If we don’t re-build the wetlands and barrier islands the next storm will be even worse. You can’t let that silt build up behind those dams forever, so moving downstream is the logical step to take. If climate change means getting massive amounts of rain in the Midwest, the less silt the better. With a little thought they could probably siphon it below the dams and let the river carry it down stream, rather than the expense of barges.
You have to be rich and white to get government compensation. The Federal flood control system failed, the Feds should be picking up the tab for re-building.
]]>Regarding rebuilding the land, some limited rebuilding can be done by turning the river loose again south of New Orleans, but there is a major problem upstream in that 50% of the silt that once came down the Mississippi is now stopped by upstream dams. Ideally that silt would get loaded up in barges when the shipping channels behind the dams are dredged and get dumped on the coast, but that’s not happening because it would be (doh) expensive. I do think that’d be the ideal thing to do, but there’s a lot of entrenched opposition to it, both from the former homeowners south of New Orleans (who are now living in tents or trailers on the sites of their former homes) and from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who is concerned that this would require them to continually dredge a shipping channel in order to get ships up to New Orleans and that’d be expensive. Just more penny-pinching at the expense of Louisianians, sigh…
]]>Downstream the levees are destroying the ability of the delta to rebuild by keeping the channel too deep and fast and sending everything out to the Gulf to feed the Dead Zone. If they don’t let the fresh water spread out, they’ll never wash the salt out of the soil, allow the silt to rebuild, and nothing will grow.
We are still losing trees from the salt spray carried on the wind by Ivan, and we have had a lot of rain that should have flushed the soil.
]]>Now is the time to stop with the floodwall crap and build real levees that won’t have catastrophic failures, after dumping all of the canals.
]]>-Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
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