In October 2001, Mark Fischetti wrote an eerily prescient article for Scientific American, titled “Drowning New Orleans”:

The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls
of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If
a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it
would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water.

New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies
below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain
to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a
damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at
increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta,
which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from
now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh – an area the size of
Manhattan – will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss
gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the
bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding
communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water
would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University
(L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced
computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags
wouldn’t go very far.

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