Word: coasts
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Three years to the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall, another storm is barreling toward the Louisiana coast. Are the manmade defenses around New Orleans prepared for Gustav? Afraid not. Are the marshes and cypress swamps that once provided natural protection for the Louisiana coast still vanishing? Afraid so. How should local residents feel after a manmade catastrophe followed by three years of promises? Afraid, period...
...news to report. New Orleans is still extremely vulnerable to catastrophic flooding, but it is not quite as vulnerable as it was before Katrina. And while there is still tremendous pressure to build gigantic new levees that could destroy hundreds of thousands more acres of wetlands and doom the coast in the name of saving it, those misguided plans for a Great Wall of Louisiana seem to be losing momentum...
...article for Katrina's second anniversary, I explained how the warped priorities and tragic errors of the Army Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans, and how the Corps and its allies in the political world were planning to repeat and extend some of those mistakes along the entire Louisiana coast. I'm thrilled to report that over the last year, the Corps has gently applied the brakes to those plans. That won't save the coast from Gustav; the storm is coming so soon after Katrina that there isn't much else to do except hope it weakens or misses...
...rest of the coast has received virtually no additional protection. That's why officials in Louisiana's southern parishes have been pushing for a series of gigantic levees, starting with a 72-mile project known as Morganza-to-the-Gulf. Morganza (the name of a small inland community) would protect the city of Houma as well as a series of tiny bayou towns, but it would also cut off 135,000 acres of wetlands from their natural tidal exchanges. Scientists have said the project would make the area even less safe by ravaging natural storm buffers, amplifying storm surges...
...more than three decades in the citrus business, Doug Bournique has never seen such a downpour over Florida's Treasure Coast and Space Coast regions. It's been impossible to pump the stormwater out quickly because adjacent bodies of water are also above normal level. "We're in unchartered territory. I've never seen it this wet," says Bournique, executive director of the Indian River Citrus League, which includes 900 grower-members from Palm Beach County north to the Daytona Beach area. "It really was a one-in-100-year rainfall event for this region...