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From:
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[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On
Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005
2:30 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Futurework] Gone with
the Water
The catastrophe in Mississippi and Louisiana was
predicted and feared for some time. FEMA officials, besides environmental
scientists and civil engineers, dreaded what they’ve compared to a 9/11
or major California earthquake happening.
Already some on the RRR (radical religious right) are claiming that Hurricane Katrina, the
eye of which depicted on weather channels they say resembled a first trimester
fetus, was God’s punishment for the “baby murder clinics” in
New Orleans and its sinful neighbors. No doubt some will also blame the casinos
and the Mardi Gras culture.
Below are key story extracts from an October 2004
National Geographic article about the disaster-in-waiting in New Orleans.
It’s a prescient depiction of an engineer’s nightmare, and the
price we will pay, not for gambling and abortion clinics, but for ignoring
environmental precautionary measures while catering to the avarice of money
greed and energy foolishness. In the human, economic and ecological disaster
yet unfolding, let us hope that a consensus forms to restore and rebuild a
wiser, more sustainable redevelopment. KwC
Gone
with the Water
The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh
in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the
nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.
“The storm hit Breton
Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into
Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds
back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies
below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water
poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly,
over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of
the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on
Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet
(eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon
contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the
flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued.
It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried
under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000
were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United
States.
When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But
the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management
Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats
to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist
attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters
in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.
…Just as the risks of a killer storm are rising, the city's
natural defenses are quietly melting away. >From the Mississippi border to the Texas state line,
Louisiana is losing its protective fringe of marshes and barrier islands faster
than any place in the U.S. Since the 1930s some 1,900 square miles (4,900
square kilometers) of coastal wetlands—a swath nearly the size of
Delaware or almost twice that of Luxembourg—have vanished beneath the
Gulf of Mexico. Despite nearly half a billion dollars spent over the past
decade to stem the tide, the state continues to lose about 25 square miles (65
square kilometers) of land each year, roughly one acre every 33 minutes.
A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the
coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually
giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence.
The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual
deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were
raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the
marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s
engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals
through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches
sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing
lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.
While such loss hits every bayou-loving
Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in
the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery
world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or
transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural
gas, and ranks second
only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look
like a petting zoo by comparison.
Such high stakes compelled a host of
unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders,
and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect
what's left. Drafted by
the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially
estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much
as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked
at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars
over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way,
Congress must authorize the money before work can begin.
…You can smell the petrodollars burning at Port Fourchon,
the offshore oil industry's sprawling home port on the central Louisiana coast.
Brawny helicopters shuttle 6,000 workers to the rigs from here each week, while
hundreds of supply boats deliver everything from toilet paper to drinking water
to drilling lube. A thousand trucks a day keep the port humming around the
clock, yet Louisiana 1, the two-lane highway that connects it to the world,
seems to flood every other high tide. During storms the port becomes an island,
which is why port officials like Davie Breaux are clamoring for the state to
build a 17-mile-long (27-kilometer-long) elevated highway to the port. It's
also why Breaux thinks spending 14 billion dollars to save the coast would be a
bargain.
"We'll go to war
and spend billions of dollars to protect oil and gas interests overseas,"
Breaux says as he drives his truck past platform anchors the size of two-story
houses. "But here at home?" He shrugs. "Where else you gonna
drill? Not California. Not Florida. Not in ANWR. In Louisiana. I'm third
generation in the oil field. We're not afraid of the industry. We just want the
infrastructure to handle it."
The oil industry has been good to Louisiana, providing low
taxes and high-paying jobs. But such largesse hasn't come without a cost,
largely exacted from coastal wetlands. The most startling
impact has only recently come to light—the effect of oil and gas withdrawal
on subsidence rates.
For decades geologists believed that the petroleum deposits were too deep and
the geology of the coast too complex for drilling to have any impact on the
surface. But two years
ago former petroleum geologist Bob Morton, now with the U.S. Geological Survey,
noticed that the highest rates of wetland loss occurred during or just after
the period of peak oil and gas production in the 1970s and early 1980s. After
much study, Morton concluded that the removal of millions of barrels of oil,
trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, and tens of millions of barrels of
saline formation water lying with the petroleum deposits caused a drop in
subsurface pressure—a theory known as regional depressurization. That led nearby underground faults to
slip and the land above them to slump.
"When you stick a straw in a soda and
suck on it, everything goes down," Morton explains. "That's very
simplified, but you get the idea." The phenomenon isn't new: It was first
documented in Texas in 1926 and has been reported in other oil-producing areas
such as the North Sea and Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Morton won't speculate
on what percentage of wetland loss can be pinned on the oil industry.
"What I can tell you is that much of the loss between Bayou Lafourche and
Bayou Terrebonne was caused by induced subsidence from oil and gas withdrawal.
The wetlands are still there, they're just underwater." The area Morton
refers to, part of the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, has one of the highest
rates of wetland loss in the state.
The oil industry and its consultants dispute Morton's
theory, but they've been unable to disprove it. The implication for restoration
is profound. If production continues to taper off in coastal wetlands, Morton
expects subsidence to return to its natural geologic rate, making restoration
feasible in places. Currently, however, the high price of natural gas has oil
companies swarming over the marshes looking for deep gas reservoirs. If such
fields are tapped, Morton expects regional depressurization to continue. The
upshot for the coast, he explains, is that the state will have to focus
whatever restoration dollars it can muster on areas that can be saved, not
waste them on places that are going to sink no matter what.
"When you look at the broadest
perspective, short-term advantages can be gained by exploiting the environment.
But in the long term you're going to pay for it. Just like you can spend three
days drinking in New Orleans and it'll be fun. But sooner or later you're going
to pay."
See related links,
resources and bibliography here http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/feature5/
