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Click to enlarge >> Louisiana's Wetlands @ National Geographic Magazine Photograph by Tyrone Turner By Joel K Bourne, Jr. Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, an d seafood lovers everywhere. It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Ea sy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if th ey were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurrica nes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on As h Wednesday. But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, howeverthe car-less , the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians w ho look for any excuse to throw a party. The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top o f the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearl y 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea levelmore than eight feet be low in placesso the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over th e brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it r aced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale r ider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it. Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perish ed from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took tw o months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,00 0 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the Uni ted States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurri cane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation , up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack o n New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters i n the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great. "The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before la ndfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 2 4 hourscoming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired co astal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years stud ying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actua l August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are," Suhayda says, watching sailboats glide by. But when it fails, it's going to make things much worse." The chances of such a storm hitting New Orleans in any given year are sli ght, but the danger is growing. Climatologists predict that powerful sto rms may occur more frequently this century, while rising sea level from global warming is putting low-lying coasts at greater risk. "It's not if it will happen," says University of New Orleans geologist Shea Penland. Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's natural de fenses are quietly melting away. From the Mississippi border to the Texa s state line, Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and b arrier islands faster than any place in the US Since the 1930s some 1, 900 square miles (4,900 square kilometers) of coastal wetlandsa swath n early the size of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourghave vanis hed beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars sp ent over the past decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose a bout 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly o ne acre every 33 minutes. A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to op en water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Miss issippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual del uges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees we re raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increa sing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brack ish and freshwater marshes. While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every US citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marsh es, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a t hird of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks sec ond only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison. Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellowsscientists, envi ronmental groups, business leaders, and the US Army Corps of Engineers to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimat ed to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration b alked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two bil lion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects . Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin. To glimpse the urgency of the problem afflicting Louisiana, one need only drive 40 minutes southeast of New Orleans to the tiny bayou village of Shell Beach. Here, for the past 70 years or so, a big, deeply tanned man with hands the size of baseball gloves has been catching fish, shooting ducks, and selling gas and bait to anyone who can find his end-of-the-r oad marina. Today Frank "Blackie" Campo's ramshackle place hangs off the end of new Shell Beach. The old Shell Beach, where Campo was born in 19 18, sits a quarter mile away, five feet beneath the rippling waves. Once home to some 50 families and a naval air station during World War II, t he little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says in the local patoi s Gone forever. Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous existence. Hurricanes t wice razed the community, sending houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide (150-met er-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its fate was sealed. The Missi ssippi River-Gulf Outlet, known as "Mr Go," was supposed to provide a s hortcut for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never caught on. Ma ybe two ships use the channel on a given day, but wakes from even those few vessels have carved the shoreline a half mile wide in places, consum ing old Shell Beach. Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes the color of a lat e autumn sky. Our conversation turns from Mr Go to the bigger issue aff ecting the entire coast. "What really screwed up the marsh is when they put the levees on the river," Campo says, over the noise of a groaning a ir-conditioner. But we know they not going to let the river run again, so there's no solution." Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just thatletting the river run. A c oastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, Reed is convinc ed that breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways wo...
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