Wetlands Could Have Protected Louisiana
September 18th, 2005September 8, 2005 ? According to Valsin Marmillon, spokesman for America’s Wetland: Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana, human activity responsible for the coastal erosion and receding wetlands in Louisiana, deprived the southern US state of its natural storm barrier, that could have mitigated the effects of Hurricane Katrina.
“Because of continuing land loss, many of coastal Louisiana’s populated areas, including New Orleans, are almost completely exposed to the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. “The sad irony of the situation is that the Mississippi River levees, which were constructed to protect lives in the 1930s, have had the unintended consequence of laying waste to the very wetlands that are the state’s greatest natural protection.”
Since levees that were built after a series of deadly floods in 1927, more than 5,000 square kilometers (1,982 square miles) of wetlands — an area twice the size of Luxembourg — have disappeared. Without these levees, river sediments and alluvial deposits — 50 percent of which flow out to the ocean — could have maintained and extended marshlands in the Mississippi delta as a natural barrier to the hurricanes and tropical storms that frequently strike the region.
“New Orleans won’t be safe from another storm like Katrina until we restore this hurricane buffer,” warned Robert Twilley, a wetlands specialist at the University of Louisiana who heads a two-billion-dollar project to renourish the delta. Despite the high cost of the programme, Twilley said much more money is needed to restore enough marshland to protect New Orleans: “A very rough estimate is about 14 billion,” he said (Agence France Presse, 9/8/2005).
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