USGS reports massive wetlands loss caused by Katrina. Basically, the upper Breton Sound marshes, which protected the St. Bernard Parish back levees from a direct hit by storm surge, are *gone* -- Katrina almost completely wiped them out. The St. Bernard Parish back levees as a result took almost a direct hit from the storm surge and are in dire shape, simply melted away in many places.
The Louisiana goverment has a whole site with lots of maps of the wetland losses. It's scary. Especially the animated maps of the loss over just the past 50 years. The land literally melts away before your very eyes.
Most of that land is gone forever, because of subsidience caused by the oil and water underneath it being sucked out, and because of global warming causing sea levels to rise. But doing something to stop the loss, and to restore the losses in certain critical areas such as the upper Breton Sound marshes and around Port Fouchon, is absolutely necessary for the economy of the United States. These marshes protect close to 1/4th of the refining capacity and oil offloading infrastructure of the United States, and without them, all the multi-billion dollar levees being requested by Governor Blanco will be useless, because building a dike that will withstand a 40 foot storm surge directly is an engineering feat that not even the Dutch have managed...
Finally, lest we forget: Whoopsie Gras. We Louisianians will never forget that we were abandoned to die for five days by our nation, and that hundreds of thousands of people basically are still abandoned. Sadly, a press with the attention span of a fruit fly is going to forget this soon enough...
- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
Awwww...(tears):(
ReplyDeletePresident...such a douchebag...so much hate...tearing country apart, the antichrist sonovabitch...
We paray for you in Pittsburgh, y'all.
Just sayin': I don't understand how anyone could possibly forget something like what happened following Katrina. Every hurricane I've known of has done damage, some a whole lot more than others. In my own area: Floyd hit us hard one day in '99, but FEMA was here two days in advance -- overall, they did a fine job. Then there was Isabel in '03 -- that hurricane dug a trench through SC, NC, VA, and other places. What made that hurricane so awful though, was that more people died during the clean-up than during the event -- it made that big of a mess. FEMA, under the Bush administration, wasn't so hot then, either. I guess what happened in New Orleans two years later shouldn't have surprised me on that count.
ReplyDeleteBut while the feds might have failed us in '03, they outright betrayed the gulf states this summer. For a couple of days, my brain just would not believe the shit it was hearing or seeing. This wasn't incompetence. This was evil.
And then came Rita to rub salt in the wound. I'm glad it wasn't anything like Katrina, but it was still pretty bad -- and a reminder of just how fragile we as a nation are. Everyone took this hurricane seriously. With the possible exception of Bush -- he might have been too drunk to acknowledge it.
I just don't know anymore...