Word: rita
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Hurricanes Rita and Katrina will both be remembered for their crowded human calamities: the gridlocked escape from Houston, the suffering at the Superdome. But in dozens of small towns dug into the fragile ecosystems of the coastal marshes, far from the urban meltdowns, communities weren't just inflamed, they were annihilated. In Cameron Parish, La., along the border with Texas, Rita washed towns like Creole, Oak Grove and Grand Chenier into the sea. In neighboring Vermilion Parish, the residents of Pecan Island returned to find little more than a mile-wide debris field choked with dead marsh grasses...
...Rita's eye took dead aim at the already debilitated Sabine Basin, which lies between Port Arthur, Texas, and Lake...
Charles, La. Since 1930, coastal erosion and channel dredging have destroyed a third of the marshlands that once formed a bulwark between those cities and the Gulf. In some respects, the coast's best defenses were scuttled before the battle with Rita was even joined...
...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...
...Rita turned out to be much less of a disaster, and it was pretty much not a big problem, thank god,” he said...