Whenever it overtopped its banks-something it used to do virtually every spring-the river cast its sediment across the plain. “I do not know much about gods but I think that the river is a strong brown god,” T. S. All the while, it has been carrying on its broad back vast loads of sediment-at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, some four hundred million tons annually. In one form or another, the Mississippi has been winding its way to the Gulf for millions of years. It will feature enough concrete and riprap to pave Greenwich Village and, when operating at full capacity, will, by flow, be the twelfth-largest river in the country. The furthest along of these is slated for Plaquemines Parish. And so a huge new public-works project is getting under way-this one aimed not at flood control so much as at controlled flooding. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted, “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.īut if control is the problem it must also, by the logic of the Anthropocene, be the solution. Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. But the essential one is a marvel of engineering. Really, though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.Ī variety of factors are driving the “land-loss crisis,” as it’s come to be called. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U.S. Since the days of Huey Long, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place-names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.Īnd what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. Everyone who lives in the parish-and fewer and fewer people do-can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. Plaquemines has the distinction-a dubious one, at best-of being among the fastest-disappearing places on Earth. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. What little solid land there is clings to the river in two skinny strips.įlying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. For most of its length-more than sixty miles-it’s practically all vein. If it’s an arm, it’s a horribly emaciated one. Seen from the air, the parish has a very different look. At the very end of the arm, the main channel divides into three, an arrangement that calls to mind fingers or claws, hence the area’s name-the Bird’s Foot. On maps, it appears as a thick, muscular arm stretching into the Gulf of Mexico, with the Mississippi running, like a ropy blue vein, down the center. Plaquemines is where the river meets the sea. Then we continued to follow the water as it wound its way into Plaquemines Parish. We picked up the Mississippi at English Turn, the sharp bend that brings the river almost full circle. The plane took off to the north, over Lake Pontchartrain, and looped back toward New Orleans. The Piper’s pilot and owner was a lawyer who liked having an excuse to fly. Today, Lakefront Airport is used for small planes, which is how I recently found myself there, aboard a four-seat Piper Warrior. A few years later, the architect, too, went to prison. Within eighteen months of the airport’s opening, in 1934, Shushan had been indicted for money laundering and Long had been murdered. Its terminal was designed by the same architect Long had used to build a new Louisiana state capitol and a new governor’s mansion, and it was originally named for one of Long’s cronies, Abraham Shushan. Long on a tongue of fill that sticks out into Lake Pontchartrain. The New Orleans Lakefront Airport was built by the Louisiana governor Huey P.
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