Coastal Louisiana Drowning in Gulf

LEE HOCKSTADER / Washington Post 13jul03

Encroaching Salt Water Is Threatening the State's Economy and Homes

DULAC, LA—Donald Bourg is not an old man, but he has borne witness to a millennial event. He has watched the earth — hundreds of square miles of stunningly rich Louisiana land — disappear before his eyes.

In his youth it was there, verdant and solid and alive with pelicans and egrets, ducks and terns and herons. Then the land was gone, poached, swallowed and drowned by the encroaching salt water of the Gulf of Mexico.

The territory around Bourg's tiny hamlet of Dulac, in the ragged southern sole of Louisiana's boot, is in the heart of a vast disappearing act. Largely unnoticed until recently, nearly 2,000 square miles of southern Louisiana coastland simply vanished in the last two-thirds of the 20th century — the equivalent of losing Delaware, Baltimore and Washington combined. Each year, 25 to 30 square miles of marsh and dry ground sink into the gulf — in effect, a football field every half-hour. And according to recent projections, an additional 700 to 900 square miles will be swamped by 2050 unless a major drive is mounted to contain the loss.

"When I was a kid, you could put on tennis shoes and walk forever in the woods," said Bourg, a steady, sunburned man of 46. "We used to have trees and forest. There's no more of that. My dad pulled up his last pecan tree just the other day — the salt water killed it."

Few dispute that this is an environmental calamity, but for years state officials brushed it off as a fringe cause. No longer: Most of Louisiana's industrial economy is on the coast, and much of it is at risk. Over the last several years, as satellite imagery and computer projections have driven home the point, the state's bankers, oil executives, engineers and governor have awakened to the possibility of an economic disaster of epic proportions.

Louisiana's sinking coast has endangered not only the single greatest source of shrimp, oysters and other seafood outside Alaska, but also major supplies of oil and natural gas and the only deep-sea offloading terminal for supertankers in the continental United States. Water supplies are in peril; oil and gas lines are exposed. Entire coastal towns are sinking, and New Orleans is threatened as never before. And as the coast loses its protective buffer, inland areas are increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes, even minor ones.

A half-mile down the street from Bourg's house, at the pint-size boatyard he runs, Bayou Grand Caillou has breached its bank. Metallic gray water laps several feet into the machine shed, where the equipment is on platforms for its protection. His grandfather started the business toward the end of World War II, but Bourg, who began scraping barnacles off boat bottoms as a teenager, doubts it will last much longer.

"The fishing is great, the trolling is great, the people are wonderful — this is God's country, except for the water," Bourg said. "We're drowning, bud."

Now, the state is polishing a $14 billion proposal to present to Congress next year, a blueprint to halt the implosion of the world's seventh-largest delta. One of the most ambitious engineering projects in U.S. history, it would be a gargantuan network of obstructions to keep salt water out of the marshland, rebuild and reinforce barrier islands and divert millions of tons of fresh water and sediment from the Mississippi River to marshes at risk of succumbing to the gulf.

As with other environmental restorations — notably, the $8 billion federal-state effort to re-plumb the Everglades — no one is certain this one will work; one of many possible unintended consequences is damage to the state's oyster beds. But nearly everyone involved agrees that the problem cannot be reversed — only slowed — and that something has to be done.

"I've never been a tree-hugger, but that's not the issue," said R. King Milling, the patrician, silver-haired president of Whitney National Bank, whose scores of branches dot the Gulf Coast. "There's billions and billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure at stake."

Anatomy of a Disaster

Shea Penland, a coastal geologist at the University of New Orleans whose office shelves are crammed with dusty issues of the Journal of Sedimentary Research, takes a long view of what caused Louisiana's coastal marshland to start sinking.

"At the beginning," he said, "you may say it was the French who caused the problem by starting the levee system" along the Mississippi River before the Louisiana Purchase.

Starting in the 18th century, the levees — strong earthen walls along the Mississippi — were built to corset the river, contain the springtime floods that wiped out crops and channel the flow into the gulf. But the levees had another, unintended consequence: They starved hundreds of square miles of the delta land of rich river mud and silt. Over thousands of years, the river, its floodwaters and silt had built the delta. Without that nourishment, the coast began to sink or wash away because of tides, waves and storms.

In the middle of the 20th century came another major blow. Oil and gas companies sliced through the marshes, dredging thousands of miles of navigational and pipeline canals — 40 feet wide and 8 feet deep at minimum — and ridges of earth and mud dredged from the bottom were piled alongside the canals, forming dams that played havoc with the area's natural hydrology.

"Salt water comes in and kills the freshwater plants and loosens the root system, and then the mud flows away because there's nothing to hold it together," said Oliver Houck, an environmental law professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. "So there's a conversion from a very compact, tight system, like a woven rug, to open water with no rug at all."

Meanwhile, the earth itself was sinking in areas, a natural geological subsidence along the coast of perhaps three to five feet per century. But where mud and silt from the Mississippi River used to rebuild those areas, now there was none. In the 1970s, coastal land loss amounted to 40 square miles annually — an area larger than Manhattan.

Few realized the scale of the destruction under way or the value of the land being decimated. Environmentalism was in its infancy, and satellite imagery was not yet widely available. The marshes were considered an attractive wasteland — pleasant for hunters and trappers but worth little intrinsically. Besides, two of the major contributors to accelerating land loss — the Army Corps of Engineers and the oil and gas industry — were two of the leading employers in Louisiana. They had broken no laws, and almost no one questioned their methods.

Over time, the rate of land loss slowed slightly — but only because there was less exposed land to lose. As scientists grasped the sweep of the devastation, gallows humor took hold. Southern Louisiana was not Ground Zero, they said. It was Zero Ground.

Swamped

Isle de Jean Charles sounds like an island. It wasn't one when it was named, but some days now it is.

A scruffy, mud-poor hamlet of about 200 people, Isle de Jean Charles sits a few miles inland on what was once a ridge amid a lush green carpet of marsh. The marsh has sunk, and the three-mile road to Isle de Jean Charles is more like a causeway, crossing open water that laps onto its shoulder in high wind or, in a storm, sloshes right over it.

The road was elevated by two feet in 1999, at a cost of $2 million, but few people think that will save Isle de Jean Charles for long. Most realize the place is living on borrowed time — "like the frog that was put in hot water, and never knew it was heating up till it got boiled," said the Rev. Roch Naquin, 70, a retired Catholic priest who has lived in Isle de Jean Charles all his life.

"As a boy, we planted potatoes, beans, corn and sugar cane here across the road, cabbage too — we had 200 feet of land over there," he said, nodding his chin at the road and the watery sprawl beyond. "Now all that's left is salt marsh, and it's open water much of the time."

Naquin was born in a one-room shack on the same property where he still lives, and he stayed put in his birthplace, a common trait of this part of Louisiana — and one that is now under threat.

Last fall, Hurricane Lili raged ashore, and Isle de Jean Charles was swamped by five feet of water. Since then, contractors have made a killing raising houses onto stilts to the government-recommended elevation, 11 feet above sea level.

Gradually, the advancing gulf waters are prying loose the grip the Cajun and Houma Indian trappers, oystermen, shrimpers, crabbers and oil workers have maintained on this land for so long. Southern Louisiana, with its 2 million residents, is one of the few parts of the country where people are moving inland, away from the coast. That movement is eroding one of the nation's most distinctive ethnic pockets, in a place that has clung tenaciously to its own language, cuisine and character.

As part of the drive to contain storm damage, the Army Corps of Engineers is embarking on a $700 million project to build 70 miles of levees, nine to 15 feet high, across southern Terrebonne Parish. But Isle de Jean Charles will lie outside the planned path of levees, at the mercy of the gulf's relentless advance.

"They said there was too much water, and that's why we're not included," said Naquin, his eyes downcast. "There's been talk about evacuating us."

Engineering a Fix

Thirty years ago, Port Fourchon, at the very southern tip of Lafourche Parish, consisted of little more than a sport fishing outfit, a mud drilling company and a brothel. Now it is a vast industrial moonscape serving as an all-purpose depot for much of the offshore drilling that takes place in the Gulf of Mexico.

"If we lose Fourchon, the Louisiana economy would lose its viability," said Ted Falgout, who, as executive director of the Greater Lafourche Port Commission, is a sort of overseer of one of the Western Hemisphere's greatest remaining energy frontiers.

Losing Port Fourchon might also be felt way beyond Louisiana's borders, in the wallets of every American who drives a car.

Nearly a third of the nation's domestically produced oil — and even more of its natural gas — now comes from the Gulf of Mexico, most of it from off Louisiana's coast. A thousand trucks and 200 ships and boats move through Port Fourchon every day, carrying equipment used by offshore drilling platforms.

Port Fourchon also functions as the main service station for the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, the LOOP, a deep-sea parking lot 18 miles off the coast where supertankers offload a million barrels of oil a day. The only U.S. facility of its kind, the LOOP handles about 13 percent the nation's foreign oil supply.

If it shut down for two weeks or more, the price of a gallon of gas could soar to $2, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Two storms last fall, one a moderate hurricane and the other a tropical storm, swamped the 17-mile road that is Port Fourchon's lifeline, Louisiana Highway 1, which is three to four feet above sea level. Port operations were closed for seven days, which experts believe was one factor in driving up gasoline prices.

Roads, bridges, ship and fabrication yards and chemical and petrochemical plants, as well as thousands of oil and gas wellheads, also are peppered throughout southern Louisiana, providing much of the wealth that one of the nation's five poorest states has generated. Many are vulnerable to storms and flooding as never before.

"The mundane reality is that ultimately the insurance companies will decide that the deterioration renders the coast uninsurable," said Milling, the Whitney National Bank president. "Our tax base shall literally wash away."

Last year, Milling agreed to lead Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster's (R) commission on saving the coast. His presence at the commission's helm was a signal that the state's power elite — alarmed at the threat not just to their fishing lodges but to their investments — had signed on to the project.

The state has embarked on a privately funded, $10 million public relations campaign to prepare the ground for its multibillion-dollar request to Congress. Shell Oil Co. has provided a third of the financing for the campaign, which bills itself as a drive to save "America's Wetland." Louisiana's two senators have been enlisted in the cause, as have star athletes and environmentalists.

Support has been galvanized for mammoth projects taking shape within the $14 billion proposal being readied for presentation to Congress next year. Yet behind the we-must-act-now facade of unanimity, there are incipient doubts about whether the blueprints for saving Louisiana's wetlands are feasible. And even if they are, there are fears that the remedies themselves may trigger massive new environmental and social upheavals for decades to come.

One focus for those concerns is a proposal to build a colossal, double-barreled canal — 90 miles long, wider than a football field and 45 feet deep — that would carry massive volumes of fresh water, sediment and mud from the Mississippi River south toward Port Fourchon. The Bayou Lafourche conveyance channel could cost more than $2 billion, take more than 20 years to construct and — if the optimists are right — help to rebuild and revive vast tracts of once-vibrant marsh. It's the largest of dozens of such projects now under consideration and has the backing of major businesses in the area that could benefit from having a major new waterway to the river.

But there are doubts about whether the volume of sediment, diminished over the decades by upstream reservoirs and dams, is sufficient to replenish the sinking marsh. There are fears that the channel could become a conduit for further saltwater intrusions into the wetlands.

Another concern is the effect on Louisiana's oyster industry, the largest in the country. If fresh water suddenly began gushing into the bays and inlets where the oyster beds thrive on a moderate range of salinity, could the families that have lived off oysters for generations survive?

The oyster question is politically explosive. Previous freshwater diversions from the Mississippi, smaller than the ones now discussed, destroyed oyster beds east of the river and triggered lawsuits against the state. Sympathetic juries handed the oystermen judgments amounting to about $2 billion, which is likely to be tied up in appeals for years.

For Foster, the 73-year-old governor who is nearing the end of eight years in office, the campaign to save the coast is a last hurrah. He said he had woken up late to the peril.

"It's so big that it was hard to comprehend what was happening." he said. "This thing is moving fast. We're not very far from losing major roads, major settlements."

For now, the notion of rescuing the coast is suffused with questions: Will Louisiana's sordid, graft-ridden political past undercut its efforts to get funding from Congress? How much would $14 billion in land-protecting projects even accomplish? Perhaps the biggest of all: Is it even possible to contain so enormous a hemorrhage of coastal land against the forces of nature and man's environmental folly?

Most experts believe the fight against nature will be expensive, difficult and unlikely to regain lost ground.

"Reversal is not feasible," said Penland, the University of New Orleans coastal geologist. "The question is: Can we even stabilize?"

Special correspondent Karin Brulliard contributed to this report.