Word: louisiana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Louisiana the cleanup of the two-part disaster is just getting started. But many of the state's best engineering and environmental minds are already looking much further down the road, at what it will take to safely maintain humankind's precarious foothold at the water's edge. Louisiana's coastal towns have vowed to rebuild, but will they ever truly be safe...
...this magnificent rodeo, starring the Army Corps of Engineers as the wranglers of an untamed river, has been plagued from the start by unintended consequences. To 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...
...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...
...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...
Others propose a general withdrawal from the disappearing wetlands and refortification behind more easily defensible lines, like Israeli settlers withdrawing from the Gaza Strip. There are simply too many precarious outposts to build walls around them all, they say. Better to build one huge hurricane levee across southern Louisiana and leave those who choose to stay outside the floodgates to look after themselves...