BATON ROUGE, La.—After Hurricane Ida slammed into the Louisiana coast in August 2021, it took more than 100 lives and cost billions of dollars in damage. To some here, the storm was just one more justification for a desperate measure to preserve the coast by intentionally flooding parts of the state.
The storm also destroyed 68 out of 80 homes in Pointe-aux-Chenes, an Indigenous community along the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana. “I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life,” says Theresa Dardar, age 65. It took the state more than two months to bring water and electricity back to the community.
Before the Mississippi River levee system was built, the river flowed unrestrained, often flooding large parts of Louisiana. But the floodwaters also brought in sediment important to preserving the integrity of the coastal marshlands. Once the river was restricted by the Army Corps of Engineers’ network of levees after the Great Flood of 1927, the wetlands lost much of their supply of sediment and began to erode.
Figuring this out didn’t come easy. To do it, researchers had to build a Mississippi River from scratch. But not everyone is happy with this flood plan. Fishers in the area oppose the proposal because the diversion will bring freshwater into the saltwater and brackish basin, drastically reducing its salinity. They believe that key fishery species, such as brown shrimp and oysters, would die or move farther out into saltwater estuaries.
pulitzercenter Let's maybe plant ur native cypress trees back along your coasts, not sell them for pennies to Europe like cheap hoes this time, && gee idk, hundreds of years worth of studying how trees KEEP LAND IN PLACE should be maaaybe used... 🤦♀️
On average, between 1985 and 2010, Louisiana lost about a football field of coastline per hour, and the rate has not slowed
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