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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    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."

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