We couldn’t have stepped into any more of a contrast from the burkas and mosques of Abu Dhabi to completely naked women walking down Bourbon Street. You can only imagine what I thought as the taxi forced its way through crowds of parade goers to our hotel -something close to “WTF kind of crazy place have my parents brought me to?!”
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This feat of engineering sustained a city of up to 400,000 people for over 70 years, but they have to bury their dead in ornate sarcophagi because the ground is too spongy and flood prone to keep them below ground. Growing up below the sea gives one a unique perspective and is perhaps the reason why walking down to the sea from my home in Ireland still seems like a novelty for this Southern Belle.
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Hurricane Katrina hit the city 13 years later in 2005. It is ranked as the third most intense tropical cyclone to make landfall in the USA and the deadliest since 1928, taking at least 1,465 lives. It flooded 80% of the city of New Orleans, mostly due to a storm surge and levee failures that could have been prevented through better engineering. Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States and it’s considered the world’s worst engineering disaster since Chernobyl.
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The impacts of Katrina fell disproportionately on the black community, who now comprise a smaller percentage of the population and are less represented in government. Nearly 100,000 black people and 11,000 white people never returned to the city after Katrina. In the lower 9th ward, 40% of the mostly black population never returned, in most cases because they couldn’t afford to. Of those who did return to New Orleans, the median income of black households is a staggering 54% lower than of white households.
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Tourism is nearly back to pre-Katrina levels and it’s easy to see why. -There is simply no place and no people in the world that can do it like they do it in New Orleans. However, as I flew out of New Orleans International Airport to return home, I could see just how close the sea was to consuming the city.
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All of us will lose things we love to climate change eventually but how surreal to live at a time when that includes losing the entire city you grew up in. New Orleans is a city which can both least afford to be further below the sea and least deserves any further tragedy, yet it will be most impacted by climate change and its resulting sea level rise. In Louis Armstrong’s famous words, I think I finally know what it means to miss New Orleans because now I understand that it won’t always be there to return to.
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