Global warming doesn't require your agreement to raise sea level. Sea level is in fact rising and has accelerated in recent years. 2.5 to 3mm a year is significant. Look at a map and draw a line from New Orleans to Thibodaux to Morgan City. In your lifetime, all of the marshes south of that line will be open water. Book it. I have been heavily involved in the study of this for decades. It works for a short time, darlin'. Then two thing begin to happen. The rocks begin to sink into the soft sediment and the sediment itself continues to subside. In a decade or two the project can be untenable. It requires constant fixing with more rocks, adding more weight. Don't get me wrong, small revetments help prevent wake erosion along waterways which is important to maintain the waterway. But it won't stop subsidence one bit. The other thing that happens when these big feel-good projects happen along stretches of beach is that the structures do trap a limited amount of sand behind them before they start to sink under their own weight. But this deprives beaches down current of any sediment at all, which makes erosion worse there. Lots of money spent with no net gain in land. Huge rock barriers alone will not work to save the coastline. Just look at the fiasco on Grand Isle. Even worse, our idiot Republican governor, the Kingpiyush, ignored all of the scientific advice he was given after the BP Oil Spill and ordered sand berms to be built along the shorelines to prevent oil from reaching the marshes. He took action for the people--stupid fucking action for political reasons. What he actually did was dig up stable compacted sand on barrier islands to built frangible sand berms that started washing away with the first winter storms. The next hurricane will remove all traces of them and cause the retreat of more barrier islands because of the immense amounts of stable compacted sand that was removed. Politicians will wave their hands and say stop all of the studies and start building seawalls. They will spend a Trillion dollars over the next 100 years and accomplish nothing to change the shoreline from where it is to where it is going. People simply don't understand just how much of Louisiana is less than 2 feet above sea level. The land is subsiding and we can't stop it. The sea is rising and we can't stop that. We should spend that Trillion dollars relocating towns and building a new infrastructure to accommodate the future shoreline instead of throwing all of that cheddar away. But no politician can get elected saying that. So we won't. If you own land in Golden Meadow, don't expect to leave it to your children.
I just texted a friend of mine in Baton Rouge who is a prominent employee of one of vitters political opponents. He says the diaper thing is untrue but he somehow likes umbrellas.
I think it's true, but I can't stand the guy and probably would believe that he shot Kennedy if someone told me he did, I'm a tad bias. This is what came out of the New Orleans brothel he went to not the DC one.
Very disheartening if you are right and I don't know what other scientists say about it so I have to assume you are. The only reason the Mississippi River hasn't already changed course is the Old River structure that was built back in 1963. 52 years of holding back millions of gallons of rushing water per minute has got to have put a lot of pressure on the aging structure. Sooner or later the course of the river will change no matter how hard we try to stop it. Mother nature will win in the end.
But the Corps will spend another Trillion delaying this for 100 years instead of spending that money getting ready for the capture and being ready to let it happen when we are prepared. Instead they will exacerbate the problem and help insure a catastrophic river capture flood event.
If you read the book Rising Tide which is about the 1927 flood and Corps of Engineers you would learn not only did they build the levee system on a false premise but the deny the facts to this day. As I understand it the mouth of the Mississippi is at the closest point to the edge of the continental shelf in the US. All the silt that built Louisiana and the delta is pouring off the shelf. If you fly over the Atachafalya delta you see new land being built. @red55 is there any chance diverting the Mississippi down the Atachafalya and other channels would help?
Yep. The river would have changed course long ago and be building delta elsewhere. The Atchafalaya is cutting its way headward, draining a huge, low and straight path to the sea. The Mississippi wants to take that path as nature intended. The Atchafalaya has already captured the Red and is now undercutting the Mississippi. Already 30% of the Mississippi's water is diverted down the Atchafalaya. It is overbank water going through a control gate, not a deep meandering channel where the sediment is. When the main channel diverts, a new delta lobe will be created. If not for the Old River Control Structure, the Mississippi River would have changed its course to the Atchafalaya River during the flood of 1973. If it had happened, the River would be building thousands of acres of new land in what is now Atchafalaya and Cote Blanche Bays. Of course, the Atchafalaya Basin would be infilled and be no longer a wetland, Morgan City and Patterson would probably be history, and Baton Rouge and New Orleans would be sitting on a long estuary instead of the Mississippi River. Actually most of that new Atchafalaya River delta is no longer growing. Most of the sediment in the Atchafalaya comes from the Red River, not the Mississippi. That sediment is now getting caught behind the five dams of the J. Bennett Johnson Waterway and does not reach the Atchafalaya anymore. And they have to dredge the sediment behind the dams! Permanent job for the Corps of Engineers depriving the coastline of sediment. One of the proposed solutions is to create a new delta lobe by diverting most of the river into Barataria and Terrebonne Bays above New Orleans south of Donaldsonville. That might work. But little projects to divert floodwaters though gates into the marshes south of New Orleans won't accomplish much. Overbank flooding carries only fine particles, not the delta-building bedload that a Mississippi River channel can carry.
