Water threatens when natural barriers gone
By Maurice Tamman
NYT Regional Newspapers
Published: Monday, October 9, 2006 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Monday, October 9, 2006 at 5:56 a.m.
Isle de Jean Charles, La. | Demen Naquin lifted his arms away from the sides of his electric wheelchair and gently, slowly, flapped them up and down.
"We knew a storm was coming when the big black birds with 6-foot wings came," he said in broken English.
"A frigatebird," said the 79-year-old former chief of the Beloxi-Chitimache-Choctaw tribe.
The French-tinged Native American and Cajun communities on the edge of the Louisiana delta have spent generations below most Americans' gaze and just above sea level. They made their living on the water while enjoying a detente with the cyclones that battered their fishing boats and buffeted their homes.
It didn't matter that Naquin and others "down the bayou" in Terrebonne Parish lived in one of the nation's three hurricane hot spots, where hurricanes have hit an average of once every seven years for the past century and a half.
Hurricanes blew, floods came. When it was over, they shoveled the mud from their homes and shrugged. They knew the Mississippi delta's vast marshes, swamps and hammocks blocked all but the worst storm surge coming off the Gulf of Mexico.
When the water receded, they climbed back into their shrimp and oyster boats and went back to work.
That has changed.
Today most of the natural barriers have gone. And the traditional communities along the bayou have become like the frigatebirds: a warning of what inland communities will face soon.
The communities here are dying as old-timers die out and people move away. Those who stay are being forced to raise their homes two stories off the ground as insurance from flooding.
The decline began nearly 100 years ago, when engineers blocked the Mississippi from flowing into the delta. Without the river's replenishing sediment, the delta started disappearing. Today, 20,000 acres a year sinks below the water.
Another 138,000 acres may be been lost just last year as a result of hurricanes Rita and Katrina, according to a recent U.S. Geological Survey report.
"It's all completely wiped out," said Wenceslaus Billiot, Naquin's neighbor and brother-in-law. "If we get a 30-foot wave, there ain't nothing to stop it. Not like in the old day."
Forty yards from Naquin's and Billiot's front doors is water; in the 1960s it was land.
Today, fishermen catch black-tipped sharks where cows grazed in the 1960s.
While experts debate whether the sharks foretell the death of the delta and the communities that rely on the water for a living, the isolated communities on the fringes of the Louisiana bayou are barely clinging on. Their problems are a mishmash of economic and natural factors.
If nothing is done to repair the delta, the land Naquin and Billiot live on might also disappear below the water, a casualty of raging storms and human meddling.
The tribe has lived on Isle de Jean Charles, off Pointe au Chenes, near the end of solid land in Terrebonne, for about 150 years. When the two men were growing up, the island's houses only flooded during the very worst of storms.
A distant storm like Hurricane Rita, which passed offshore about 150 miles west last year, wouldn't have been a problem, they said. As Rita passed, however, the water rose a foot above Naquin's dining room table.
Now, he is moving across the street to a new home raised up two stories. It is his first concession to flooding.
Next door, Billiot has raised his house twice.
Other homeowners are clamoring to raise their older homes up to two stories, like the newest homes, and local businesses can't keep up.
"We've done 1,000 estimates since Rita," said Lori Pennison, who operates Barry's House Leveling with her husband.
The company is raising three homes a month and is fully booked for the next year.
"This is the worst it has ever been," she said. "That's why we need other house raisers."
The area's vulnerability to storms is apparent at almost every turn along the twisting roads that follow the bayous from Houma toward the Gulf of Mexico, through Chauvin southeast to Pointe au Chenes or southwest to Cocodrie.
Along Bayou Petit Caillou in Chauvin, Kenneth Lyons, 48, wades into the water to work on a 52-foot shrimp boat's rudder.
Technically, the boat is sitting in a dry dock hemmed in by the bayou on one side and a road on the other.
"At one time in the 1970s, I could work back here on dry land," he says.
Lyons drapes acetylene torch hoses over a shoulder and goes to work, cutting through a slab of 1-inch-thick steel to make a stabilizer for a rudder.
Sparks bounce of his hip-waders, and the torch's flame boils the water 2 feet below.
Eventually, he says, the sinking land and hurricanes will force all of the area's communities inland.
"The future isn't looking too bright."
Louisiana State University professor Ivor van Heerdon, who has studied hurricanes and the deltas of Louisiana for decades, said much of the Terrebonne Parish could disappear with one bad storm.
"Move Katrina 50 miles west and (the southern Mississippi River delta) totally sinks. It's all under water."
He still thinks the area can be saved if some of the Mississippi can be directed back into the delta, allowing its wetlands to rebuild.
Every two miles of healthy wetlands knocks down a storm surge by a foot, he said.
"What we need are armored levees to protect people, wetlands to protect the levees and barrier islands to protect the wetlands," he said.
Maurice Tamman writes for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla.
- Not meant to be though. Feeling very Eeyorish.
