Word: brackishness
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...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...
...Frank Minyard, doesn't hazard a guess at what lies beneath the receding waters. "We don't really know what's in the houses," Minyard says, sitting on an overturned fishing skiff in the shadow of the Superdome. He stares down an empty street as two ambulances creep through brackish waters toward Tulane University Hospital and its morgue. Near him, five men in white haz-mat uniforms wait on dry ground to collect bodies. Minyard extends his hand by way of introduction to his city. "Tough place," he says...
...tsunami, teams built raised latrines to prevent waste from contaminating the water used by refugee camps. Medical workers were also quick to spray camps for mosquitoes, which transmit malaria and dengue fever. These diseases are endemic to the region, especially at this time of the year, and the brackish pools of water left by the tsunami are perfect breeding grounds for the insects...
...makeshift lean-to made of reeds. One of the few ornaments inside his cramped quarters is a portrait of antidisease crusader Chairman Mao. Outside, the ground is littered with the shells of snails whose worms infect workers in warmer weather. Song's drinking and washing water, drawn from a brackish pit by his hut, also teems with Schistosoma worms in the summer. Naturally, Song has been diagnosed with snail fever. He doesn't feel the symptoms yet, but he knows they will come?as they have for nearly everyone he knows...
...Avoid missions during heavy rain as Chatuchak's drainage system can easily overflow. As much of the market is given over to selling pets and wild animals, you could end up wading shin-deep through feculent, brackish ooze. Not a good call if you've been scratching your infernal mosquito bites raw?unless, of course, you intend to go shopping for tetanus, septicemia or worse...