Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 13, 2003

C O C O D R I E, La.,— The National Weather Service is predicting as many as four major hurricanes and 15 tropical storms this hurricane season, and that's grim news for Louisiana, which already is sinking fast.

The locals here will tell you: Land that they played on as children is quickly disappearing.

"We could see it, physically," Don Griffin said. "It looked like land sinking and the water's rising."

The reasons the land is sinking are many. This is river delta, and deltas sink naturally. The canals dug through here have made it worse. And the hundreds of oil wells pumping oil out are part of it, too.

"When I was a kid, all you had was a canal along the side the road," said Windell Curole of a particular area. "And this marsh ground? This was solid as far as the eye can see. … None of the water was here when I was a kid, growing up."

Curole, a seventh-generation Cajun, pointed out where fishing villages used to be. A cemetery, decades old, was built on land that was then high and dry.

"People did not build cemeteries on wetlands," he said. "We just didn't do it. You build it on the highest land."

The loss of land to the Gulf has been significant in just one decade. At one southern Louisiana location, a benchmark was below ground when it was installed in 1986. But in the 17 years since, the ground has sunk ten inches.

Hurricane Danger

But land lost is not the only concern. In hurricane country, any drop in land level can be dangerous if it makes the protection levees and roads lower than people think. Worried scientists recently measured a main hurricane-evacuation highway.

"What we discovered was that the highway had sunk something on the order of about a foot in the last 20 years," said Roy Dokka, a geologist at Louisiana State University. "A foot means a lot in coastal Louisiana."

That much was evident in Cocodrie this month, when Tropical Storm Bill, a minor storm, pushed a storm surge right over the local levee, now too low to hold water back.

"If we suffered like this from a tropical storm, I hate to see what a hurricane will do," one resident said. "People will lose their lives."

Locals know solving the problem won't be easy.

It "means moving sediments, moving water, deciding what's possible and what's not possible," Curole said. "We're going to hurt some people when we start solving this problem. But if we don't solve it, we'll all be hurt."

"The Gulf of Mexico is at people's doorways now and we can't wait any longer," Dokka said.

The hope is that by addressing the problem now, somehow the way of life on this productive and lovely coast can be saved.

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/louisiana_sinking030712.html M