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Comment by pfisch | Hacker News Reader

New Orleans is itself in a rapidly deteriorating state. I lived there for over 30 years, and it has gotten progressively worse and worse over time.

There are now frequent periods where you have to boil your water before you can use it, and it floods in a hard rain which didn't really happen 10 years ago.

I guess what I am saying is I don't believe you, and most of New Orleans going into the ocean as well.

New Orleans and Miami will just slowly deteriorate over time and people will stop investing in these places because it isn't worth the flood risks. Eventually New Orleans will really just be a tourist destination. The French Quarter and probably some of uptown around St. Charles will survive unless things get really bad.

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> I guess what I am saying is I don't believe you, and most of New Orleans going into the ocean as well.

And why not? You could, you know, lift a finger and go check out for yourself the relevant local news reports about the current and past situation, but you have to go back a few years now to see how it all actually got started.

And pretty much all of coastal Louisiana is naturally subsiding (sinking) anyway. (The same is true for Texas, BTW, including much of its interior.) Flood control projects built on the Mississippi River over the past century have made the problem far more readily apparent today than it would otherwise be.

You do realize New Orleans has always been under water, right? The reason it flooded is because the local government didn't bother managing the levees and floodwalls properly.

Which time are you talking about when it flooded? It flooded on mother's day this year during just a hard rain because all the pumps are failing because the cities infrastructure is falling apart.

New Orleans has been losing its natural protection of the wet lands and barrier islands for decades, exacerbated by the oil companies digging trenches in the wetlands to speed up their demise.

Louisiana has been losing land for a long time, and it is concealed in maps by the local government.

In the last 80 years louisiana has lost 1900 square miles of land to the ocean.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/boot-no-more-a-wetter-map-...

The problem isn't only mismanagement. That is just one of many problems that are causing failing infrastructure throughout the city.

What the poster above said about Miami is probably somewhat true, in that mismanagement is one of the issues of why Miami is flooding as well. But it isn't the only problem and it isn't even the main issue these cities are facing.

It will only become more expensive to maintain these flood protections in the future, and create more opportunities for greater corruption as well.

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