Wetlands vital to post-Katrina restoration
A white egret floats near cypress knees in a Louisiana wetland.
JB: This is Earth and Sky, on restoring southern Louisiana’s coastline.
DB: Rebuilding the levee systems in and around New Orleans is just one part of the post-Katrina restoration process. That’s according to Mead Allison, a coastal geologist at Tulane University in New Orleans.
JB: Allison told us that building new coastal wetlands will bolster New Orleans future defense against devastating storm surges. Experts are still evaluating how best to do this, in the Mississippi Delta region.
Mead Allison: The answer is, we’ve got to tap into the river’s sediments. I think that most people agree that that’s the primary answer as well, that the sediments that are being carried within the Mississippi River need to be utilized, whether it is through diversion, where you cut a hole in the levee and actually allow the river to flow into an adjacent upward water region, or whether it’s a long distance pipeline, where you actually stick a pipe in the river and suck sediments into a pipeline that are then carried miles from the river channel. But, in any case, I think that the wetland rebuilding is a major post-Katrina focus of people.
DB: Allison added that a realistic goal is to rebuild new wetlands at the same rate they’re being lost, which is about 25 square miles – 65 square kilometers – each year.
JB: Our thanks today to NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We’re Block and Byrd for Earth and Sky.
Read Earth & Sky’s interview with Mead Allison
Other Katrina related stories:
Radio: Many former New Orleanians will never return
Radio: For children of Katrina, normalcy is key
Radio: New Orleans levees need time, effort, resources
Additional Teacher Resources
National Geographic: A City’s Faulty Armor: Experts Question Repairs to New Orleans Levees
As residents of New Orleans slowly rebuild their homes and lives after Hurricane Katrina, they are relying on the citys cordon of levees and floodwalls to protect them from the next big storm. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers declared almost a year ago that it had restored the barriers to pre-Katrina strength. But leading experts from the U.S. and the Netherlands say the system is riddled with flaws. They say that even a weaker storm than Katrina could breach the levees if it hit this season.
National Science Foundation: Researches Release Draft Final Report on New Orleans Levees
Following an eight-month study of the New Orleans levee system and its performance during Hurricane Katrina, a 30-person team of researchers led by Raymond Seed and Robert Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, released a near-complete draft of their findings today in a “town hall” meeting in that Gulf Coast city.
