Water, water, everywhereMar 21, 2012
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crawfish trap on the Pearl River--early in the season
heron
up a bayou
| March 21, 2012 NOLA What a couple of days! Yesterday morning, we started off with a boat ride through the Honey Island Swamp. A swamp is an area of water in vegetation; a bayou is a waterway. We saw a few small gators, a couple of black diamond water snakes (not venomous), wild iris, Cherokee roses, water lilies, lots of cypress trees (some several hundred years old), a couple of local fishermen, and more; we heard lots of stories of growing up in the bayou, as well as lots of facts about the area. A good tour. We were a little early in the year for tons of gators, but the trade off was more flowers and the possibility of mammals. Yesterday afternoon we headed in the opposite direction, and went to Laura Plantation. This is a restored plantation with a tour based on the memoirs of Laura Lecour Cole, full of stories of generations of Creole family, greed, pride, Creole customs, etc. Really interesting—rated as one of the best tours in Louisiana, and I agree. So much history, so well presented. This morning we watched the movie “Hurricane on the Bayou”, a Weather Channel presentation filmed 3 months before Katrina (2005), with actual footage of Katrina added in. Really well done. The thesis is that the loss of wetlands, due to human actions, significantly increased the impact of Katrina on New Orleans. The Mississippi River used to flood every year. Beginning in the 1930’s, man started building canals and channels that changed how the river flowed. When the river was no longer allowed to flood, the wetlands began to change. This was on top of building houses where they should not have been built. Some of these canals (used to allow large ships to get to New Orleans, which is 90 miles away from the coast) allowed salt water into places upstream, where it killed the trees. No tree roots holding the soil means more erosion. The wetlands had always been a place that tempered a hurricane—every 10 miles of wetlands would dissipate the strength of the hurricane up to a full category. Now that the wetlands have been diminished and changed, the hurricanes come ashore unchallenged. It was fascinating. We drove into NOLA, ate lunch under a threatening sky, and before we embarked on a 3.5 hr Post-Katrina tour of the city, the heavens opened. The guide showed us where the levees were breached, explained why they breached, and why certain areas of the city were hit badly. We drove through areas that were not touched, and areas that are still in disarray today. Before the hurricane, NOLA was about 500,000 people. After the hurricane, there were about 80,000. Even in areas where there was no flood damage, whole shopping centers have closed, as have tons of small businesses—there were no customers anymore. The city is back to close to 400,000 now, but it is a city with very few children. After the hurricane, there were no schools, no jobs, etc. Children need stability, and the families moved away. They could not wait the 5 years for things to start to get back to normal. The guide pointed out that in some neighborhoods, the houses were made of brick, and while they filled up with water, they pretty much survived. In other neighborhoods, the houses were small, wooden houses, which were picked up off their foundations (slabs) and they floated away until they ran into an immovable object, where the houses all piled up. The clean up of a flooded house is an awful thing. The water sat in these houses for 10-28 days. What is amazing to me is that some people are rebuilding right where they had been. Many people have elevated their houses 4’, but is that enough? There never used to be vacant lots anywhere in the city, but now they are common, and in some cases there are almost whole blocks of vacant lots. My personal feeling is that the houses that had to be demolished should stay demolished, and those lots not built on. The next hurricane will take out a few more, and so on, until the flood plain is restored. Despite the uncomfortable van--we were in the back seat of a 12 person van with no shocks, driving over terrible roads with huge potholes—it was a very interesting tour. Just as with our drive through Cameron, you can’t imagine the extent of the devastation, and how little of it has been put back. |
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