Louisiana Island Has That Sinking Feeling

"For natural and manufactured reasons, 30 square miles of South Louisiana wetlands vanish every year into the Gulf. People here say they lose a football field every 20 minutes, every half-hour, every hour â€" the estimates vary, but the panic is constant, partly because wetlands and barrier islands act as hurricane buffers for the vulnerable mainland.

The unnerving sense of 'look away, lose an inch' is especially keen here on the very poor, very mucky and thoroughly exposed Isle de Jean Charles, which almost dutifully received six feet of water during Hurricane Rita last September. But the advancing waters rubbing away a culture have a partner, tribal members say: the government.

[The] 72-mile levee system called the Morganza to the Gulf of Mexico Hurricane Protection Project, [a] $887 million project of the Army Corps of Engineers...is designed to stem the wetlands' erosion in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes caused by natural subsidence, the rerouting of the Mississippi River and, some say, global warming.

'The system will provide hurricane protection to over 90 percent of the residents,' said Jerome Zeringue, the director of the Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District. "There are a few people left out, unfortunately.' Most of those few left out are the Biloxi-Chitimacha on Isle de Jean Charles.

In effect, the government had to ask itself: is it worth $100 million or more to protect a shrinking spit of an island, its only road, its modest homes, some of them little more than shacks, and its 250 residents, whose families have lived here for generations? Its conclusion: no."