How to Save a Sinking Coast?

How to Save a Sinking Coast? Katrina Created a Laboratory

Ten years ago, the neighborhood hard by the 17th Street canal in this city was water-blasted. The surges from Hurricane Katrina swept into the canal, broke through its flood walls and forced homes off their foundations. Much of New Orleans remained steeped in brackish filth for weeks until the sodden city could be drained.

In the aftermath, Congress approved $14 billion for a 350-mile ring of protection around the city with bigger and stronger levees, gigantic gates that can be closed against storms, and a spectacular two-mile “Great Wall of Lake Borgne” that can seal off the canal that devastated the city’s Lower Ninth Ward when its flood walls fail. More work is underway, including pump stations that will keep the city’s three main drainage canals from being overwhelmed again during storms.

The elaborate system of walls, pumps and gates is still not everything the Crescent City needs; some flooding of streets in heavy storms will always be a fact of life. But it goes a long way to fulfilling a promise by federal and state officials that the kind of widespread destruction from Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst disasters in United States history, will not happen again.

And it is only the start. As the federal government built a protective ring around New Orleans, state officials devised a plan to take care of other vulnerable areas in the state as part of a 50-year, $50 billion master plan. It combines structures such as levees with “green infrastructure,” like restored wetlands and bulked-up barrier islands to soften the punch of storms while providing havens for wildlife.

To the northeast, New York and New Jersey are looking at multibillion-dollar proposals to limit the damage that could be caused by the next Hurricane Sandy. To the west, Galveston, Tex., wants an “Ike Dike,” a great wall to blunt storms like Hurricane Ike in 2008.

Officials also have come from around the world by the planeload to see what is rising here.

Ricky Boyett, a spokesman for the New Orleans district for the Army Corps of Engineers, said that in 2010, during the corps’ construction boom on the system, he and his colleagues conducted more than 400 tours for congressional delegations and officials from two dozen nations, including Bangladesh, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, not to mention visiting conventioneers. After that, he said, “we quit counting.”

René Poché, another corps spokesman, said that he had led so many tours that he sometimes felt like a guide at Disneyland. “I have the pith hat,” he joked. “I have my little jungle vest.”

The tour buses would take visitors to see such engineering feats as the Lake Bogne wall and the gargantuan pump station and gates at the Harvey Canal on the West Bank, and end up at the 17th Street canal — then, as often as not, they would stop for lunch at Deanie’s Seafood in the nearby Bucktown neighborhood for shrimp, crawfish and spicy boiled potatoes.

These visitors see in Louisiana a glimpse of their own future, as climate change brings rising seas and heavy weather to coastal communities. And because Louisiana is dealing with the additional challenge of sinking land, the vanishing boot of the state has become a laboratory with tensions over the cost and pace of the work, and uncomfortable questions about whether the endeavor is an exercise in futility — for dealing with the effects of a warming world.

“We are at the forefront of addressing the issues caused by climate change,” said Chip Kline, the state’s top coastal official.

Restoring the Wetlands

In the last 80 years, the state has lost 1,900 square miles of its coastal wetlands, a land mass roughly the size of Delaware. That has happened in large part because of the levees along the Mississippi, which cut off the Delta from its replenishing sediment, and because oil and gas operations cut in pipelines and channels for navigation that allowed saltwater to creep in and kill off the delicate wetlands.

This history of loss has been repeated so often that just about everybody here can recite the statistics by heart.

“People know about the number of football fields we lose every hour,” Mr. Kline said (the answer: one).

But the losses have overshadowed the steps being taken to restore the land.

The state has more than 150 projects from its master plan underway or complete. More than $11 billion in state and federal funds has been spent on hurricane risk reduction, with more than $2 billion earmarked for ecosystem restoration.

The state is building up eroding barrier islands and headlands, restoring their beaches, dunes and marshes. It is bringing land back to wetland areas that had degraded to open water.

Each project is its own puzzle: The Caminada headland is receiving sand brought in by barge and pipeline from a rich, sandy shoal 30 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. The headland shields the bustling shipping industry at nearby Port Fourchon and Highway 1, a vital link and hurricane evacuation route for communities like Grand Isle.

Over at Bayou Dupont, hundreds of acres of land, already sprouting fields of grass, have risen in recent months from open water because of a 13-mile pipeline that carries dredged sand from the bottom of the Mississippi.

Restoration efforts like these provide protection from the power of hurricanes, said Reggie Dupre, a former state legislator who is the executive director of theTerrebonne Levee & Conservation District.

Source: NY Times

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