Louisiana's Governor Declares State Of Emergency Over Disappearing Coastline (npr.org)

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards has declared a state of emergency over the state's rapidly eroding coastline. From a report on NPR: It's an effort to bring nationwide attention to the issue and speed up the federal permitting process for coastal restoration projects. "Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels have made the Louisiana coast the nation's most rapidly deteriorating shoreline," WWNO's Travis Lux tells our Newscast unit. "It loses the equivalent of one football field of land every hour." More than half of the state's population lives on the coast, the declaration states. It adds that the pace of erosion is getting faster: "more than 1,800 square miles of land between 1932 and 2010, including 300 square miles of marshland between 2004 and 2008 alone."

Comments

Its pretty important...

[cayenne8]

This area of LA....a large percentage of the US's seafood comes from here, and, a large portion of the US's domestic oil comes from the Gulf into LA, and processed here.

Oil from all over the place is processed here.

The people that work these jobs, live on the coast and the sealife that supports these folks and provides a good amount of seafood to the US will disappear if this coastal erosion is allowed to continue.

This isn't just for the people of Louisiana, but for the great resources it provides the rest of the US.

Re:Its pretty important...

[Major Blud]

It's a shame more people don't realize this, as evidenced by the multiple posts on here suggesting that people need to relocate. I've lived all over the country, but I've spent the majority of my life here in Louisiana and I'd like to stay here.

The majority of the folks affected by this live in areas such as Plaquemines, Terrebone, and Lafourche parishes aren't rich by any means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They were born here; to suggest that they just pack up and move is pretty short-sighted and somewhat insulting.

The other part of this that's frustrating is that there isn't a simple engineering solution to fix this. The levee system, while keeping urban areas from flooding, prevents sediment build-up that would restore some of the coast line. Even nutria rats are partially responsible for the eroding coast.

Re:Its pretty important...

[Waffle Iron]

So ironically, transporting the oil and gas out of the region is putting oil and gas production in jeopardy.

That would seem to be yet another reason to transition this country away from fossil fuels altogether. That would address both the erosion issue and the fossil fuel dependence at the same time.

As far as seafood goes, there's going to be a coastline somewhere, no matter how far it moves into the current state of Louisiana. The seafood will still come from wherever that is.

Reasons

[Pollux]

Decades of saltwater intrusion, subsidence and rising sea levels

No, that's not why the delta's disappearing. Here are the reasons why:

1) Levees and flood protections prevent silt from the Mississippi from depositing into the delta to maintain it, and
2) Oil drilling required dredging up the delta to permit pipelines and shipping lanes, destroying wetlands that help capture and build-up the silt.

Re:Reasons

[Elfich47]

If I can add to this:

The delta used to shift and move the river bed quite often. With the canals and leeves in place the natural tendency of the river to move is being fought against. It is the reason why the river breaks out at odd places just up stream or downstream of existing leeves. Part of this is a result of the silt deposits that used to be carried downstream by the Mississippi.

With the wetlands being destroyed the ocean barrier that helped protect against storms is being destroyed. Which exposed larger areas of the coast line to damage.

Re:Reasons

[d34thm0nk3y]

From your link:

"So we're fighting this massive loss of surface land [and] we're also subsiding because we're not replenishing these wetlands," Marshall says. "On top of that, here comes global warming and sea level rise." According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, southern Louisiana has "the highest rate of relative sea level rise of any place in the country, and one of the highest rates anywhere on the planet."

Re: Louisiana is one big sinkhole

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically anything south of Alexandria (which sits dead center of Louisiana) is consistently flooding. This includes many major cities (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Lafayette).

There is really no way to stop this, the state is literally sinking.

Re:So the maths

[Anonymous Coward]

"more than 1,800 square miles of land between 1932 and 2010, including 300 square miles of marshland between 2004 and 2008 alone."

In the first case that's 1800 sq miles over 78 years or 23 sq miles per year.

In the second case that's 300 sq miles over 4 years or 75 sq miles per year.

Whichever number you use (and if you include the year in the range, so the numbers may be +/- 1 year) it's still greater than 5 sq miles per year.

Old news: New Orleans is artificial and a mistake

[knorthern knight]

From a 2005 post https://pesn.com/archive/2005/...

Summary... the City of New Orleans is sinking, and sliding off the continental shelf. It's doomed even if sea levels did *NOT* rise.

> The river is moving away from the city. The city is sinking because of its
> weight, because no upbuilding by new muck for many decades, because of
> being cut off from the fresh water, because it is sliding off a cliff (the Continental Shelf),
> and because the Oil and Gas Industry is extracting oil out from under it.
> It is a city that for all intents and purposes is now Sea domain.

And, oh yeah, the very fact that ships can navigate from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi River is an anthropogenic artifact.

> To understand the City of New Orleans one must first understand the
> massive Mississippi River delta. New Orleans was built at the site of the old
> "French Quarter" on the high ground adjacent to the Mississippi river.
> This location was picked because the Mississippi River didn't have a mouth
> into the ocean. The river simply went into the "Black Swamp" and disappeared.
> This was where ships headed down river had to stop and unload their
> goods to be transshipped across Lake Pontchartrain to the sea. This was
> done by unloading the goods at the docks and then hauling them to the
> lake where shallow draft boats would take the goods to the seagoing ships.
>
> By using some ingenious methods, Henry Shreve -- after whom
> Shreveport, La., is named -- forced the river to dig its own channel out to
> the sea where it now goes. This allowed the ocean-going boats access to
> the enormous Mississippi river. This, together with the work of the US Army
> Corps of Engineers, produced what is functionally the largest ocean port on earth.

Re: Louisiana is one big sinkhole

[Khyber]

"What is the ground composed of and what does the water table underneath look like?"

That entire area is in the Mississippi Delta Floodplains. Everything from Memphis to the Gulf of Mexico is practically FLOATING on a giant aquifer. All it takes is for New Madrid to go 7.5 or higher to put most of everything from Memphis down to Hattiesburg underwater. A large influx of water on the floodplains further south would probably cause a quicksand effect (and in fact there's tons of that in Louisiana) and simply wash everything away or drag much of it under the ground (as we witnessed with Katrina and New Orleans.)