As Louisiana slips away, 1 isle digs in

[jamotto]

Link

quote:

---

By Dahleen Glanton Tribune national correspondent

At the end of a two-lane road, surrounded by water and patches of grassy marsh, an old American Indian village dangles near the edge of the Earth.

All around it the land is sinking, pushing the tiny coastal community toward the Gulf of Mexico. Still, many of the 250 people who live here--all descendants of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians who settled the land in the 1800s--refuse to leave, despite an offer by the U.S. government to find them new homes.

"Everything here is just wasting away," said Michel Dardar, 76, a lifelong resident who, like most of his neighbors, is raising his house atop 13-foot stilts to keep floodwater out. "When I was growing up, everyone had a garden. We grew green beans, potatoes and watermelons. Now there is nothing. I don't even have a back yard anymore."

The huge loss of land in Isle de Jean Charles, about 70 miles southwest of New Orleans, is one of the most glaring examples of the coastal erosion occurring throughout southern Louisiana, home to 40 percent of the nation's wetlands. During the past 75 years, 1,900 square miles of marshland--about the size of Delaware--sank into the gulf. If nothing is done to stop it, scientists say, Louisiana could lose about 700 more square miles--a chunk the size of Chicago and Los Angeles combined--by 2050.

The problem is caused, in part, by the channeling of the Mississippi River approved in 1928, which deprived Louisiana of silt, mud and other sediment that naturally rejuvenated the marshland.

Now Louisiana officials are asking the federal government to help pay for a proposed $14 billion project to save the delta.

During the next 20 to 30 years, the project would have the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers build a massive diversion system to channel water from the Mississippi River to the dying wetlands.

The corps also would rebuild beaches and restore the barrier islands, install erosion controls, plug basins and bayous to stop the flow of salt water into the marshes and plant new vegetation. The project, expected to go before Congress this session, would be the most ambitious civil-engineering effort ever undertaken in the United States, including the current restoration of the Florida Everglades.

"We fret about the Amazon and we worry about the Nile, but within our own borders, we have a national catastrophe of huge proportion," said King Milling, chairman of the Governor's Advisory Commission on Coastal Restoration and Conservation and president of America's WETLAND Foundation. "This is the seventh-largest delta on Earth, and it is in a state of collapse. From our standpoint, there is little doubt that if we don't do something, we have over a million people whose lives and businesses are at risk."

For centuries the marshland, with its thick vegetation, served as a barrier protecting places such as Isle de Jean Charles and New Orleans from hurricanes and tropical storms. As the land is chipped away, these areas--most of which lie at or below sea level--become more vulnerable to floods.

A tropical storm could wipe out Isle de Jean Charles, and a major hurricane could sink New Orleans, killing, by Red Cross estimates, up to 100,000 people in that city. To ensure safety, the agency no longer operates hurricane relief shelters south of Interstate Highway 10, which crosses the state from New Orleans to Lake Charles.

The loss of coastal marshland, once rich with raccoons, muskrats and minks, threatens not just the American Indians but the Cajun community, which settled here in the 1760s.

What happens in coastal Louisiana ultimately could have an effect nationwide.

The deteriorating wetlands threaten Louisiana's $2.2 billion-a-year fishing industry, one of the nation's largest, with its shrimp, oysters, crabs and other seafood.

Underneath the marshland lie 36,000 miles of pipelines and holding tanks that deliver about 30 percent of the oil and natural gas consumed in the United States. The surrounding marsh protects the system, which includes the only deep-sea offloading terminal for supertankers in the United States. As the ecosystem disappears, the infrastructure becomes more exposed to elements from the gulf, threatening production as well as the price and distribution of oil and gas nationwide.

"The soil is like a big sponge that soaks up the water and sinks the land. Then the salt water from the gulf eats the vegetation," said Jerome Zeringue, executive director of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District. "We will never get back what we had, but we can return it to a viable, healthy system."

Isle de Jean Charles was not always an island. Seventy years ago it was a remote community perched on a ridge several feet above the marshland. Now salt water from the gulf encroaches from all sides, swallowing up yards, killing the greenery and submerging what is left in soggy muck.

It has always been hard to get here. Now when the rains come, it is almost impossible. Residents used to ride out the storms at home, but each year makes it easier for floodwaters from hurricanes and tropical storms to seep into their homes.

The only road, a 2-mile stretch that leads to nearby Pointe-aux-Chenes, was just a dirt path that stretched across the marsh when it was built 50 years ago. In the 1970s it was covered with blacktop, and in 1999 it was raised 2 feet. Still, in a storm or even a high tide, Island Road is submerged.

Chris Brunet, 39, whose family has lived in the community almost 200 years, remembers when two big oak trees formed an arch over the graveled street in front of his house. Now even the stumps, which were battered by storms and eaten away by salt water from the gulf, are gone. Throughout coastal Louisiana, salt water has killed almost all of the cypress trees, leaving only dried-out shells with extended limbs that bear no leaves.

For years, residents of this close-knit community had hoped it would be saved when the federal government builds a 14-foot-high hurricane levee to protect a 72-mile stretch of towns in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes from flooding.

Now they have been told their community will not be part of it.

The Army Corps of Engineers gave up trying to save the community when studies showed that extending the levee to include Isle de Jean Charles would add $100 million to the $680 million project. Officials said they could not justify the additional expenditure and offered instead to spend $8 million to move the residents within the levee area.

Though they are poor and there are no jobs or businesses in the community, many residents, particularly the older ones, refuse to leave their modest homes and trailers.

They did not get electricity until 1962, and some have lost everything and had to rebuild. They acknowledge that survival under such conditions is harder than it was in the past because the fresh water and land that sustained them as hunters and fishermen is gone.

"A lot of life has changed in the area since I was a boy. But I can't think of anything that would make me want to leave," said Brunet, who has cerebral palsy and gets around in a wheelchair. "For us, there is no other place. The land is who we are. It's our way of life."

In 2000, the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District built a 6-foot-tall levee on the east side of the island to protect houses from high tides. The district is waiting on the final permits to build a similar levee, which would basically be a dirt mound, on the west side, said Zeringue, who calls the west-side protection levee a Band-Aid solution.

Resident Harris Leonard, 48, has decided to move with his wife and two daughters to firmer ground. After a series of storms last year, Leonard placed his three-bedroom house on the island's west side on the market. The house is appraised at $57,000, he said, but he will let it go for $35,000.

"When hurricane season starts, that's when we start getting scared," said his wife, Vickie, 30, who grew up in the community. "We have evacuated so many times, and we never know what we are going to come back to. I want a yard for the kids to play in. I want to put a swing set in it. What we have now is standing water all the time, and the gnats are awful."

Many of those who have left the southernmost part of the Louisiana coast are moving to cities such as Houma. But even there, they cannot escape danger.

In the 1960s Houma was about 50 miles from the coast, according to Berwick Duval, a Houma resident and member of the Governor's Advisory Commission on Coastal Restoration and Conservation. Now, he estimated, the coast is 10 miles away.

"We are being ignored by the federal government. And I believe the U.S. has a moral obligation to help us because what we do here benefits the entire country," said Duval, adding that he has grown tired of the federal bureaucracy that stalls the project. "Why do we have to move? People who live on faults in California don't. People who live on the coast of Florida don't. We're just a small, poor place, and no one is paying attention to us."

---