Word: mississippis
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...cities on the Gulf Coast have always been potential deathtraps, they have always been gold mines too--great natural ports on a warm-water gulf, perfectly situated to profit from the traffic moving up and down one of the world's most important shipping lanes: the Mississippi River. The port of South Louisiana moves more tonnage each year than any other in the nation. Add to that the commodities the Gulf produces, including nearly 30% of the nation's oil, 20% of its natural gas and a third of its fish and shellfish, and it is clear--as many have...
...sedimentary layer remains, growing heavier and heavier and ultimately subsiding under its own weight. The only way to keep the land from sinking altogether is to let the soil replenish itself with each flood. Human beings have done just the opposite, walling off New Orleans and re-engineering the Mississippi River to flow around the growing metropolis, effectively choking off the silt supply...
...coastal marshlands to sink, that tampering eventually kills the wetlands that do survive, as salt water intrudes deeper and deeper inland, killing vegetation that helps hold the soil together. The elimination of natural flooding also causes barrier islands, which line the Gulf and protect the coast, to shrink. The Mississippi in its naturally flowing state spilled silt into an intricate delta, spreading sediment east and west and fortifying the islands. Walled and dredged all the way to the Gulf, the river now dumps that silt right over the edge of the continental shelf. Geologists report that the Chandeleur Islands...
...Bayou Classic football game. When asked, my father declined to articulate precisely what made him grow so uneasy about the Big Easy, beyond his stock response: "New Orleans is changing. It's gotten so dirty and dangerous down there." It's true that he was a black Mississippi country boy raised to be suspicious and fearful of the big, bad city and had grown into a conservative, law-and-order school administrator, but clearly Daddy had started to sense that real trouble was festering down in the Crescent City...
Several days before Katrina struck, John Walker shut down production and evacuated crews from the oil and gas fields that his company operates in the Mississippi Delta. The CEO of EnerVest, a Houston energy-asset-management firm, was luckier than most. Katrina spared four of his fields, though the damage to a fifth was ugly. The storm blew a barge five miles down the bayou from its moorings in marshy Garden Island Bay. Nearly every piece of oil equipment was destroyed, and Walker estimates it will take several months to get that field running at full capacity. "When there...