Word: louisiana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Residents along the Louisiana Gulf Coast began to leave Friday. Preparations began a couple of days before that with residents boarding windows, buying generators, batteries and water, and filling up their cars with gas. Traffic mixed with evacuees and fans headed to the first Louisiana State University football game of the season started to back up on I-10 West toward Baton Rouge Friday evening. A drive that normally takes a little more than an hour took about two and a half hours...
...take $15 billion to bring the entire system up to the 100-year level, and so far it has only spent about $2 billion. "That should give you an idea of how much work there still is to do," says Garret Graves, who oversees coastal protection and restoration for Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal...
...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...
...even if the coast-killing Morganza alignment is scuttled, southern Louisiana is still losing a football field worth of wetlands every 38 minutes. It will not be enough to stop making the problem worse; at some point there will have to be some real restoration. Southern Lousiana began to disappear in the 20th century after the Corps imprisoned the Mississippi River and converted it into a barge channel that no longer deposited sediment into coastal marshes; this NASA satellite image shows that sediment cascading into the Gulf of Mexico during the Mississippi floods this spring. "You can see on that...
This week, all Louisiana will have to hope that Gustav's haymaker misses the mark. But in the future, the coast is going to have to relearn how to block a punch...