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Jolie Rouge · 08-01-2006, 01:16 AM

Geography shifts in the wake of the storm
10 October 1998
From New Scientist Print Edition.

HURRICANE Georges has not only left behind a trail of misery, it may also force cartographers to redraw maps of the Mississippi Delta.

Until Georges roared through on 27 September, the Louisiana coast was protected by a low-lying 50-kilometre arc of sand called Chandeleur Island. But when Thomas Michot of the US Geological Survey in Lafayette flew over the area after the storm, he saw "about a hundred" islands, some separated by several kilometres of water.

If Chandeleur Island has been permanently breached, this may have lasting consequences for the region's ecology. The shallow waters surrounding Chandeleur contain one of the largest seagrass beds in the Gulf of Mexico, which supports a wealth of invertebrates. These are in turn eaten by fish and birds.

Louisiana's coastal defences may also suffer. The island breaks the force of storm waves before they reach threatened marshes along the Louisiana coast. It also protects New Orleans, which is vulnerable to flooding despite being 60 kilometres inland.

The damage is the worst since photographic surveys began in the 1930s, says Greg Stone of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Although Georges was not as severe as Hurricane Camille in 1969, it moved much more slowly, so the island took more of a battering from waves and wind.

Geomorphologists consider Chandeleur one of America's most threatened coastal barrier islands and expected it to disappear within a few hundred years. The damage wrought by Georges will hasten its demise.

From issue 2155 of New Scientist magazine, 10 October 1998, page 16

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16021552.900.html

Study: Katrina, Rita may have KO’d islands
Scientists fail to find Chandeleur’s sandy start to rebuilding
By MIKE DUNNE -- Advocate staff writer
Published: Jul 31, 2006

Shea Penland, professor and chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at University of New Orleans, points at a map book that shows the erosion of barrier islands over time along the Louisiana coast.

Researchers mapping the Louisiana coast say they can’t find the sand and sediment that normally rebuilt the Chandeleur Islands east of New Orleans after past big storms.

Hurricanes like Camille in 1969 and Ivan in 2004 pushed sand to the rear of the islands in what is known as “overwash fans,” or splays of sand usually in the shape of an open folding fan. After each monster storm, the island chain slowly rebuilt itself on those fans, always a little smaller than before the storms.

Underwater mapping around the islands and in the Gulf of Mexico shows no such fans or any other sands and sediments that might help rebuild the islands, according to University of New Orleans geology professors Shea Penland and Mark Kulp. The mapping also shows evidence of landslides on the seafloor slopes on the Gulf side, which they say has not been seen before. The now-deeper water might increase the size of some of the waves hitting — and eroding — the remnants, they said. Another research vessel mapping another part of the chain apparently found the same landslide scars, Kulp said.

Dawn Lavoie of the U.S. Geological Survey, working with Penland and Kulp, even wonders if Katrina so severely damaged the islands one has to ask: “Is there a threshold (that has been reached) where the island won’t rebuild itself?”

Penland said the islands act as a “speed bump,” or barrier for storms approaching southeastern Louisiana and coastal Mississippi. Computer models designed to predict hurricane flooding show the islands help reduce the storm surge in the marshes protecting the New Orleans area, he said.

Penland is leading the Barrier Island Comprehensive Monitoring effort to map the Louisiana coast, barrier islands and offshore zones. It is being funded by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and UNO.

“This is the biggest assessment of the coastline” in more than 20 years, said Penland, who is also director of the geology department at UNO. “We are looking at every map that has ever been made since 1850” in trying to decide how Louisiana’s coastline and offshore waters and barrier islands have changed.

Kulp is overseeing the underwater mapping, which will provide new data to complete a 100-year history of seafloor change along the coast.

All of the data will eventually be available for the state, Corps of Engineers and other agencies that will be designing future coastal restoration projects.

Kulp’s underwater surveys found what appear to be seafloor landslides on the Gulf of Mexico side of the northern tip of the island chain. Another ship doing similar work along the central Chandeleurs found similar seafloor collapses, Kulp said. The two groups have not had a chance yet to share data, Kulp said.

The wind, waves and tides have always moved sand around the islands but they always found an equilibrium, Kulp said. But Katrina was “a major event that moved volumes of sediment” that “tampered with the equilibrium.”

Penland said a 1980s survey found the islands pretty stable “and we thought they would still be around in 300 years. Now, we are saying, maybe a decade.”

Historically, the fronts of the islands lost 20-30 feet of land each year, usually being rolled to the back of the island in those “overwash fans.”

Between 1996-2004, that loss grew to 300 feet per year following hurricanes like Georges, Lili and Ivan and Tropical Storm Isidore. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita practically blew the islands away, leaving only remnants.

“Katrina events tell us a lot,” Penland said. With forecasts for more powerful storms in the future, lessons from Katrina may become very valuable for decision-makers of the future, Penland said.

http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/345...?showAll=y&c=y

Jolie Rouge · 08-01-2006, 01:29 AM

Katrina: Behind the Tragedy
Taming the River to Let In the Sea
Southern Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
The surprising culprit is overambitious flood control.

By Shea Penland

http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/mas..._feature2.html

( to see the AMAZING graphics, you must go to this site. )

In February 2005, writing in Natural History, Shea Penland, Director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans, and the University’s Braunstein Professor of Petroleum Geology, outlined the threat of hurricanes and catastrophic flooding to the city of New Orleans and the surrounding Mississippi Delta region. Now, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the full horror of that threat has been realized. The toll of the dead mounts daily. The survivors are refugees: when—and whether—they will be able to return to what is left of their homes is unclear. Behind the tragedy lie both natural trends and the impact of human settlement and engineering. Penland’s article, reproduced below, explores these factors and provides a context for understanding the tragedy, as well as a guide to the obstacles that must be addressed as the devastated region is rebuilt.

If you live in Louisiana and don’t know how to swim, now might be a good time to learn. The state is rapidly disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico. As a result of hundreds of years of natural-resource exploitation and modifications to the flow of the Mississippi River, whose silty waters created the delta region of southern Louisiana, the state’s coast lost more than 1,900 square miles of land in the twentieth century alone. At the current rate of loss in Louisiana, an area of wetlands the size of the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., metropolitan area will disappear by 2050. Without putting a massive program of ecological restoration into effect immediately, the fertile crescent of the Mississippi River is doomed to wash away sometime in this century.

Habitable land has always been a critical issue in coastal Louisiana. Much of the state lies only a few feet above sea level; the highest elevation in Louisiana is only 535 feet. Much of the city of New Orleans is actually below the level of the Gulf of Mexico. No wonder, then, that the earliest European explorers, colonists, and entrepreneurs became preoccupied with “taming” the Mississippi. Wherever people settled, they built levees, channels, and canals to control the floods; they reclaimed land from the bottoms of swamps and running rivers; and they did whatever else they could to harvest the bounty of Louisiana’s deltaic Eden.

Actual and projected areas of land loss and gain in coastal Louisiana are detailed on the map above, based on a map by the Louisiana Land Change Study. Land builds up when the Mississippi, its flow slowed as it meets the still waters of the Gulf, deposits its burden of silt. Some land loss results from erosion, but the most important effect is subsidence. Silt left by flooding subsides with time, and without regular flooding to renew the layers of silt, the ground can sink low enough to become immersed in the Gulf. The areas running from just east of Morgan City, eastward to Head of Passes and the Chandeleur Islands are the ones affected by the absence of regular flooding; two centuries’ worth of levee building and flood control on the Mississippi have led to that unintended consequence. The most active areas of land buildup are the Atchafalaya Delta, south of Morgan City, and limited areas around Head of Passes, at the present mouth of the Mississippi.

Map © U.S. Geological Survey, National Wetlands Research Center

The Mississippi and other rivers, of course, are not the only threat to Louisiana’s lowlands. Every year hurricanes pose a threat from the Gulf of Mexico. The accompanying storm surges cause local, short-term flooding, but they also lead to permanent erosion of the coastal marshes and barrier islands in the Gulf, which provide the only protection for the inhabited lowlands farther inland. Louisianans have focused on river flooding for hundreds of years, yet only in the mid-1970s did the state begin to take the coastal erosion problem seriously.

The breakdown of the marshes and beaches coupled with the drainage of reclaimed lowlands remains a disaster in the making. New Orleans’s defenses would simply crumble if a truly enormous storm lingered over the city for long: a storm the size of, say, Hurricane Ivan, which made landfall along the Gulf coast of Alabama last fall, roughly 150 miles to the east. Even many residents do not realize that New Orleans is on the brink of becoming the next Atlantis, the fabled island that, according to Greek legend, sank into the sea.

Beach erosion and flooding are still not the heart of the problem facing Louisiana: subsidence of the delta plain is.
Important as they are, though, beach erosion and flooding are still not the heart of the problem facing Louisiana: subsidence of the delta plain is. Before the levees were built to channel and “control” the Mississippi and other nearby rivers, floodwaters would spread out and slow down as they flowed over the delta. When the flow slowed, the river would deposit its burden of silt, forming a new layer of earth. But the levees, which now constrict floods along a 1,200-mile corridor of the Mississippi, keep the floodwaters from spreading across the delta. Instead, the river-borne silt is lost off the edge of the continental shelf.

The delta, primarily mud that already filled the Mississippi River valley before the levees were built, is continuously being compacted under its own weight. As it compacts, it loses elevation, and without floods, no new sediments can arrive to build the land back up. In the past several hundred years, subsidence rates have ranged from a foot to four and a half feet per century.

Compounding the risk of catastrophic flooding is global climate change. Many climatologists expect such change to cause hurricanes even more frequent and more violent than the ones of the past several years. Sea levels are expected to rise by ten to twenty inches. As Louisiana’s marshes and barrier islands sink farther into the sea, the people of Louisiana could find themselves exposed to the elements. But the present trends and ominous signs of coastal land loss in Louisiana threaten much more than just the environment, economy, and people of the state. The importance of the Mississippi and, in particular, New Orleans to the commerce of the nation makes the crisis a threat to the entire United States.

The importance of the Mississippi and, in particular, New Orleans to the commerce of the nation makes the crisis a threat to the entire United States.

The threatened collapse of coastal Louisiana has been centuries, even millennia, in the making. Eighteen thousand years ago, with the end of the last ice age, sea levels began to rise dramatically. For thousands of years the great glaciers that had formed in the preceding era melted into the ocean, until, four thousand years ago, the sea level stabilized. But the Mississippi now met the sea in what had been its old valley. The river water, halted in its course by the Gulf of Mexico, no longer had the energy to carry its sediment. The sediment, falling out of the flow, began filling in the ancient river valley. The result was a subsidence-prone delta that could maintain its elevation only so long as sediment from upstream reached the delta plain each year.

Meanwhile, for thousands of years, the Mississippi Delta has undergone a process known as “delta-lobe switching.” The path the river takes to the Gulf is constantly changing, because the river is continuously drawn along the most efficient path to the Gulf [see map on opposite page]. Thus time and again the delta forms and reforms. By roughly four thousand years ago, the St. Bernard delta lobe was building up to the east of New Orleans and cut off three bays from the sea; those became lakes Maurepas, Pontchartrain, and Borgne [see map above]. The lobe terminated at the Chandeleur Islands, to the east. Geologically, though, that drainage did not last long. By roughly three thousand years ago, the Mississippi was probably also entering the Gulf via the Lafourche lobe, which lies southwest of present-day New Orleans. That delta lobe formed the region around the present-day communities of Houma, Golden Meadow, and Grand Isle.

The path the river takes to the Gulf is constantly changing, because the river is continuously drawn along the most efficient path to the Gulf.

Jolie Rouge · 08-18-2006, 03:31 PM

This is to let you know of an upcoming LPB and PBS television documentary that I think will be of interest to you.

Christina Melton, an award winning Louisiana Public Broadcasting producer has completed a powerful documentary that will air within Louisiana on public broadcasting stations on the one-year anniversary of Katrina on August 29, 2006 at 8:00 p.m. It will air again in Louisiana on September 3, 2006 at 4:00 p.m.

For those of you outside of Louisiana, Washing Away will air nationally on September 7, 2006 at 8:00 p.m. CST (9:00 p.m. EST).

Washing Away: Losing Louisiana the story of Louisiana's disappearing coastline and how this unfolding crisis affects all of America - is told through the eyes of people affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. It is narrated by academy award winner, Susan Sarandon.

You can see a preview of Washing Away at the following link. Scroll down to the bottom of the poster at the link and you can see a preview of the documentary.

http://www.lpb.org/programs/washingaway/

If you have the time, it would help if you could spread the word to your friends and contacts around the United States about this documentary.

Washing Away is a very powerful story that will help people to understand the depth of the connection between our south Louisiana culture, economy, and ecology.

Warm regards,

Kerry M. St.PÃ, Program Director

Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program

http://www.btnep.org/

Jolie Rouge · 01-02-2007, 04:06 PM

Louisiana slowly slipping into gulf
By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press Writer
Mon Jan 1, 9:47 PM ET

NEW ORLEANS - A new report by scientists studying Louisiana's sinking coast says the land here is not just sinking, it's sliding ever so slowly into the Gulf of Mexico.

The new findings may add a kink to plans being drawn up to build bigger and better levees to protect this historic city and Cajun bayou culture.

If the land is shifting — even slightly — engineers may need to take that into consideration as they build new levees and draw lines across the coast to identify areas that should and shouldn't be protected.

Researchers have known for years that the swampy land under south Louisiana is sinking (potholed streets and wobbly porches and floors are visible evidence of that) but a lateral movement of the land into the Gulf enters largely unstudied terrain.

The report, which appeared in December's Geophysical Research Letters, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Geophysical Union, says the bedrock under heavily populated southeast Louisiana is breaking away at a glacial speed — at the pace fingernails grow.

The southward movement, the study says, is triggered by deep underground faults slipping under the enormous weight of sediment dumped by the Mississippi River.

The slippage, though, is confined to a large egg-shaped area approximately 250 miles long and 180 miles wide that encompasses the delta of the Mississippi, which was built up by river deposits over the past 8,000 years, the report says.

The report was based on data collected between 1995 and 2006 by Global Positioning System stations installed in recent years to better understand the dynamic nature of this delta the French settled in 300 years ago.

"People should not be afraid that we're going to fall into the Gulf. That's not going to happen," said Roy Dokka, lead researcher and executive director of the Center for GeoInformatics at Louisiana State University.

He described the slide into the Gulf as "a kind of avalanche of material, except that it is happening very slowly. It moved about the width of two credit cards this year."

While that may seem trifling in the big picture, Dokka said engineers need to include this reality into their plans for levees, floodgates and other projects.

Windell Curole, a levee and hurricane expert who is on a state board developing a master protection plan, said the phenomenon of sinking, or subsidence, has not been "included in a big way" in the new plan but that planners are "aware of it."

"As we understand it better, we will include it," he said. "You have to be aware of the elevation issues and the rate — these things need to be in the equation."

Flood protection planners have their work cut out for them as they choose between often competing theories about what is causing Louisiana to lose land at alarming rates. Since the 1930s, more than 2,000 square miles of coast sank or eroded.

Some scientists believe oil and natural gas extraction in the middle and late 20th century caused much of the sinking; others say the land is caving in because the Mississippi River and other waterways were straightjacketed by levees, which stopped floodwaters from replenishing the soil.

And some scientists have suggested the debate over subsidence is overstated.

Torbjorn Tornqvist, an associate professor of earth and environmental sciences at Tulane University, found much of the region surprisingly stable and the rate of sinking to be at least 10 times less than previously reported.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070102/...king_louisiana

Jolie Rouge · 01-02-2007, 05:19 PM

Divers seal broken Gulf oil pipeline
By JOHN PORRETTO, AP Business Writer
Sun Dec 31, 5:18 PM ET

HOUSTON - Divers sealed a broken oil pipeline Sunday after about 44,500 gallons leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard said.

The weeklong spill about 30 miles south of Galveston was expected to have minimal effect on the environment. The oil continued to move away from land Sunday and was quickly dispersing, the Coast Guard said.

A portion of the High Island Pipeline System ruptured Dec. 24. The pipeline's owner, Houston-based Plains All American Pipeline LP, shut down the line after detecting a pressure loss in the system.

A ship trying to moor in the area, where the water is about 90 feet deep, might have dropped its anchor on the pipeline, Plains Pipeline spokesman Jordan Janak said.

It was too early to say when the line would be repaired or how much the damage will cost the company, Janak said.

The spill's size was significant, but the crude oil was a relatively light grade and is far from land, according to Greg Pollock, deputy commissioner of the Oil Spill Prevention and Response Program in the Texas General Land Office.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061231/...e_us/oil_spill

___

On the Net:

Plains All American Pipeline: http://www.paalp.com

Texas Oil Spill Prevention and Response Program: http://www.glo.state.tx.us/oilspill

Jolie Rouge · 03-05-2007, 12:36 AM

Coastal clock nears midnight
Sunday, March 04, 2007

The picture on the front page of today's paper shows how little separates New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico, and the image ought to be seared into the minds of those who care about coastal Louisiana's future.

We are not just close to danger in terms of miles. We are also close -- perilously close -- to the point of no return in dealing with the state's coastal erosion crisis. A three-day series that begins in The Times-Picayune today spells out how little time is left to reverse land loss and the devastating consequences if we do not.

Scientists interviewed for the stories say that we have 10 years or less to create more wetlands than we are losing. If that doesn't happen, the cost of repair and the time needed to accomplish it will be overwhelming.

The urgency of their warnings stands in contrast to the slow pace and insufficient scope of what's been done so far to restore the coast and even what is on the drawing board. For every square mile that the state has created since serious restoration efforts began in 1989, another five have been lost.

Cypress swamp, marshes, ridges and barrier islands reduce storm surge, and the loss of those protective buffers have made our coastline far more vulnerable.

Louisianians need to understand this issue so that we can speak up -- loudly -- about the need to save our homes and communities and the assets that the entire nation relies on, from Gulf fisheries to energy networks. It's a message the rest of the country also needs to appreciate. Reading the stories and graphics that make up "Last Chance" is a good way to begin.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/editori...020.xml&coll=1

LAST CHANCE: The fight to save a disappearing coast
We have 10 years or less the act before the loss of Louisiana's wetlands is irreversible
Sunday, March 04, 2007
By Bob Marshall

The satellite map in Kerry St. Pe's office shows the great sweep of marshes protecting New Orleans from the Gulf in bright red, a warning they will vanish by the year 2040, putting the sea at the city's doorstep.

Coastal scientists produced the map three years ago.

They now know they got it wrong. "People think we still have 20, 30, 40 years left to get this done. They're not even close," said St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which seeks to save one of the coast's most threatened and strategically vital zones. "Ten years is how much time we have left -- if that."

That new time frame for when the Gulf could reach New Orleans' suburbs sharply reduces projections that have stood for more than three decades. Unless the state rapidly reverses the land loss, coastal scientists say, by the middle of the next decade the cost of repair likely will be too daunting for Congress to accept -- and take far too long to implement under the current approval process.

Interviews with the leading coastal scientists, as well as state and federal officials, brought no disagreement with that stark new prognosis. And while the predictions stand at odds with nearly a decade of official optimism, scientists said the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina prompted them to voice private concerns that have been growing in recent years. "I think that shocked us as much as any other group," said Robert Twilley, director of Louisiana State University's Gulf restoration initiative who has worked on the issue for years. "I think our concern now is that we may have contributed to false optimism."

Unless, within 10 years, the state begins creating more wetlands than it is losing -- a task that will require billions of dollars in complex and politically sensitive projects -- scientists said a series of catastrophes could begin to unfold over the next decade.

In 10 years, at current land-loss rates:

-- Gulf waves that once ended on barrier island beaches far from the city could be crashing on levees behind suburban lawns.

-- The state will be forced to begin abandoning outlying communities such as Lafitte, Golden Meadow, Cocodrie, Montegut, Leeville, Grand Isle and Port Fourchon.

-- The infrastructure serving a vital portion of the nation's domestic energy production will be exposed to the encroaching Gulf.

-- Many levees built to withstand a few hours of storm surge will be standing in water 24 hours a day -- and facing the monster surges that come with tropical storms.

-- Hurricanes approaching from the south will treat the city like beachfront property, crushing it with forces like those experienced by the Mississippi Gulf Coast during Katrina.

The entire nation would reel from the losses. The state's coastal wetlands, the largest in the continental United States, nourish huge industries that serve all Americans, not just residents of southeastern Louisiana. Twenty-seven percent of America's oil and 30 percent of its gas travels through the state's coast, serving half of the nation's refinery capacity, an infrastructure that few other states would welcome and that would take years to relocate. Ports along the Mississippi River, including the giant Port of New Orleans and the Port of South Louisiana in LaPlace, handle 56 percent of the nation's grain shipments. And the estuaries now rapidly turning to open water produce half of the nation's wild shrimp crop and about a third of its oysters and blue claw crabs. Studies show destruction of the wetlands protecting the infrastructure serving those industries would put $103 billion in assets at risk.

Despite such dire threats, the most disturbing concern may be this: Coastal restoration efforts have been under way for two decades, but not a single project capable of reversing the trend currently awaits approval.

The modest restoration efforts already under way have no chance of making a serious impact, experts say. "It's like putting makeup on a corpse," said Mark Schexnayder, a regional coastal adviser with LSU's Sea Grant College Program who has spent 20 years involved in coastal restoration.

Decades after scientists alerted the nation to the problem, the Gulf not only continues to eat into the coast, its appetite remains insatiable: For every square mile the state has created since 1989, when serious restoration efforts started, the Gulf has devoured 5 more miles. Looking at just the wetlands surrounding New Orleans, the prognosis grows even more ominous, because these are the areas with the highest rates of loss on the coast.

Congress provided a note of hope last year, voting the state a permanent 37.5 percent slice of offshore oil revenues for coastal restoration work. But full financing -- some $650 million annually -- won't kick in until 2017. During the critical next decade, the state will be receiving only about $20 million a year, a pittance in the face of a problem that will require tens of billions of dollars to solve. Although the state could borrow against future revenues, scores of logistical and political hurdles remain.

St. Pe and others say 10 years will be too late for many coastal communities; they'll have to be moved within the next decade if serious land-building hasn't already started. "If we aren't building land I can walk on inside of 10 years, we'll be moving communities," St. Pe said. "It's already the witching hour for a lot of these places, and a lot of other places are next."

The demise will not come only as a steady south-to-north movement of shorelines melting away from the pounding of waves. Subsidence and saltwater intrusion will also eat away marshes from the inside. Like a digital image rapidly losing pixels, small holes appear in the marsh and then grow larger as almost every high tide and strong wind carries away more plants and soil. Soon the holes join to form large lagoons, which, in turn, merge with nearby lakes and bays.

That reality becomes disturbingly clear from the window of an airplane. Vast sections of the state's majestic marshes, once spread across the sportsman's paradise like a thin veil of green lace, have been swallowed by the sea. The water now pushes against the city's boundaries and spreads unbroken to the southern horizon.

Jolie Rouge · 03-05-2007, 12:37 AM

Too little, too late

The arrival of a tipping point in the coast's demise has long been predicted.

As early as the 1970s, researchers had documented the scope of the state's coastal land loss. They knew the causes: a combination of levee construction, which prevented rivers from rebuilding deltas, and the thousands of canals dredged across the fragile wetlands, primarily at the behest of oil, gas and shipping.

Although the erosion imperiled the entire coast, it especially threatened the wetlands around New Orleans, where loss rates in the 1970s soared above 50 square miles per year. Whole sections of the Terrebonne and Barataria estuaries south and west of New Orleans and the Lake Borgne-Breton Sound area to the east of the city rapidly washed out to sea.

Despite that knowledge, the state did not officially commit to coastal restoration until 1989, with the creation of a trust fund to pay for projects. But during the next 15 years, most proposals were stifled by lack of financing and the conflicting concerns of competing wetland user groups such as commercial fishers and oyster harvesters, the oil and gas industry, property owners and developers.

Since the 1970s, scientists at state and federal agencies have supported a parade of legislation they hoped would finance various plans for a goal collectively known as "coastal restoration." Yet they knew the projects they advocated -- usually unsuccessfully -- would not actually stop the loss.

That includes even the massive $14 billion Louisiana Coastal Area Plan developed by the state and the Army Corps of Engineers five years ago.

Coastal advocates were appalled when the Bush administration promised only $1.9 billion to start the program two years ago. Yet St. Pe and others involved in developing the plan now concede that even if the state got the $14 billion tomorrow, the cumulative impact would not come close to building wetlands at a rate faster than they are being lost. "Everyone who has been involved in this has known for 20 years the projects we were involved in wouldn't reverse this trend," St. Pe said. "But you didn't want to speak out because you were committed at least to getting your idea -- something -- done."

Katrina has sparked an outbreak of frank urgency among scientists. "I'm concerned we've built a level of expectation of restoration among residents in many vulnerable communities that is simply not warranted by what we can deliver," said Twilley, who anticipates the state soon will have to give up on restoring the marshes protecting many communities. "People have a right to know that," he said.

Years of inaction

By the time Katrina struck in 2005, the few meager state and federal restoration efforts that escaped political purgatory had not only failed to reverse land loss, they didn't even slow it down. The impact of the big storm may finally have galvanized public opinion, but those years of inaction have taken a toll that could prove fatal to the hopes of rebuilding critical basins near the city, experts now say.

For nearly 30 years, those hopes depended on moving sediment from the rivers into the remains of the wetlands infrastructure, what UNO coastal scientist Denise Reed calls "the skeleton" of the system that once stretched from the city south to Grand Isle.

The skeleton included the natural levee ridges of ancient bayous, barrier islands, reefs and large marsh islands, all of which could trap and hold sediment and create a foundation for land growth. Even submerged, those "bones" would have provided critical help. But as the decades passed without action, many of those bones have been eroded by the relentless pounding of waves and the subsidence of the delta. Bays that once could trap sediment now are just open bodies of water, growing larger and deeper by the year. In 10 more years, experts said, the size of many bays might require an amount of fill that would be difficult to finance. "Sure, with enough money, you could build projects large enough to build land in that environment, but that isn't likely to be forthcoming," said Donald Boesch, a New Orleans native and expert on the state's estuaries who serves as president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "That's why I say we have 10 years left to get this done," he said, echoing St. Pe and others.

Losing Barataria basins

No area is more imperiled than the wetlands of the Barataria-Terrebonne basins, directly south of New Orleans -- the weakest link in the metro area's hurricane defense.

While engineers say they can protect the city's northern flank by controlling storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain with floodgates or other barriers across key passes, no such option exists to the south. The Barataria estuary is simply too large. It stretches in a wide arc along the Mississippi River's west bank, from the freshwater marshes behind Marrero and Westwego, south past Lafitte to Grand Isle, including Belle Chasse, Port Sulphur, Empire and Venice near the mouth of the Mississippi.

Before 1940, Barataria was a trusted storm-fighter, an almost solid mass of cypress swamp, marsh, barrier islands and ridges providing nearly 80 miles of hurricane buffer between the city and the open Gulf.

Since then, the Barataria basins have suffered the greatest rates of land loss in the state. Maps of the region are filled with names of communities that no longer exist, and once-vast marsh islands that are now open water.

Anglers like Joe Courcelle of Jesuit Bend routinely find themselves operating their fishing boats over spots their charts show as solid land. "We're always fishing 'used-to-bes,' " he said. "This used to be Bird Island. This used to be Manila Village."

The quickening pace of erosion has been impossible to ignore for some scientists involved in the fight, because it has literally reached their office doors. Any strong southerly wind now floods roads and yards in communities such as Montegut and Cocodrie along Louisiana 56 in Terrebonne Parish -- little more than 35 miles from the French Quarter.

That has forced researchers at the Louisiana University Marine Consortium in Cocodrie to take boats to work, and the erosion has made life ever more precarious in communities once separated from the Gulf by miles of marsh. "We can't plant gardens anymore because when we get a south wind, the tide comes out of the bayou and covers the yards and the roads," said Carolyn Johnson, who has lived in Cocodrie for 30 years. "We used to only see that with hurricanes."

Such tidal inundation has become a fact of life for almost every community outside hurricane protection levees south and west of the city. The imperiled wetlands to the east offer only slightly more protection to St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. Although the land base there better resists erosion, projects such as the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet shipping channel have weakened that buffer and exposed large developed areas to floods. "The enemy is at the gates," said Jimmy Johnston, who recently retired as chief of the spatial analysis branch of the U.S. Geological Service National Wetlands Research Center, which uses maps and satellite photos to track changes in landscape. "The Barataria estuary is just a disaster. Anyone who thinks we've got 10 years left over there is dreaming."

Aggressive advance

Since scientists first addressed the problem in the 1970s, they have stressed the need for quick action because of the aggressiveness of the sea's inland advance.

As the amount of open water grows, winds build larger waves that strike shorelines with greater force, increasing the rate of erosion. And that results in exponential acceleration: The larger the problem gets, the faster it gets even larger.

St. Pe uses a brief animation that graphically depicts the calamity now unfolding south of the city. Marshes that appear solid in the early 1900s are pocked with holes that slowly grow larger until the 1990s, when the pace dramatically speeds up. By 2020, the expanse of open water is almost unbroken from Lafitte to Grand Isle, Venice to Golden Meadow. "That's where we are right now," St. Pe said of the last 10 seconds in the animation. "We had opportunities in the 1980s to really stop this, to get ahead of the curve. And people still don't seem to realize this isn't something we can wait on. While we were arguing over what to do, the process was gaining speed."

. . . . . . .

Bob Marshall can be reached at bmarshall@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3539.

Staff writers Mark Schleifstein and Matthew Brown contributed to this article.

http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpa...190.xml&coll=1

Jolie Rouge · 03-08-2007, 01:31 AM

The Times-Picayune Predicts the Future, Again
Harry Shearer Wed Mar 7, 8:37 PM ET

In 2002, New Orleans' only daily ran a series that predicted the chilling results of a major hurricane hitting the Crescent City. It was not pretty, but it was not what actually happened in 2005, when a less-than-ultimate storm sideswiped the city, but the hurricane protection system gave way. Now the paper takes on the bigger issue of vanishing wetlands in Louisiana in a five-part series running this week. As some commenters to my posts have consistently pointed out, it's foolish to build a better levee system without a serious, expensive, systematic commitment to restoring the wetlands that have disappeared, basically, on our watch. Somebody ginned up the political support for federal money to "rebuild the Everglades", so the job of ginning up the political support for rebuilding the Louisiana wetlands could well start with people reading this series.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/200...uto4_t.Mz8B2YD

Jolie Rouge · 07-17-2007, 01:37 AM

Saving coast a long battle
Advocate Opinion page staff
Published: Jul 16, 2007

The recent death of Mike Dunne, a longtime reporter for The Advocate, marks the passing of a great champion of Louisiana’s endangered coastline. This past spring, Dunne received the first America’s Wetland Conservationist of the Year award for his stories on threats to Louisiana’s coast. He was also the co-author, with Bevil Knapp, of “America’s Wetland: Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast.”

The week that Dunne died, the continuing urgency of Louisiana’s coastal problems was underscored in a roundtable discussion of the issue on the public affairs show, “Focus on Louisiana.”

Louisiana is in a race against the clock to preserve its coastal marshes, the show’s panel of experts agreed. The coastal restoration episode of “Focus on Louisiana” was the sixth in the nine-part public affairs series, sponsored by the Council for a Better Louisiana and Cox Communications. Information about the series is available on the Internet at http://www.cabl.org or at http://www.cox.com/batonrouge.

Experts estimate the state loses a football field of marshland every 38 minutes. Since 1930, the amount of wetlands lost in Louisiana has been greater than the entire land mass of Rhode Island. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone wiped out 217 square miles of wetlands.

Sidney Coffee, executive assistant to the governor for coastal activities, told fellow panelists that the state’s comprehensive plan for coastal restoration and protection will take at least 30 years and as much as $55 billion to complete.

University of New Orleans geology and geophysics Professor Denise Reed said a lot of mistakes made during the past century helped create the coastal land-loss problem. Levees were built to stop flooding from the Mississippi River, which limited the river’s ability to bring land-replenishing sediment to coastal areas. Channels were carved into the marshes to accommodate commercial fishing boats, and oil and gas barges and tankers.

“The marshes are hanging on by their fingernails at the minute,” Reed said. “We have to change that. We need to get the river back replenishing the system so they don’t have to hang on by their fingernails — so they can be healthy, vibrant systems for generations to come.”

The economic and ecological case for preserving Louisiana’s wetlands is compelling.

Louisiana’s wetlands produce more than 30 percent of the nation’s commercial fisheries, and they support the production of more than 25 percent of all the oil and gas consumed in the United States. Ninety-five percent of all the marine species in the Gulf of Mexico spend at least part of their life cycle in Louisiana’s wetlands. Louisiana’s coastal marshes host more than 5 million migratory waterfowl, as well as 70 rare, threatened or endangered species.

But beyond the statistics, the loss of coastal areas also exacts a deeply human toll. Panelist Stephen Smith, an environmental engineer from Houma, said the land loss already is affecting the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

“Frankly, it’s heartbreaking, when you leave Baton Rouge and you drive to Montegut to see a guy like Roland Pitre,” Smith said. “He’s a guy I was with two days ago who’s walking in water in the parking lot of his business, literally, on a daily basis, because the wind is blowing out of the south. How does it feel? It’s heartbreaking.”

Reed said scientists have concluded that there’s a future for Louisiana’s coastal marshes, but action must be taken now.

Recent advances in federal funding for coastal restoration are a good first step. But Louisiana must make coastal restoration a consistent priority. Otherwise, there might come a day, quite soon, when the cause will be irreversibly lost.

http://www.2theadvocate.com/opinion/8521542.html

Jolie Rouge · 06-21-2008, 01:32 AM

Floodwaters to widen 'dead zone' in Gulf of Mexico
By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer
Fri Jun 20, 4:02 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Floodwaters loaded with farm runoff are heading down the Mississippi River, and scientists fear the deluge will dramatically increase this summer's dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, covering an area the size of Maryland.

The dead zone is a region of the gulf that becomes starved for oxygen during much of the summer and cannot support fish or other sea life.

There are hundreds of dead zones around the world that wreak havoc with marine ecology and cut off vast areas for commercial fishing. The zone in the gulf is the largest in the Western Hemisphere.

"It's going to be a very interesting summer out there just because of this," said Steven DiMarco, a professor of oceanography at Texas A&M University. "The last time something like this happened, we did see a huge difference" in the size of the dead zone from one year to the next.

The zone off the Louisiana and Texas coasts was first seen in 1972. Its size varies each year, but it has tended to grow over the decades, with a major jump in 1993, after the last big Mississippi River flood.

That flood made the oxygen problem substantially worse, which may happen again this year, DiMarco said Friday.

Even before the flooding, scientists had predicted that the gulf this summer would see its largest-ever dead zone — more than 10,000 square miles. Now experts say it's likely to be even bigger.

Oxygen in the dead zone is depleted by excess nutrients, mostly nitrates from farm fertilizer runoff, that cause algae blooms. After the algae dies, bacteria on the bottom feast on the remains, removing crucial oxygen from the water.

The dead zone in the gulf forms in early summer and lasts through early fall.

This year's massive floods will bring a heavier load of fertilizer into the gulf, DiMarco said.

But it's more than the nitrates. The trillions of gallons of floodwater help trap the oxygen-depleted water near the gulf floor. The fresh water, which stays at the surface because it is less dense, forms a physical barrier that keeps oxygen in the air from mixing with the water covering the dead zone area, DiMarco said.

Scientists are just starting to study how the increasing size of the dead zone is affecting fish.

Think of a giant corridor from Des Moines to Chicago and "you took a great big piece of Saran Wrap over all that area and sucked all the oxygen out," said Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. "You would have a big problem."

Even without the flooding, signs from early spring flooding and heavy fertilizer use were pointing to a record year for the dead zone, said Louisiana State University professor R. Eugene Turner. Earlier this month, using data from before the floods, Turner predicted the zone would break the 10,000-square-mile mark. Last year it covered 7,900 square miles.

Scientists are also worried that the jump in corn production triggered by heightened demand for ethanol fuel could worsen the dead zone because of the increased use of fertilizers. The big question is whether it will make the zone larger, cause it to last longer or become more oxygen-starved, or some combination of those, DiMarco said.

In May, nearly 500 million pounds of nitrates flowed down the Mississippi, Rabalais said. The algae bloom — the first step of dead zones — started a month early this year, in February, she said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080620/...unAQbr.KOs0NUE

Jolie Rouge · 07-23-2008, 02:13 PM

Researcher says Gulf dead zone bigger than ever
By MICHAEL GRACZYK, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jul 23, 5:39 AM ET

HOUSTON - A "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas-Louisiana coast this year is likely to be the biggest ever and last longer than ever before, with marine life affected for hundreds of miles, a scientist warned.

"It's definitely the worst we've seen in the last five years," said Steve DiMarco, a Texas A&M University professor of oceanography who for 16 years has studied the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, so named because the oxygen-depleted water can kill marine life.

The phenomenon is caused when salt water loses large amounts of oxygen, a condition known as hypoxia that is typically associated with an area off the Louisiana coast at the mouth of the Mississippi River. The fresh water and salt water don't mix well, keeping oxygen from filtering through to the sea bottom, which causes problems for fish, shrimp, crabs and clams.

This year's dead zone has been aggravated by flood runoff from heavy spring rains and additional runoff moving into the Gulf from record floods along the Mississippi.

DiMarco, joined by researchers from Texas A&M and the University of Georgia, just returned from an examination of 74 sites between Terrebonne and Cameron, La. He said the most severe hypoxia levels were recorded in the mid-range depths, between 20 and 30 feet, as well as near the bottom of the sea floor at about 60 feet.

Some of the worst hypoxic levels occurred in the western Gulf toward the state line.

"We saw quite a few areas that had little or no oxygen at all at that site," DiMarco said Tuesday. "This dead zone area is the strongest we've seen since 2004, and it's very likely the worst may be still to come.

"Since most of the water from the Midwest is still making its way down to the Gulf, we believe that wide area of hypoxia will persist through August and likely until September, when it normally ends."

Last year, DiMarco discovered a similar dead zone off the Texas coast where the rain-swollen Brazos River emptied into the Gulf.

The zone off Louisiana reached a record 7,900 square miles in 2002. A recent estimate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Louisiana State University shows the zone, which has been monitored for about 25 years, could exceed 8,800 square miles this year, an area roughly the size of New Jersey.

DiMarco said a tropical storm or hurricane likely would have no impact on this year's zone, believed to be caused by nutrient pollution from fertilizers that empty into rivers and eventually reach the Gulf.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080723/...6GA7Sz7XGs0NUE