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La. Plan to Reclaim Land Would Divert the Mississippi
Keith Brunet's house in Isle de Jean Charles, La., is surrounded by dying trees and a yard that no longer supports a tomato garden because of saltwater intrusion.
(By Michael Williamson -- The Washington Post)
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"If the hurricanes didn't make the point we've been trying to make for all these years, nothing will," said Sidney Coffee, the chairman of the state authority created by the legislature to develop a plan. "We can't afford to be scaled back again."
"We didn't want to take risks before," said Scott Angelle, secretary of Louisiana's Department of Natural Resources. "But now we've been hit in the head with a two-by-six. We're ready."
The Loss of Land
For decades, the steady loss of Louisiana's coastal wetlands was considered a slow-motion disaster, but not an emergency.
Most of southeastern Louisiana was built over the past 6,000 years by the sediment of the Mississippi River, which naturally changed course and flooded over the millennia. The river deposits created everything from the land that New Orleans sits on down to the state's southernmost -- and marshiest -- extremes.
Since the settlement of New Orleans, however, the levees built to prevent catastrophic flooding have slowly but inexorably contributed to a different type of catastrophe: the loss of land.
The hemmed-in river could no longer occasionally change course and overflow to spread its sediment and build up the land. The soft soil of southern Louisiana continued to settle and sink. At the same time, the wetland vegetation that had helped hold the existing land together was crisscrossed with navigation canals, paths for oil rigs and gas pipelines.
Since the 1930s, an estimated 1,900 square miles of land have been lost, an area about the size of Delaware.
Entire bayou Cajun communities -- Leeville, Port Fourchon, Isle de Jean Charles -- have shrunk over the decades to little more than narrow strips. Fields and marshes that once supported hunting and fishing have surrendered to the ocean. After each storm, more families relocate to higher ground.
One recent morning, Keith Brunet, 31, a tugboat deckhand, and his girlfriend were doing chores in the front yard of the Isle de Jean Charles house his grandfather once lived in.
The yard, he points out, no longer supports the tomato garden that used to grow there; the soil has become too salty.
In his lawn, there are two types of grass: one small patch of ordinary lawn grass and the rest a spiky marsh variety. A 25-foot oak, planted by Brunet's father when Brunet was a child, died a few years ago, leaving only a leafless ghostly white trunk.
His father, "tired of fighting the water," recently moved north, leaving the house to Brunet. Across the street is an abandoned house where his aunt used to live.
