, Blogger The Author said...

I ran across that the other day. Very useful for pointing out how only half the city is below sea level (never mind that the MS Gulf Coast was wiped clean at least a football-field deep and all of it was way above sea level).

 
At 2/10/2006 02:30:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Actually, far more than half of the city is below sea level. The excellent USACOE diagram is just a cross-section of one particular strip, a straight line between the lake and the river, between the foot of Canal Street and UNO. There are dozens of maps on the net that can illustrate what areas of the city are below sea level, but this diagrem only gives heights at particular points of reference. Lakeview, New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, three extremely large areas of the city's residential population areas, are utterly destroyed due to post-Katrina levee failure flooding. Add to these the bowl areas illustrated in this cross sectional view and you've got about 75% of the city - the parts that flooded. The remaining high spots include the French Quarter (the original dry ground that the city was founded upon), part of the CBD (although there was less catastropic flooding in the CBD, there are many buildings requiring extensive ground-level repairs due to 2-3 feet of water), about 30 homes near the Lake Front, homes along the Gentilly and Esplanade Ridge, and the area of Uptown now referred to as "The Sliver by the River". That land mass is about one quarter of the city's surface area and much less of the city's population (not much residential in the CBD and mostly larger single-family homes in the areas that survived.) Never mind that the United States government built a levee system that didn't work and is culpable for the failure. We just don't like having to deal with poor people in any context.

 

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