Unsafe Harbor

By Nathan Thornburgh / Plaquemines Parish

Hurricanes Rita and Katrina will both be remembered for their crowded human calamities: the gridlocked escape from Houston, the suffering at the Superdome. But in dozens of small towns dug into the fragile ecosystems of the coastal marshes, far from the urban meltdowns, communities weren't just inflamed, they were annihilated. In Cameron Parish, La., along the border with Texas, Rita washed towns like Creole, Oak Grove and Grand Chenier into the sea. In neighboring Vermilion Parish, the residents of Pecan Island returned to find little more than a mile-wide debris field choked with dead marsh grasses.

In south Plaquemines Parish, a sinuous ribbon of land between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, not only were all the towns lost to Katrina's fury, but nature itself seems mortally wounded as well. The 30-mile strip of houses, farms and schools has been transformed into a sump filled with fetid water. Groves of orange trees lie half submerged near Triumph. In Empire, almost 1 million gallons of oil have broken out of a giant Chevron storage tank, coating the levees and seeping into the marshland. A herd of cows staggers ankle deep through greasy waters in Venice. A few miles north, horses graze amid dead fish and the hulks of beached shrimp trawlers.

Devastation that complete looks like an act of God, but residents here know that the truth is more complicated. For decades the oil-rig roughnecks and menhaden fishermen who have made their living on this fragile shore have seen drilling and dredging kill off the surrounding marshes and forests, leaving them defenseless against the rising waters. "Our parish was not only destroyed by nature," says Benny Rousselle, Plaquemines Parish president. "It was destroyed by man."

Katrina was less an isolated episode than a cruel salvo in a continuing war being waged across much of the U.S. Americans are now predominantly a coastal people, drawn to the shores for work and play. Yet their presence at the water's edge threatens the natural barriers that should be shielding them. In Louisiana, the Mississippi River has been lashed into tenuous submission, its absorbent delta constricted and carved into channels for oil pipelines and navigation routes. In Alabama and Mississippi, the playground of the Gulf Coast has been developed to the edge of the open water, rebuilt bigger and more audaciously after each storm that wipes it out.

Rita's eye took dead aim at the already debilitated Sabine Basin, which lies between Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake

Charles, La. Since 1930, coastal erosion and channel dredging have destroyed a third of the marshlands that once formed a bulwark between those cities and the Gulf. In some respects, the coast's best defenses were scuttled before the battle with Rita was even joined.

In Louisiana the cleanup of the two-part disaster is just getting started. But many of the state's best engineering and environmental minds are already looking much further down the road, at what it will take to safely maintain humankind's precarious foothold at the water's edge. Louisiana's coastal towns have vowed to rebuild, but will they ever truly be safe?

Americans have a long history of meddling with the Mississippi and its delta. Clifford Smith, a civil engineer from the delta city of Houma, La., paints it as a story of progress. "What we have done is allow the Mississippi valley to become the most productive in the world," he says. "One of the major reasons that we are the most powerful country in the world is because of what we've done to control flooding and navigation on the Mississippi."

But this magnificent rodeo, starring the Army Corps of Engineers as the wranglers of an untamed river, has been plagued from the start by unintended consequences. To prevent catastrophic floods like the 1927 disaster that left 700,000 people homeless from Illinois to Louisiana, the Corps leveed and streamlined the Mississippi. That effort turned the meandering, porous waterway into the world's largest high-pressure hose, shooting sediment and nutrients off the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Starved of silt and undermined by oil-drilling operations, the delta has been sinking at the same time global warming has caused water levels to rise. The result: every half an hour, a chunk of land about the size of a football field is lost to the Gulf. Every year 22,000 acres sink beneath the waves. Locals say the Corps has traded a quick drowning for a slow but equally sure death.

The western Louisiana coastline, similarly deprived of Mississippi river sediment, has been losing, in some places, as much as 35 ft. of beach a year, according to biologist David Richard, a specialist in the area's wetlands. By the time Rita hit, he says, the Gulf of Mexico was more than a quarter of a mile closer to the inland cities than it was when Hurricane Audrey struck in 1957.

At the same time, channels dug for easier navigation, infrastructure projects or flood control are mainlining saltwater straight into the freshwater swamps and bayous, where the brine burns the marsh plants and kills off the freshwater cypress trees. The most controversial of those channels is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO, known locally as "Mister Go"), which the Port of New Orleans commissioned 50 years ago for quick Gulf access. But quick access to open water also means easy access for seawater. The MRGO and two other deepwater channels carved out of the bayou meet at the Industrial Canal just east of New Orleans to form a superchannel that points like a shotgun at the city's low-income, low-elevation Ninth Ward. Hurricanes merely pull the trigger. Both Katrina and Rita brought storm surges from the Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain that crashed unimpeded, blasted past the levee and sank the district.

The Corps can build the levees higher and stronger, but New Orleans didn't always rely on engineering bravado to save it from Gulf storms. Until this century, the city counted on a three-tiered defense: barrier islands to break the waves, wetlands to absorb storm surges and inland cypress forests to slow the winds. All have been disappearing.

On Bayou LaBranche, a green, glassy waterway some seven miles west of New Orleans, it's alligator-hunting season, and trappers have strung hunks of raw chicken on heavy hooks to dangle over the water. An 8-ft. gator leaps out of the dark waters to snatch the bait; a great egret flaps away from the commotion.

Just a short drive from the petrochemical cesspools of eastern New Orleans, it's heartening to see nature seemingly unbowed by hurricanes. But even though the waterway is alive and well, the cypress swamps that line it are clearly dead. The 100-year-old trees stand naked and decayed, their bark stripped by the wind. The hurricanes are not the culprit. The trees have been dead for a decade or more, victims of man-made canals that carry brackish water from Lake Pontchartrain, poisoning the cypress. Biologists call this a ghost swamp, one of many throughout the delta. When Katrina's winds howled in from the lake, the thinned forest around Bayou LaBranche could do little to buffer the impact on the communities of Norco and Good Hope to the south. Nor could the area's old marshland slow the storm surge that followed; most of the marsh had long since been turned into a salty lake.

The relationship between environmental recovery and infrastructure protection has created strange bedfellows in Louisiana. Environmentalists and oilmen, engineers and biologists alike have rallied behind a plan called Coast 2050. First drafted in 1998, it called for $14 billion in federal funding for the restoration of barrier islands, marshes and swamplands. But the money never came. In fact, the White House's Office of Management and Budget squeezed the request from $14 billion to $1.9 billion in the 2005 Water Resources Development Act, which is still awaiting a Senate vote. Governor Kathleen Blanco, in her first State of the State address after Katrina, tried to hitch the plan to the swell of reconstruction aid, asking for a cut of federal oil revenues to pay for coastal restoration, an idea also proposed by Louisiana's two Senators, one a Republican and the other a Democrat. They are not without supporters. Even the Army Corps of Engineers, which spent so much of its history trying to tame Mother Nature, has changed its tune and become a proactive steward of the Mississippi watershed.

But even if the myriad smaller coastal restoration projects are fully funded, it might not be enough. Bigger storms, experts insist, require bigger ideas. Geologist Sherwood Gagliano has spent a lifetime trying to figure out how to save his sinking state, and he has come up with what he thinks is the only plan ambitious enough to match the size of the problem. His idea: to redirect a branch of the Mississippi through the heart of Terrebonne Parish, the most densely populated in the delta. Shipping lanes would remain routed through New Orleans, but much of the Mississippi would be diverted at Donaldsonville, 90 miles upriver from the city, so sediment-rich waters could revive the ancient riverbeds in the central delta and rebuild marshland long since lost to the Gulf. Many local groups, including the Terrebonne-based Restore or Retreat, support the idea. One major impediment: parish residents who for generations have built homes and planted sugar-cane crops along and even inside the levees where this new branch of the Mississippi would come roaring through.

As a Terrebonne native, Clifford Smith is skeptical about Gagliano's plan, but he believes that the extraordinary situation may call for rethinking where some people live. "I'm a landowner down there, so I'm not wild about eminent domain, but this was a biblical event we suffered," he says. "To solve this in the future, we're going to have to compromise."

Others propose a general withdrawal from the disappearing wetlands and refortification behind more easily defensible lines, like Israeli settlers withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. There are simply too many precarious outposts to build walls around them all, they say. Better to build one huge hurricane levee across southern Louisiana and leave those who choose to stay outside the floodgates to look after themselves.

Far more common are the voices of the thousands who have lost everything but still talk about rebuilding on their same spot of soggy ground, the way New Yorkers talked about rebuilding the World Trade Center after 9/11. It's a question of resolve, says Plaquemines Parish sheriff Jiff Hingel, whose home lies torn and submerged somewhere in the waters of Buras. "If they start making people move from Plaquemines Parish," he says, "then before long they'll make people move from St. Bernard and eventually from New Orleans. Where would it stop? No, sir, we're not giving an inch."

But for a parish that spends an estimated $3 million to $4 million a year on levee maintenance alone, it may be time to ask some difficult questions. Some suggest that the parish could tap into a FEMA grant program to buy out the most flood-prone properties on the condition that they never be developed again. Others say it is foolish to maintain a continuous 100-mile levee, that the parish should be converted into a string of islands of development with marshland between them. Ultimately, it may be up to individual landowners to decide if they want to roll the dice again and rebuild.

But after the violence of this hurricane season, even Hingel acknowledges that some kind of conditions will have to be placed on those who would return to south Plaquemines Parish, where the devastation from Katrina was nearly total. "We can't just build higher levees next time," says Hingel. "We need to figure out how to get our marshes back." --With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/ Baton Rouge, Brian Bennett/Washington and Steve Barnes/Little Rock

With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas / Baton Rouge, Brian Bennett / Washington, Steve Barnes / Little Rock