The River, the Bayou, the Bay

This is part five in a series of posts leading up to the five year anniversary of hurricane Katrina on August 29th

Left- Murphy Oil-- another spiller


Twenty-one months after the hurricane, we headed down once more. This time, it was more than New Orleans. We would be looking at river control, levees, and especially, Terrebonne Bay.

That’s not to say that we wouldn’t be heading to New Orleans for several days, however.

By this time, there were books, articles, academic texts to read, absorb, pick apart. Somewhere in that mess, I read a line that changed me. I have to paraphrase for you here, because I can no longer find the paper, but it said that eight weeks of Iraq (war) spending would fix the wetlands problems in Louisiana, and would stop another disaster of the magnitude of Katrina from effecting Louisiana.

Two months. Eight weeks of war spending in Iraq. That’s all it would take, if we, Americans, thought it important enough.

And then I saw the bayous, the sinking wetlands, the weakened barrier islands and the river control system with my own eyes.

In 1927 the Mississippi River flooded in a way that few of us can envision today. Levees were a private affair back then, and most were inadequate to a 500 year flood. In the spring of 1927, it wouldn’t stop raining. Several cities along the river, in multiple states, were inundated.

Controlling the Mississippi became a big priority, but I won’t bore you with the engineering behind it. What everyone does need to understand, however, is that when the levees went up to today’s levels, they began channeling the river. The river channels so much now, that the water from the Mississippi actually shoots out into the Gulf, instead of dissipating throughout the delta as it once did. The river, which built the state of Louisiana over eons of time, starting shooting all of the land-building mud and silt over the continental shelf—where it does not build land. With the lack of silt and mud deposits, the wetlands salinate, flood, the grasses die and the trees die off, the animal and marine life leave.

Instead of massive amounts of wetlands that help buffer places like New Orleans from giant storms like Katrina, there is more ocean.

Here’s another thing I read: 75 years of river control erased 2500 years of land building by the river.

One more thing: every day we lose a football field’s worth of wetlands.

On the river trip, we went to some of the most amazing places I have ever seen. Have you seen a bayou? Have you seen the wetlands? Have you been in Terrebonne Bay, riding in a shrimp trawler, watching porpoises swim beside the boat? Have you walked along the beach of a barrier island? Have you watched the sun go down over the Gulf?

And this is what we are losing-- this land lost is what aided and abetted Katrina in drowning NOLA and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

When I heard that this year’s oil disaster had hit Cocodrie, Louisiana, and they had to lay down hard boom to keep the oil at bay I cried. How much more could this place take?

We spent another several days in NOLA that time around. People were starting to come back to the Lower 9th ward—we met with an advocate that I will never forget. We met with her in a computer lab that she had set up especially to help former residents start the trek up the paperwork mountain on the road home. She had hope, and yet, she was cynical. She looked at me and I looked at her, and we both understood each other. I like to think that it made her feel better that someone from the outside understood.

She wrote us a letter, thanking us, several weeks after our trip. It was one of the kindest things I had ever read.

After we met with her, we made another trip to the place that had torn me up so badly two months before. This time I was prepared—steeled against the quietude.

Some of the students with us, students who had been down to volunteer (either with our class or on their own) within months of the hurricane; they had not been back to see this yet. It hit them hard.

Imagine: you met some of these people, and now all traces of them are gone from the landscape. Or, you helped them gut their house over a year ago, and it still stands in the same condition today.

We sat together crying. We walked the streets together, astonished. And then, we came across the first FEMA trailer to be seen.

It was an older woman—a mother of the civil rights generation. She was warm, welcoming, and ready to talk to us about how the neighborhood had been. She didn’t have the answers on how to make the neighborhood into something again, but she was there. She was doing her part. She was ready to welcome her neighbors home, if they were able to make it back.

She did her part to bring us back from despair. She radiated calm, courage, hope. She lifted all of our spirits just by being present. She showed the potentials, the possibilities that might still exist for this ravaged town.

It is a superpower that I wish I possessed.