Rebuilding New Orleans and Southern Louisiana Could be Risky
if Drastically Eroded Delta Region is not Rebuilt

Golden Meadow Plant Materials Center

Greenhouse No. 1:  75% glazing blown off and some structural damage.  Glazing panels found over one-half mile from structure.

He knew it would happen eventually, a hurricane with the destructive impact of Katrina, but Gary Fine, manager of the Plant Materials Center (PMC) in Golden Meadow, Louisiana had hoped he would have a few more years to get the word out.  Unfortunately, his and many other scientists’ warnings went nearly unheeded for decades by those with the power to allocate the huge sums of money needed to avert a catastrophe in Louisiana and Mississippi. 

Now the PMC he manages, a USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service facility, has been knocked offline by the storm, and that’s more bad news for Southern Louisiana and Mississippi because the research being conducted at the center was some of the best in building national awareness of what nature can do to help control massive storms and the destructive tidal surges they bring. 

Roof panels and wood support framing blown off the leeward side of the headhouse due to positive internal pressure from hurricane-force winds breaching the door.

“Among our many research studies over the years, we had just completed the initial phase of a cooperative project to build a maritime-ridge marsh,” said Fine.  “The marsh, once all the vegetation was planted, was to act as a barrier island or a first defense against tidal surges.” 

At this point, no one knows exactly how much of the project survived and worse, because Katrina hit with such force, it will never be known how much protection the completed marsh would have provided.  But it’s not rocket science to deduce that any protection a maritime ridge (and many like it) could have offered would have been a tremendous help at dissipating the 25 foot tidal surge that swept across the Louisiana/Mississippi-delta region on August 29, 2005.   

“It’s certainly safe to say that had the PMC been given larger funding appropriations over the years, projects like the maritime-ridge marsh would have more-than-likely saved lives and cost the country far less than the $200 billion estimated by the government to clean up after Katrina’s wake,” said Fine.

Powerline down over can yard and office facilities.

Yet, despite so many of Mr. Fine’s warnings coming true, little is being talked about in the national media in regards to reconstruction efforts to allocate the funds that will be required to rebuild the delta region, which since the 1930s has been depleted by almost one-third of its mass.  That’s because after the great Mississippi River floods of 1927, the federal government engineered a series of levies along the Mississippi that indeed prevented flooding (not one Mississippi levy ruptured during Katrina) but also sent sediment which used to replenish the delta’s marshes into the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. 

Mr. Fine and many of his fellow scientists certainly would like to see the funds needed to rebuild the delta.  Estimates to replenish the delta region are in the one to ten billion dollar range—a relative bargain compared to what Katrina will more than likely cost.  And what‘s the point, as many believe, in spending $200 billions if in the next (maybe more powerful hurricane) it’s all washed away once again?

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