Louisiana port city founded in 1718 by French colonists. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville convinced his colleagues in Paris that the capital of French Louisiana should sit on the swampland where the Mississippi river met the Atlantic. The port gave the French an edge in commerce and defence. In 1719, a year after its founding, the city flooded for the first time. For the next century it fought against water, as French rule gave way to Spanish and then American.
By 1840 New Orleans had become the biggest city in the South and the fourth-busiest port in the world. The political heroes of the day were the "drainage kings" who engineered dry land. In 1914 the mayor went on a national tour to advertise the feat of reclaiming the city from the swamp.
Around the time of the 1914 tour, an architect noticed cracks in St Louis Cathedral, the city's grandest church. New Orleans was sinking below sea level. The levees that engineers had built to stop the flooding prevented the river depositing sediment to replenish the land as it always had. In the 20th century oil and gas companies carved 10,000 miles of canals through the marshes of coastal Louisiana, killing the cypress groves that slowed the rush of water towards the city. Some 2,000 square miles of land sank into the ocean. "The paradox is that the very devices that made New Orleans possible had sowed the seeds for its undermining," says Richard Campanella of Tulane University.
On August 29th 2005 Hurricane Katrina breached the city's levees, killing 1,800 people and causing $200bn worth of damage. Hundreds of thousands of people fled. The federal government spent $125bn, in today's dollars, to rebuild a region home to just 1.4m people, making Katrina America's costliest storm. Had the government not invested so much, the city would probably have followed the path of Galveston, Texas, which ceded its place as the state's ocean-side economic engine to Houston after a devastating hurricane in 1900.
Katrina sparked a ferocious partisan argument about who was to blame for failing to prepare. Democrats blamed President George W. Bush and won a thumping victory in the national mid-term elections of 2006. Dennis Hastert, then the speaker of the House of Representatives, asked whether New Orleans should be rebuilt at all.
In the decade after Katrina the federal government spent $14bn to build a system of levees and floodwalls to withstand another storm of equal strength. This time the government promised "risk reduction", not "protection". The West Closure Complex, its largest pumping station, could empty an Olympic swimming pool in five seconds. After switching to a fully charter-school system, educational results in the city dramatically improved.
New Orleans's three biggest industries are tourism, shipping, and oil and gas—all of which are losing jobs. It is bleeding residents faster than any other city of its size in America. In the next 50 years Louisiana is expected to lose as much coastal land as it did in the past 100, and the probability of huge storms will more than double. Since 2020 the federal government has declared four times the number of weather disasters in all Louisiana parishes as in the average American city. Louisiana already takes far more money from the federal government than it sends back in taxes.
Cheer Up! Things are getting worse at a slower rate.