It’s using that money to dredge sand offshore and pump it toward the coast to rebuild a network of disappearing barrier islands. The agency draws money from state and federal sources, but it saw a $13 billion windfall from settlements after the 2010 BP oil spill. Haase directs the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, or CPRA, formed in 2005 in response to the damage done that year by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The losses are most rapid, the USGS says, when a major hurricane hits, and a football field can be lost in minutes. Geological Survey estimates that Louisiana’s coastal parishes lost more than 2,000 square miles of land between 19, an area larger than Delaware. Next, in the 20th century, came the oil and gas industry, which sliced the wetlands to pieces with canals that provided the sea more paths to surge inland.Īnd now comes climate change, caused by burning coal, oil, and gas, which is raising sea level and intensifying hurricanes-and thus accelerating the loss of land to the sea. In preventing floods, it also starved the communities and wetlands of southern Louisiana of the rich, land-building river sediment that once kept the whole spongy region from naturally sinking into the Gulf. First, beginning in 1717, when the French built levees to protect New Orleans, came the channelization of the Mississippi River behind levees and dams. The Louisiana Coastal Master Plan, as it’s called, is a moonshot bet, the state’s last best chance to slow the self-destruction caused by three centuries of human intervention in the environment. They heard about the damaged electric grid that left New Orleans without power for days.īut then as now, as Louisiana enters another hurricane season, hoping it won’t bring the third straight year of monstrous storms, Haase was focused on the infrastructure he himself oversees-part of a $50 billion plan to save much of the state’s coastline from disappearing off the map. As it passed, people outside Louisiana heard a lot about the threat to oil and gas platforms and refineries. Ida ended up tying the record set by Hurricane Laura a year earlier as the strongest hurricane ever to hit Louisiana.
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