Word: morganza
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...Cajun country of farm towns, fishing villages and oil ports that are even more exposed than New Orleans. For decades, Louisiana's southern parishes have clamored for a series of gigantic levees across the coast--a kind of Great Wall of Louisiana--starting with a 72-mile (116 km) Morganza-to-the-Gulf dike for the city of Houma and some exposed bayou towns. Keith Luke rode out Gustav in his shrimp boat; his hometown of Dulac, once nestled behind cypress swamps and marshes, is now surrounded by open water. "We need levees," Luke said after the storm. "This...
...million Morganza-to-the-Gulf levee that Congress approved last year would include Dulac, but it would also cut off 135,000 acres (55,000 hectares) of wetlands. Scientists believe it would make the coast even less safe by ravaging storm buffers, amplifying storm surges and encouraging complacency. And a preliminary Corps analysis suggests that building the levee to real 100-year standards could cost $10.7 billion, a 1,200% increase. Before Gustav, Jindal had convened a science panel to review Morganza-to-the-Gulf, and momentum has been building for an alternative alignment that would protect Houma without cutting...
...spending more money in Louisiana than in any other state, but it was wasting most of the funds on navigation boondoggles that had nothing to do with hurricane defense. Louisiana's political establishment is pushing hard for coastal restoration, but it is also pushing for the coast-killing Morganza project as well as port deepenings and other make-work projects that benefit special interests...
...Morganza no longer seems as inevitable as it did last year. The Corps has agreed to review its original cost-benefit study, and a preliminary analysis suggested that building the levee according to real 100-year standards could cost $10.7 billion - a 1,200% increase. Meanwhile, Governor Jindal has convened a science panel to review whether Morganza is consistent with restoration plans. Even Keith Magill, the editor of Houma Today, wrote a brave column suggesting that the new cost figures represented "the end of Morganza as we know it," and praising a levee alignment proposed by environmentalists that would still...
...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...