Bayou Bulwarks

We're all familiar with the phrase "act of God" used by insurers to describe natural catastrophes. The closer we look at the Katrina disaster, the less apt it seems.

In yesterday's L.A. Times, Susan Zakin chronicles how federal attempts to conrol Mississippi floods contributed to the erosion of south Louisiana's bayous and increased New Orleans' vulnerability to flooding.

Starting in the 1940s, levees built along the Mississippi River stopped the natural flooding that for centuries had stacked the bayous with sediment that acted as a hedge against salt water pushing in from the Gulf of Mexico. Later, canals built for oil pipelines and tankers accelerated erosion and allowed salt water to intrude farther into the swamps. Every year Louisiana loses 25 square miles of wetlands because of various kinds of human interference. That's a little more than one football field every half hour, a rate that Louisianians cannot staunch by themselves.

If that wasn't bad enough,

getting Washington to pay attention isn't easy. Just a week before the hurricane struck, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco had tried to persuade the president to fly over the bayou country. Blanco, of course, wanted money. Earlier this year, over the president's protests, Congress included in an energy bill a provision that would give Louisiana about $135 million a year, which is well short of the $14 billion over 30 years needed to restore Louisiana's wetlands.

Is Blanco just another hysterical greenie out of touch with economic realities? Guess not: Even the oil companies are backing Blanco's plan for coastal restoration; they'll lose their pipelines and ship canals if southern Louisiana sinks like a dying thing into the Gulf of Mexico.

As Congress convenes to discuss relief and reconstruction, they ought to spend a little time considering these words from Zakin's summation:

In New Orleans, the bones of the world have been laid bare, and Americans are seeing how inseparable are the natural and the made worlds. We see it in other countries--Haiti comes to mind--and now we see it at home, where the levees have broken, where the Superdome looks like the Hotel Rwanda and police couldn't rescue victims of the flood because they were arresting looters.

Better flood policy, Zakin concedes, wouldn't necessarily have prevented this chaos. The storm's path was, as they say, an act of God. However, that doesn't excuse the rulers of this world (and those who vote for them) from supporting water and wetlands policies that can minimize or avert the damage and the related suffering from hurricaines--and diasters of other sorts-- to come.