Unsafe Harbor

Natural barriers that might have slowed Rita and Katrina were ruined long ago by human development along the fragile Gulf Coast. How Louisianans plan to protect themselves by protecting the environment first

By Nathan Thornburgh/Plaquemines Parish Monday, Oct. 03, 2005
    • KADIR VAN LOHUIZEN / AGENCE VU FOR TIME

    RAVAGED COAST: A seafood-delivery truck dangles in the ruins of Empire, La., near the mouth of the Mississippi River

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    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.

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