Book Read Free

Under a White Sky

Page 4

by Elizabeth Kolbert


  The Center for River Studies is an outpost of Louisiana State University. It’s situated not far from the actual Mississippi, in Baton Rouge, in a building that resembles a hockey rink.

  At the center’s center is a 1:6,000 replica of the delta, from the town of Donaldsonville, in Ascension Parish, to the tip of the Bird’s Foot. The model is made from high-density foam that’s been machined to mimic the region’s topography and all that’s been added to it—the levees, the spillways, the floodwalls. The size of two basketball courts, it’s sturdy enough to stand on. But when the model is running, as it was the day I showed up, it’s hard to take more than a few steps. There are large puddles representing Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne, which are not really lakes but, rather, brackish lagoons. More puddles represent Barataria Bay and Breton Sound, inlets of the Gulf, and still more puddles represent various bayous and backwaters. I pulled off my shoes and tried to walk from New Orleans to the coast. By the time I got to English Turn, my feet were wet. I stuffed my soggy socks into my pocket.

  The model delta, which represents a kind of relief map of the future, is supposed to simulate land loss and sea-level rise and to help test strategies for dealing with them. Prominently displayed on one of the walls of the center is a maxim attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

  At the time of my visit, the model was so new that it was still being calibrated. This involved running simulations of well-documented disasters from the past, like the flood of 2011. In the spring of that year, heavy snowmelt, along with weeks of intense rain across the Midwest, resulted in record-breaking water levels. To spare New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré Spillway, about thirty miles upriver from the city. (The Bonnet Carré diverts water into Lake Pontchartrain; when all the gates are open, the flow through it exceeds that of Niagara Falls.) On the model, the spillway gates were represented by small strips of brass attached to copper wires. Because in previous trials the gates had jammed, an engineer had been positioned to watch over them from a folding chair. He looked like a latter-day Gulliver, bent over a drowning Lilliput. He, too, I noticed, had wet socks.

  In the world of the model, time as well as space contracts. On its accelerated schedule, a year passes in an hour, a month in five minutes. As I watched, the weeks raced by and the river kept rising. Much to the engineers’ relief, this time the gates on the pint-sized Bonnet Carré opened. Water began flowing out of the Mississippi into the spillway, and New Orleans was saved, at least for now.

  Two separate vats served as the source for the mini-Mississippi. One provided clear water. The other held the mud of the Little Muddy, though not real mud. This was simulated sediment, imported from France and composed of exactingly milled plastic pellets—teensy, half-millimeter-wide pellets for large grains of sand and even teensier pellets to represent finer particles. The sediment was jet black and stood out against the foam riverbed and surrounding terrain, which were painted bright white.

  During the mock flood, some of the pellets had been flushed down the spillway, into Lake Pontchartrain. Others had settled in the riverbed, where they’d formed miniature shoals and sandbars. Most had swooshed past New Orleans and around English Turn. So thick with simulated sediment were the channels of the Bird’s Foot that they seemed filled with ink. This inky mix was streaming in dark eddies toward the Gulf, where, had it been real sediment, it would have vanished off the continental shelf.

  Here, in black and white, was Louisiana’s land-loss dilemma. In the days before floodgates and spillways, a super-wet spring like that of 2011 would have sent the Mississippi and its distributaries surging over their banks. The floodwaters would have wreaked havoc, but they would have spread tens of millions of tons of sand and clay across thousands of square miles of countryside. The new sediment would have formed a fresh layer of soil and, in this way, countered subsidence.

  Thanks to the intervention of the engineers, there had been no spillover, no havoc, and hence no land-building. The future of southern Louisiana had instead washed out to sea.

  LSU’s model Mississippi re-creates the river in miniature.

  * * *

  —

  Directly next door to the Center for River Studies sits the headquarters of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. CPRA was founded in 2005, a few months after Hurricane Katrina hit, inundating New Orleans and leaving more than eighteen hundred people dead. The authority’s official mission is to implement “projects relative to the protection, conservation, enhancement, and restoration of the coastal area of the state,” which is a nice way of saying it’s supposed to prevent the region from disappearing.

  One day while I was in Baton Rouge, I met up with two engineers from CPRA at the model. As we chatted, someone flipped a switch controlling projectors in the ceiling. Suddenly, the fields of Plaquemines turned green and the Gulf blue. A satellite image of New Orleans glowed in the crook between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. The effect was dazzling, if also a little unnerving, as when Dorothy steps out of sepia-toned Kansas into Oz.

  “You can see there’s not a lot of land in Plaquemines,” one of the engineers, Rudy Simoneaux, observed. He was wearing a shirt embroidered with the CPRA emblem, a circle with marsh grass on one side, waves on the other, and a black floodwall in between. “It’s kind of frightening when you look at this model and realize how close we all are to water.”

  Simoneaux and his colleague, Brad Barth, were holding a public meeting that evening in Plaquemines, so after we’d admired the mini-Mississippi for a while, we set out for the real thing. Our destination was Buras, a town ten miles north of the Bird’s Foot. We reached the parish seat, Belle Chasse, in time to grab po’boys for lunch. Then we continued south on State Route 23, the only through-road on the parish’s west bank. We passed a Phillips 66 refinery, a citrus nursery, and fields as flat and green as pool tables.

  Much of Plaquemines lies below sea level—six feet under, people sometimes say. This arrangement is made possible by levees—four sets of them. Two run along the river, one on each bank. Another two—known as “back levees”—run between the parish and the Gulf, to prevent the sea from rolling in. The levees, which keep water out, also keep water in. When they are breached or overtopped, Plaquemines fills up like a pair of long, skinny bathtubs.

  Plaquemines was devastated by Katrina, which made landfall in Buras, and then was ravaged again, just a few weeks later, by Hurricane Rita, the most intense storm ever recorded over the Gulf. For months after these back-to-back disasters, Route 23 was blocked by washed-up fishing boats. Dead cows hung from the trees. In anticipation of the next catastrophe, public buildings in the parish stand on improbable pilings. Where other schools might have a gym or a ground-floor cafeteria, South Plaquemines High has enough empty space to park a fleet of tractor trailers. (The school’s mascot is a swirling hurricane.) Many of the homes in the parish have been similarly elevated. One house we passed had been raised to a particularly vertiginous height; Simoneaux estimated its pilings were thirty feet tall.

  “That’s really getting up there,” he observed. We were driving alongside the river, but inside the levees, so for long stretches the Mississippi was invisible. Every so often, a ship would loom into view. From the vantage point of the road, it appeared to be floating not on water but on air, like a zeppelin.

  Near the town of Ironton, Simoneaux pulled off the highway onto a gravel drive. We parked and scrambled over some barbed wire onto a scruffy field. It was a steamy day, and the field, dotted with puddles, smelled of rot. Flies buzzed lazily in the thick afternoon air.

  The land we were standing on was a project designated BA-39. Simoneaux explained that, like the rest of the delta, BA-39 had come out of the Mississippi, just not in the usual way. “Picture a massive eight-foot drill bit on the bottom of the river,” he s
aid. As the drill spun, it had gouged out sand and mud. Enormous diesel-powered pumps had sent this slurry gushing through a steel pipe thirty inches in diameter. The pipe had run for five miles, from the west bank of the Mississippi, over the river levees, under Route 23, across some cattle fields, over the back levees, and finally into a shallow basin of Barataria Bay. There the muck had piled up until bulldozers spread it around.

  BA-39 had proved, not that further proof was really necessary, what enough pipes and pumps and diesel fuel can accomplish. Nearly a million cubic yards of sediment had made the five-mile journey, resulting in the creation—or, to be more exact, the re-creation—of one hundred and eighty-six paludal acres. Here were all the benefits of flooding without the messy side effects: drowned citrus groves, drowned people, cows hanging from the trees. “We took centuries of land-building and we did it in a year,” Simoneaux observed. The bill for the project had been $6 million, which, I calculated, meant that the acre we were standing on had cost about $30,000. CPRA’s somewhat redundantly titled “comprehensive master plan” calls for dozens more such “marsh creation” projects, each with a price tag of millions or, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars. But Louisiana is locked in a race with the Red Queen, and in this race it has to move twice as fast just to stay even. To match the pace of land loss, the state would have to churn out a new BA-39 every nine days. Meanwhile, with the drill removed, the pumps unplugged, and the pipes carted off, the artificial marsh had already begun to dewater and subside. According to the authority’s projections, in another decade, BA-39 will once again have sunk away.

  * * *

  —

  We reached Buras at around 3 p.m. and turned in at a sign advertising Cajun Fishing Adventures. The sign showed ducks and fish leaping into the air as if startled by some kind of explosion. Behind a grove of palms was an A-frame lodge with a pool out back.

  Ryan Lambert, a fish-and-game guide and the lodge’s owner, came out to greet us. “I want to teach people not to listen to propaganda,” he said, explaining why he’d volunteered to host the evening’s meeting. “I want them to see for themselves.” To this end, he’d also organized a flotilla of boats to take attendees out on the Mississippi. I joined a group that included a reporter from the local Fox News station and Lambert’s big black dog.

  Out on the water, it was about ten degrees cooler than on shore. A stiff breeze set the dog’s ears flapping like flags. We hit the wake of another boat, and the Fox reporter, trying to balance a camera on his shoulder, almost fell overboard.

  Unlike Plaquemines’s west bank, where the levees stretch all the way to the Bird’s Foot, on the east bank they give out right about at the point where, if the parish were actually an arm, its elbow would go. South of the elbow, the river regularly overflows. On occasion, it cuts a new channel, sending water and sediment flowing in new directions and, in the process, creating new land.

  “Everything you see in front of you used to be open water,” Lambert said as we glided past a wide stretch of green. “Now it’s lush and beautiful.” His mirrored sunglasses reflected the low late-afternoon sun and the tea-colored river.

  “Look at all the new willow trees!” he exclaimed. He was steering with one hand and gesturing with the other. “Look at the birdlife!” The Fox reporter asked what the spot was called.

  “It’s hard to put a name on it, because it doesn’t have a name, because it’s new,” Lambert said. “This is the newest land in the world!”

  We sped in and out of unnamed bayous. A large alligator sunning itself on a log plopped into the water as we zipped by. “Isn’t this beautiful?” Lambert kept saying. “When I come here, I feel great. When I go over to the west bank, I want to vomit.” The newborn marsh had the sweet smell of freshly cut grass. Way off in the distance, I could see the silhouette of a giant oil platform, perched above the Gulf.

  Back on the west bank, in the lodge, the meeting was about to start. A screen had been set up in a room decorated with an elk’s head, a stuffed squirrel, and several fish mounted in splashy poses. About fifty people had gathered, some sitting on couches, others leaning against the walls beneath the elk and the fish.

  Barth began with a slide presentation. He explained the region’s deep geology—how the coast had built up over the millennia, delta lobe by delta lobe, as the Mississippi thrashed around. Then he laid out the problem: How were two million people going to live in a region that was sinking into oblivion? The losses were particularly acute, he noted, in their own backyard. The area around Plaquemines had already shrunk by some seven hundred square miles.

  “We’re in an uphill battle against sea-level rise and subsidence,” Barth said. CPRA would continue to drill and lay pipe. “We will attempt to dredge every ounce of sediment out of the river that we can,” he promised. But projects like BA-39 were incommensurate with the scale of the challenge: “We need to be bold.”

  * * *

  —

  When the Mississippi bursts through its levees, be they natural or man-made, the opening is called a “crevasse.” For most of New Orleans’s history, the term was a synonym for disaster.

  In 1735, a crevasse-induced flood inundated practically all of New Orleans, which at that point consisted of forty-four square blocks. Sauvé’s Crevasse was a breach that flooded the city in May 1849. A month later, a reporter for The Daily Picayune, surveying New Orleans from the cupola of the St. Charles Hotel, observed “one sheet of water, dotted in innumerable spots with houses.” In 1858, forty-five crevasses opened up in Louisiana’s levees, in 1874, forty-three, and in 1882, two hundred and eighty-four.

  A contemporary rendering of Sauvé’s Crevasse

  In what’s become known as the “Great Flood of 1927,” two hundred and twenty-six crevasses were reported. That flood inundated twenty-seven thousand square miles across a half-dozen states. It displaced more than half a million people, caused an estimated $500 million worth of damage (more than $7 billion in today’s money), and marked a very wet watershed. “I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door,” Bessie Smith lamented in “Backwater Blues.”

  In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of water-related legislation “since the world began.” The Corps extended the levees—within four years, it had added another two hundred and fifty miles’ worth—and strengthened them. (On average, the levees were raised by three feet, while their volume almost doubled.) The Corps also added a new feature—spillways, like the Bonnet Carré. When the river was at flood stage, the spillway gates would open, relieving pressure on the levees. A poem commemorating the Corps’ efforts declared:

  The plan was an engineer masterpiece

  Fashioned by experts, a grand bas-relief

  Levees, floodways, and other improvements

  Blended into a project beneficent.

  Thanks to the “project beneficent,” the crevasse period came to an end. But with the end of river flooding came an end to fresh sediment. In the succinct formulation of Donald Davis, a geographer at LSU: “The Mississippi River was controlled; land was lost; the environment changed.”

  CPRA’s “bold” scheme for saving Plaquemines is to rehabilitate the crevasse for a post-crevasse age. The agency’s master plan calls for punching eight giant holes through the levees on the Mississippi and two more through those on its main distributary, the Atchafalaya. The openings will be gated and channelized, and the channels will themselves be leveed. CPRA likes to characterize the effort as a form of restoration—as a way to “reestablish the natural sediment deposition process.” And this is true, but only in the sense that electrifying a river might be called natural.

  The furthest along of th
e man-made crevasses is a project known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The diversion will be six hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep and lined with enough concrete and riprap to pave over Greenwich Village. It will start on the west bank of the Mississippi, some thirty-five miles upriver of Buras, then, in evident defiance of hydrology, run in a perfectly straight line due west for two and a half miles, to Barataria Bay. When it’s operating at maximum capacity, some seventy-five thousand cubic feet of water will pass through it every second. In terms of flow, this will make it the twelfth-largest river in the United States. (For comparison’s sake, the Hudson River’s average flow is twenty thousand cubic feet per second.) Nothing quite like it has ever been attempted before. “It’s one of a kind,” Barth told me.

  Currently, the bill for the project is estimated at $1.4 billion. The next diversion in line, the Mid-Breton, which is planned for the east bank of Plaquemines, is priced at $800 million. Financing for both diversions is supposed to come out of the settlement fund from the BP oil spill, which, in 2010, spewed more than three million barrels of oil into the Gulf, fouling the coast from Texas to Florida. (Planning for the other eight diversions is still at an early stage and funding for them hasn’t yet been secured.)

  Many Plaquemines residents, like Lambert, welcome the diversions as the parish’s last best hope. “It’s all about the sediment,” Albertine Kimble, an outspoken proponent of the projects and one of the few people in the parish who live outside the levees, told me. But there are also many who oppose them. A few weeks before the meeting in Buras, Plaquemines’s president had staged a public showdown with CPRA by denying the authority permits to take soil samples at the proposed site of the diversion. The authority had taken them anyway, with a state trooper standing guard.

 

‹ Prev