[kibwen]

Honest question: has anyone, engineer or otherwise, yet come to the rescue of New Orleans in the fourteen years since Katrina? The flooding there, and our response to it, is so far our best benchmark of what we can expect as sea levels keep rising.

[ethbro]

$14B in new Army Corp of Engineers work, in and around New Orleans?

Doing work isn't sexy, and it doesn't make national news media, but it's what gets shit done.

And the Army Corp of Engineers has its management problems, but it also tends to be caught between "We don't believe anything will happen, so we're not giving you enough funding / control, but are giving you an unfunded mandate" and "Something happened! How did you let this happen after we trusted you to fix it?!"

In reality, they do a lot of good work.

[scurvy]

There's some visibly new pumping stations and some that shut down, but they don't run these. As a result, they're left to the city to mismanage and have normal storms turn into bad floods. I'm not being political here, this is fact with people walking off the job or just not doing their job.

The city's sewer systems are completely busted and need way more than $14b to fix.

Yeah the Corps fixed what they broke, but there's not a lot of new investment by them.

[selimthegrim]

Seeing as they failed New Orleans in the first place with the levee pilings, 14 billion is penance, not anything forward looking

[selimthegrim]

Downvote me all you want, you come live here then before you gainsay me

[ethbro]

What would be an appropriate number, then?

[selimthegrim]

https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/environment/art...

$92 billion for the coast and probably another $20 billion for New Orleans? It doesn’t have to be all at once.

[bilbo0s]

You're WAYYY off if you think 92 billion will save coastal cities. So is the Advocate. The diversity of soil, or bedrock types, of seismic profiles, of infrastructure, etc.

I call BS on that number.

Obviously places like Galveston/Houston, and New Orleans have to be saved at any cost, but we have to get realistic about how much this stuff actually costs. And we have to get real pragmatic, real fast about deciding which of these ports we really don't need anymore.

All that said, yes, Miami is pretty high on the "Not Needed" list. So, I guess if the rich people who live there decide to save the place, great. If not, no biggie. We'll live. It's not like losing Houston, Norfolk, or New Orleans.

[ethbro]

Adding in shoreline topography.

It's amazing how different ports are. Some are essentially flood plains. Others (e.g. the Chesapeake Bay) have surprisingly steep elevation meeting the water.

Savannah - Charleston - Norfolk are a good east coast trio to illustrate the differences.

https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/#/layer/slr/6/-9028683.402612444/...

[xnyan]

I can't see any way out of this besides massive population shifts over the next 50-100 years.