<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/28/louisiana-bayou-levee-gulf>
"On 29 August 2021, as Hurricane Ida made landfall on Louisiana’s Gulf coast,
69-year-old Windell Curole sought refuge with others at the three-story Lady of
the Sea hospital in Galliano, located 90 minutes south-west of New Orleans.
As Curole looked out the window, watching Ida’s rain hammer the grass, a
question tormented him: would the levees that encircled his community be tall
enough to hold back the water that was surging toward them?
To Curole, a lifelong resident of the area, the question was personal. Since he
was primarily responsible for the levees’ existence, it was political, too. If
I can see green out there tomorrow morning, he thought to himself, we’re good.
Across the surrounding bayou communities, home to several hundred thousand,
Ida’s gale-force winds blew out windows and ripped apart buildings. Outside the
hospital window, sheets of black tar paper began to whip across the sky. “Get
back!” a nurse yelled from behind him. Running into the hallway, Curole
realized that the airborne material was the hospital’s roof, a portion of which
had peeled away in the storm.
Communication went out around the region. Curole slept on a hospital bed on the
second floor. It would take 24 hours for him and his wife to inform one another
that they were alive, and another month before their power came back on.
This is what “land loss” – an abstract concept to many Americans – looks like.
Southern Louisiana is among the fastest-disappearing land masses in the world,
with an area about the size of Manhattan vanishing every year. Sometimes the
erasure happens gradually, as our warming planet melts ice caps, and the
geologically young soil of the Gulf of Mexico compresses under its own weight
and sinks into the sea. Other times it happens cataclysmically, as it did that
day in 2021, when Ida tore out an estimated 106 sq miles (275 sq km) of land,
devouring in an afternoon what a rising sea would have taken years to dissolve.
It wasn’t that long ago that southern Louisiana held a quarter of the world’s
wetlands, whose rich soils and teeming grassy waters not only fueled the area’s
booming fishing industry, but also functioned as natural hurricane protection
that could absorb storm surges like a sponge. But small towns and villages are
the new frontlines of weather disaster. Everything from muddy swamps to Main
Streets are subsumed by the water."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
