Is there a future for New Orleans?

A city faces submersion, again

New Orleans.
(Image credit: Illustrated | HultonArchive/Illustrated London News/Getty Images, Kyle Niemi/US Coast Guard via Getty Images, Booblgum/iStock, -slav-/iStock)

Just over a month into the 2019 hurricane season, New Orleans is already flooding. The Mississippi River is 10 feet higher than usual for this time of year and the arrival of Tropical Storm Barry from the Gulf of Mexico threatens to build the river's surge to 20 feet, enough to overflow the sodden city's levees on Saturday. Some New Orleans streets were under four feet of water by Wednesday, half a week before the downpour's peak.

The National Weather Service says Barry's effects may be "unprecedented," a designation that had a lot more power to shock a couple of decades ago. These days it seems like unprecedented floods are nothing so much as normal. Maryland's Ellicott City, where stormwater surges down Main Street's charming, historic, death trap of a man-made gulch, has 1,000-year storms with a ruinous frequency. Houston suffered in 2017; Washington this past week threatened to literally submerge in its usually metaphorical swamp.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.