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Photograph by Tyrone Turner
By Joel K. Bourne,
Jr.
Photographs by Robert Caputo and
Tyrone Turner
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The Louisiana bayou, hardest
working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire
consequences for residents, the nearby city of New
Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.
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It was a
broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the
Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured
outside moved as if they 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: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life
in this town as hangovers on Ash 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, however—the
car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those
die-hard New Orleanians who 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 of the massive
berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over.
Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea
level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water
poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick
ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of
the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the
Garden District, until it raced through the bars and
strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider 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 perished from
dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It
took two 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 50,000 were dead. It
was the worst natural disaster in the history of the
United States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the
doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal
Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane 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 on New York City. Even the Red
Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city,
claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
"The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at
72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at
48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the
worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal
engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30
years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a
lakefront restaurant on an actual 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. "Our
technology is great when it works. 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 slight, but the danger is growing.
Climatologists predict that powerful storms 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. "It's
when."
Yet just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the
city's natural defenses are quietly melting away. From
the Mississippi border to the Texas state line,
Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and
barrier islands faster than any place in the U.S. Since
the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900 square
kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size
of Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have
vanished beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half
a billion dollars spent over the past decade to stem the
tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles
(65 square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one
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 open water unless fresh
layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The
Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that
balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous.
After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were 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, increasing erosion and allowing
lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and
freshwater marshes.
While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right
in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen
right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working
wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes,
and barrier islands that either produces or transports
more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of
its natural gas, and ranks second 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
bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business
leaders, and the U.S. 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 estimated 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 balked at the price tag, supporting
instead a plan to spend up to two billion 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-road 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 1918, 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,
the little village is now "ga'an pecan," as Campo says
in the local patois. Gone forever.
Life in old Shell Beach had always been a tenuous
existence. Hurricanes twice razed the community, sending
houses floating through the marsh. But it wasn't until
the Corps of Engineers dredged a 500-foot-wide
(150-meter-wide) ship channel nearby in 1968 that its
fate was sealed. The Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet,
known as "Mr. Go," was supposed to provide a shortcut
for freighters bound for New Orleans, but it never
caught on. Maybe 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, consuming old
Shell Beach.
Campo settles into a worn recliner, his pale blue eyes
the color of a late autumn sky. Our conversation turns
from Mr. Go to the bigger issue affecting 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 air-conditioner. "They should take the
levees out and let the water run; that's what built the
land. But we know they not going to let the river run
again, so there's no solution."
Denise Reed, however, proposes doing just that—letting
the river run. A coastal geomorphologist at the
University of New Orleans, Reed is convinced that
breaching the levees with a series of gated spillways
would pump new life into the dying marshes. Only three
such diversions currently operate in the state. I catch
up with Reed at the most controversial of the lot—a
26-million-dollar culvert just south of New Orleans
named Caernarvon.
"Caernarvon is a prototype, a demonstration of a
technique," says Reed as we motor down a muddy canal in
a state boat. The diversion isn't filling the marsh with
sediments on a grand scale, she says. But the effect of
the added river water—loaded as it is with fertilizer
from farm runoff—is plain to see. "It turns wetlands
hanging on by the fingernails into something quite
lush," says Reed.
To prove her point, she points to banks crowded with
slender willows, rafts of lily pads, and a wide shallow
pond that is no longer land, no longer liquid. More like
chocolate pudding. But impressive as the recovering
marsh is, its scale seems dwarfed by the size of the
problem. "Restoration is not trying to make the coast
look like a map of 1956," explains Reed. "That's not
even possible. The goal is to restore healthy natural
processes, then live with what you get."
Even that will be hard to do. Caernarvon, for instance,
became a political land mine when releases of fresh
water timed to mimic spring floods wiped out the beds of
nearby oyster farmers. The oystermen sued, and last year
a sympathetic judge awarded them a staggering 1.3
billion dollars. The case threw a major speed bump into
restoration efforts.
Other restoration methods—such as rebuilding marshes
with dredge spoil and salt-tolerant plants or trying to
stabilize a shoreline that's eroding 30 feet (10 meters)
a year—have had limited success. Despite the challenges,
the thought of doing nothing is hard for most southern
Louisianans to swallow. Computer models that project
land loss for the next 50 years show the coast and
interior marsh dissolving as if splattered with acid,
leaving only skeletal remnants. Outlying towns such as
Shell Beach, Venice, Grand Isle, and Cocodrie vanish
under a sea of blue pixels.
Those who believe diversions are the key to saving
Louisiana's coast often point to the granddaddy of them
all: the Atchafalaya River. The major distributary of
the Mississippi River, the Atchafalaya, if left alone,
would soon be the Mississippi River, capturing most of
its flow. But to prevent salt water from creeping
farther up the Mississippi and spoiling the water supply
of nearby towns and industries, the Corps of Engineers
allows only a third of the Mississippi's water to flow
down the Atchafalaya. Still, that water and sediment
have produced the healthiest wetlands in Louisiana. The
Atchafalaya Delta is one of the few places in the state
that's actually gaining ground instead of losing it. And
if you want to see the delta, you need to go crabbing
with Peanut Michel.
"Peanut," it turns out, is a bit of a misnomer. At six
foot six and 340 pounds, the 35-year-old commercial
fisherman from Morgan City wouldn't look out of place on
the offensive line of the New Orleans Saints. We launch
his aluminum skiff in the predawn light, and soon we're
skimming down the broad, café au lait river toward the
newest land in Louisiana. Dense thickets of needlegrass,
flag grass, cut grass, and a big-leafed plant Michel
calls elephant ear crowd the banks, followed closely by
bushy wax myrtles and shaggy willows.
Michel finds his string of crab pots a few miles out in
the broad expanse of Atchafalaya Bay. Even this far from
shore the water is barely five feet deep. As the sun
ignites into a blowtorch on the horizon, Michel begins a
well-oiled ritual: grab the bullet-shaped float, shake
the wire cube of its clicking, mottled green
inhabitants, bait it with a fish carcass, and toss. It's
done in fluid motions as the boat circles lazily in the
water.
But it's a bad day for crabbing. The wind and water are
hot, and only a few crabs dribble in. And yet Michel is
happy. Deliriously happy. Because this is what he wants
to do. "They call 'em watermen up in Maryland," he says
with a slight Cajun accent. "They call us lunatics here.
You got to be crazy to be in this business."
Despite Michel's poor haul, Louisiana's wetlands are
still a prolific seafood factory, sustaining a
commercial fishery that most years lands more than 300
million dollars' worth of finfish, shrimp, oysters,
crabs, and other delicacies. How long the stressed
marshes can maintain that production is anybody's guess.
In the meantime, Michel keeps at it. "My grandfather
always told me, Don't live to be rich, live to be
happy," he says. And so he does.
After a few hours Michel calls it a day, and we head
through the braided delta, where navigation markers that
once stood at the edge of the boat channel now peek out
of the brush 20 feet (six meters) from shore. At every
turn we flush mottled ducks, ibis, and great blue
herons. Michel, who works as a hunting guide during duck
season, cracks an enormous grin at the sight. "When the
ducks come down in the winter," he says, "they'll cover
the sun."
To folks like Peanut Michel, the birds, the fish, and
the rich coastal culture are reason enough to save
Louisiana's shore, whatever the cost. But there is
another reason, one readily grasped by every American
whose way of life is tethered not to a dock, but to a
gas pump: These wetlands protect one of the most
extensive petroleum infrastructures in the nation.
The state's first oil well was punched in south
Louisiana in 1901, and the world's first offshore rig
went into operation in the Gulf of Mexico in 1947.
During the boom years in the early 1970s, fully half of
the state's budget was derived from petroleum revenues.
Though much of the production has moved into deeper
waters, oil and gas wells remain a fixture of the coast,
as ubiquitous as shrimp boats and brown pelicans.
The deep offshore wells now account for nearly a third
of all domestic oil production, while Louisiana's
Offshore Oil Port, a series of platforms anchored 18
miles (29 kilometers) offshore, unloads a nonstop line
of supertankers that deliver up to 15 percent of the
nation's foreign oil. Most of that black gold comes
ashore via a maze of pipelines buried in the Louisiana
muck. Numerous refineries, the nation's largest natural
gas pipeline hub, even the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
are all protected from hurricanes and storm surge by
Louisiana's vanishing marsh.
You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon,
the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the
central Louisiana coast. Brawny helicopters shuttle
6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while
hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet
paper to drinking water to drilling lube. A thousand
trucks a day keep the port humming around the clock, yet
Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to
the world, seems to flood every other high tide. During
storms the port becomes an island, which is why port
officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state
to build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated
highway to the port. It's also why Breaux thinks
spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a
bargain.
"We'll go to war and spend billions of dollars to
protect oil and gas interests overseas,"
Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors
the size of two-story houses. "But here at home?" He
shrugs. "Where else you gonna drill? Not California. Not
Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third generation
in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We
just want the infrastructure to handle it."
The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing
low taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't
come without a cost, largely exacted from coastal
wetlands. The most startling impact has only recently
come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal on
subsidence rates. For decades geologists believed that
the petroleum deposits were too deep and the geology of
the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on
the surface. But two years ago former petroleum
geologist Bob
Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey, noticed
that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during
or just after the period of peak oil and gas production
in the 1970s and early 1980s. After much study, Morton
concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of
oil, trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of
millions of barrels of saline formation water lying with
the petroleum deposits caused a drop in subsurface
pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization.
That led nearby underground faults to slip and the land
above them to slump.
"When you stick a straw in a soda and suck on it,
everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very
simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't
new: It was first documented in Texas in 1926 and has
been reported in other oil-producing areas such as the
North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't
speculate on what percentage of wetland loss can be
pinned on the oil industry. "What I can tell you is that
much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and Bayou
Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and
gas withdrawal. The wetlands are still there, they're
just underwater." The area Morton refers to, part of the
Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest
rates of wetland loss in the state.
The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's
theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The
implication for restoration is profound. If production
continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton
expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic
rate, making restoration feasible in places. Currently,
however, the high price of natural gas has oil companies
swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas
reservoirs. If such fields are tapped, Morton expects
regional depressurization to continue. The upshot for
the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to
focus whatever restoration dollars it can muster on
areas that can be saved, not waste them on places that
are going to sink no matter what.
A few days after talking with Morton, I'm sitting on the
levee in the French Quarter, enjoying the deep-fried
powdery sweetness of a beignet from the Café du Monde.
Joggers lumber by in the torpid heat, while tugs wrestle
their barges up and down the big brown river. For all
its enticing quirkiness, for all its licentious
pleasures, for all its geologic challenges, New Orleans
has been luckier than the wetlands that lined its
pockets and stocked its renowned tables. The question is
how long Lady Luck will shine. It brings back something
Joe Suhayda, the LSU engineer, had said during our lunch
by Lake Pontchartrain.
"When you look at the broadest perspective, short-term
advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment.
But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just
like you can spend three days drinking in New Orleans
and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going to
pay."
I finish my beignet and stroll down the levee,
succumbing to the hazy, lazy feel of the city that care
forgot, but that nature will not.
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