“Mud, mud, mud,” wrote architect Benjamin Latrobe of New Orleans in 1819; “this is a floating city, floating below the surface of the water on a bed of mud.”
Soil scientists would not disagree, and actually use terms like “sticky,” “muck” and “gumbo” in the federal government’s official Orleans Parish soil survey. Nor would geologists disagree with Latrobe in describing our loamy sediments as “the result of the gradual accumulation of the deposition of the river.”
This tenuous terroir likely explains the surprise expressed last month after Elon Musk’s The Boring Company selected New Orleans, along with Baltimore and Dallas, for its Tunnel Vision Challenge to explore building a one-mile loop tunnel…