Word: gulf
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...