***..........Chris Paolino, a spokesman for Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican whose district lies just north of New Orleans, said underfunding of Army Corps projects stretched back several decades. "There's been a sense that this is a Louisiana problem, when of course there are national implications," he said. "It hasn't been the national priority it should have been."
Army Corps commander Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock said last week that the uncompleted levee-improvement projects could not be linked to the levee failures. The areas that were breached were at "full project design and were not going to be improved," Strock told reporters in a conference call. "We were just caught by a storm of an intensity which exceeded the design of the [flood protection] project we have in place."
While attention has been focused on the failure of the city's last line of defense, the levees, others are pointing to the deterioration of the area's outer rim of protection against gulf storms: Louisiana's coastal marshes and barrier beaches.
Upriver development and flood-control projects have cut off the flow of river sediments that built the Mississippi delta region to 3.6 million acres over the last 7,000 years. The decision to maintain the river's current path rather than letting it drift westward - done to sustain river commerce in New Orleans and its environs - prevents the broader distribution of sediments.
Marshland has also been affected by oil and gas exploration, which, by carving access channels through the marshlands, exposes it to greater erosion.
With normal erosion at the delta's edges now outstripping new soil deposition, more than a million acres of coastal wetlands have disappeared since 1930 - roughly the size of Rhode Island - and another 300,000 acres are expected to vanish by 2050 if nothing is done.
"These wetlands and barrier islands serve as a natural hurricane protection system," said Scot Faber, a spokesman for Environmental Defense, a New York-based environmental group. "New Orleans will not be safe from another disaster like Hurricane Katrina until we begin to restore this natural hurricane buffer."
The Army Corps and the state of Louisiana are developing ambitious plans to divert river water, and the sediment that goes with it, to help rebuild the marshes and the vanishing barrier islands. There is even talk of transferring dredged sediment from upriver to build up the vanishing delta.
The project would be very costly - an estimated $14 billion, or more than the huge Everglades restoration project. So far, pilot projects for freshwater diversions and island restoration have been funded at only $50 million per year.
But Bahr, the Louisiana coastal official, said it was possible that last week's disaster would build support for such a large investment. After all, the $14 billion price tag doesn't look as big when held against the damage wrought by a single storm like Katrina.
"One side of this tragedy is that the nation is now going to be forced to come to grips with this, the magnitude of this," he said. "Some of us have said in the long run it's going to take a catastrophe to get people to pay attention at the level it is called for ... This is going to get the attention we needed for a long time." ***
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