New Orleans Five Years After Katrina: Rebuilding Marshes

Photo: Ken Lund

Ive gutted, restored, as well as rebuilt, though what great is which if those made up neighborhoods have been left unprotected to destiny storms?

The vessel sped through a marshes, past a BP staging area of trailers as well as mobile homes set up upon a waters corner nearby a bustling dock. Fishing boats with outstretched arms of nets sit idle, yet you cant discuss it if this is due to a spill. In a distance, column of thunderheads gathers, dim as crude.

Up until today, many of my hurricane-related proffer work in Louisiana has centered upon houses. Ive gutted, restored, as well as rebuilt, though what great is which if those made up neighborhoods have been left unprotected to destiny storms?

Louisiana loses a football margin of wetland each 38 minutes, interjection in part to channels cut for oil drilling. These healthy barriers have historically helped delayed down a wave movement topsy-turvy by big storms which pierce through in late summer, though theyre disappearing fast.

Louisiana loses a football margin of wetland each 38 minutes, interjection in part to channels cut for oil drilling.

It seems appropriate, then, to respect a fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrinas landfall during a Louisiana-Mississippi state line with a project similar to this. Ive signed up to plant marsh weed along man-dredged terraces nearby Barataria Baythe same marshes as well as islands which were once a staging ground as well as stealing place for a bandit named Jean Lafitte who in a future helped save a city of New Orleans from British takeover in a War of 1812. In fact, a locale Ive disembarked from is named Lafitte.

Im with a organisation of 6 volunteers orderly by a Barataria-Terrebone National Estuary Program. We spend a day with a elbows in a warm, soupy water, planting tufts of a weed in thick clay around a perimeters of these v-shaped t! erraces. In time, a weed will grow to cover a entire earthen terrace.

We cant work fast sufficient to keep gait with a improbably quick wetland disappearance, though Im mostly satisfied to do somethinganythingfor this fragile coast thats been beat to death by tellurian interference. Looking during a map, it seems impossible a common actions could do so most repairs to so immeasurable an area, as well as which makes me consternation if my 4 hours of planting will make a damn bit of difference.

As you head behind to shore after were accomplished planting, Im improved means to collect out a synthetic marsh terraces right away which you know what to demeanour for. And it occurs to me: if humanity has so easily exacted such great repairs in such a haphazard way, you contingency positively be able of great shift if you just get in a boats as well as get organized.

Community Connection:

Read Megans thoughts about Hurricane Katrina in her essay, Notes upon a 4th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, published in 2009 upon The Travelers Notebook.