Those are just a few of the questions posed by assistant attorneys general from other states on a recent tour of subdivisions built on drained wetland soils in eastern New Orleans.
They are appalled at the conditions of the houses with their exposed foundations, cracked driveways, sunken undulating yards and other evidences of subsidence.
They could not believe people actually bought truckloads of dirt on a regular basis to fill in their yards and cover the exposed foundations of their houses. But there were the piles of dirt, and there were the people shoveling it around their houses.
“Why don’t the people here rise up and stop developments in these wetland areas?” seems to be the most recurring question among the legal officers taking the field trip into the eastern part of Orleans Parish.
To most of the questions, Woody Gagliano, the wetland scientist leading the field trip, responded with a helpless shrug of the shoulders.
“What you don’t realize,” he said, “is that developers are still selling houses in these drained wetlands – some on even worse soils than these.”
“But can’t the prospective buyer see what happened to these homeowners and learn from their mistakes?,” an attorney general from Pennsylvania asked.
Gagliano replied that the developers “usually tell the homeowner their lot is just on the edge of a levee ridge on high ground and good soils.”
Before starting the trip, Gagliano had shown the group a slide presentation on the geology and geography of the New Orleans area.
He had explained about various levee ridges that have been built up by the Mississippi River – about how the soils in these areas are suitable for development, while those in drained wetlands are not.
He told how wetland soils or peats contain high percentages of organic materials and water. When drained, these soils shrink and sink. In most drained wetlands area, land has subsided to five or more feet below sea level.
A natural marsh is a few feet above sea level. “If marshes are left alone, they last 3,000 or 4,000 years. They are living surfaces where decaying matter continues to build the marsh and keep it productive, Gagliano explained.
Gagliano showed the legal officers a pumping station at the lakefront that pumps the now below-sea level land dry. The extent of the subsidence is evidenced by the water level in the canal which was about eight feet lower than the level of the lake.
The cost of building and operating the pumping station is borne by the local taxpayer, Gagliano told the group. The attorneys were quick to note that the cost of keeping these areas drained must have skyrocketed since the energy crisis.
After a tour of Village de ‘Est, the tour headed out I-10 to the 50-square-mile New Orleans East, Inc. tract. Gagliano said some of the peats in that area are 20 feet thick – explaining that the thicker the peats, the lower the land can sink.
Thanks to public works projects, paid for by the taxpayer, the value of marshland in New Orleans East rose from $200-300 to $15,000 per acre in the past 20 years, Gagliano said.
In addition to hurricane protection, built in the Corps of Engineers with federal tax dollars, construction of I-10 through the area increased land value substantially, he said.
The bus stopped on one of the overpasses that dead-ends in an uninhabited in marsh, where projected suburban homes never materialized. But these interchanges served to increase the land value and stand ready for the developer to exploit.
The attorney continued to fire questions about the whys and wherefores of wetland developments and tax-dollars going to enhance private land, but they received no conclusive answers.
That local residents are becoming more aware of the problem was the most helpful answer they received.
At the end of the tour, the attorneys were still incredulous. “These people down here must be a bunch of nuts,” one muttered.