Fifteen years post-Hurricane Katrina, the refuge has been conducting restoration and breakwater projects like the annual Christmas tree drop to rebuild the refuge and protect against shoreline erosion. 

“We’re floating,” said Shelley Stiaes, refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “You don’t feel it, but we are.” She described how Louisiana’s loose sediment landscape has been sinking into the Gulf Coast, making the area increasingly vulnerable to coastal erosion. “That’s another problem: subsidence in New Orleans. When you get these storms or heavy rains, everything will flood.” 

Natural protection features like barrier islands and beach ridges obscure the interior wetlands—and the city—from the waves, wind and storm surges that beat down upon the coastline. Levees were built in addition to keep the water out but consequently created what Stiaes calls a “bowl,” with New Orleans resting in the basin about six-feet-below sea level. 

Bayou Sauvage has less than 5% of natural levees with enough elevation or drainage to support the ecosystem. With the help of The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the refuge built a multi-million-dollar levee system around the conservatory. Smaller levees were built inside the refuge, which created miniature bowls, so pumping systems were installed to pipe the water that gets trapped back out. 

After Hurricane Katrina, 80% of the refuge’s forest was toppled by wind or oversaturated by saltwater that flooded in with the storm surge. 

“This used to be a closed canopy,” said Stiaes gesturing to the absent forest awning over the Ridge Trail boardwalk. In 2008, the refuge began reforestation initiatives to restore vegetative growth by planting trees that support native and migrating wildlife. The refuge began partnering with scientists to monitor vegetation growth and worked with at-risk youth, who got experience in the environment repairing boardwalks, planting native flora and removing invasive growth. 

“Some of the largest cities, especially New Orleans, collect Christmas trees,” said Brian Pember, assistant refuge manager at the Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge outside of Houma, Louisiana. “Bayou Sauvage got hammered during Katrina, so they’re still trying to restore it. That’s a really effective way to help protect the shoreline.” 

Since much of the refuge’s marshland was broken apart by Katrina, Bayou Sauvage asked New Orleans’s residents to donate their bare post-season Christmas trees to repair flood barriers within the conservatory. The annual project began before Katrina, though it was all done manually by the refuge workers. After Katrina, it developed into a large-scale collaboration between the City of New Orleans and its citizens, the Department of Sanitation and the Louisiana Army National Guard among others. 

Upcycled Christmas trees are bundled into groups of 50, strapped into a harness and airlifted three-at-a-time into the marsh via helicopters. The exercise is useful training for the Louisiana Army National Guard with the objective of laying a straight line of trees across the marsh from one poll to another. Then on an airboat, refuge workers and volunteers untie and retrieve the harnesses from the crib. 

The crib of recycled Christmas trees reconnects islands and marshland within the refuge and acts as a wave-break by obstructing the shoreline from wave erosion. The dulled water motion allows for new vegetative growth and traps silt, which helps strengthen the shoreline.

In 2019, more than 9,000 trees were estimated to have been lowered into the refuge, creating a wave-break visible from Google Earth.  

“By the time the Christmas trees have rotted, sediment has dropped out some of the emerging vegetation, like bulrushes, which grow out and protect the shoreline,” said Pember.

Similar cribs have been built at the Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge, which consists of more than 4,000 acres of freshwater marsh and is intersected by the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Being a wetland conservatory, the refuge is made up of swamp and marshland that can only be accessed by boat.

Busted up concrete piled along the shoreline helps prevent the marshland from eroding into the waterway. Repurposed Christmas trees like those at Bayou Sauvage were collected behind a wooden crib, providing a healthy barrier for the flotant marsh and loose mats of vegetation that shift in the wind and water. Often, regrowth can be seen inside the Christmas tree cribs.

“On the calm side, we get more vegetation. Birds pass by and drop seeds—I’ve seen stuff growing out of the tree.” said Stiaes. “It’s a very beneficial project. It involves the citizens of New Orleans—they get to give back.”

The post Fighting Coastline Erosion in Louisiana’s Wildlife Refuges appeared first on Rising Waters.

Outside of a stilted house at the tip of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, an artistically renovated toilet displayed a sign that read, “climate change is not worth _.”

The exhibit belongs to Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribal member Chris Brunet, whose family has been living on the Isle de Jean Charles for at least seven generations.

“The big talk is always climate change,” said Brunet. “Every environment is affected by climate change in some kind of way. There’s more than just one coastal community in Louisiana and all along the coast of the U.S. being affected—and all across the world.”

Brunet attributes his experiences with a changing climate to a complex issue of erosion both naturally caused and manmade. In 2003, Brunet’s grandmother grew tired of hurricanes bringing in floodwater and mud but refused to leave the island, so she had the house raised.

Three years later, drainage levees were installed to protect the community from high tide. Brunet recalled seeing a waterspout tear through to the large drainage ravine across the road during a storm, “This here did fill in like a bowl. And then you have to wait for the tide to go down and you can see the top of the levee. Then the pump can pump out the rest of the water, which takes about three or four days.”

His father was a fisherman who used to walk through muddy marshland to a nearby lake. Now, Brunet says that same lake is only accessible by boat.

Though many coastal residents have relocated to higher ground, Brunet and his family have decided against moving. He said the only way that the isle will lose its sense of community is if they allow it to. “You don’t want it erased,” he said. “You want to keep what you have.”

Environmental migration orders have been issued to protect vulnerable communities from the risk of worsening floods along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. After Hurricane Katrina, many retreated, though others exhibited great resilience and adapted to a flooded and economically damaged landscape. In a city that lost more than half its population after Katrina, New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward continues to feel the ramifications of the storm 15 years later.

After the Floodwall Breached 

When the Industrial Canal Flood Wall breached in the storm surge, the Lower Ninth Ward took the brunt of the flood that killed hundreds, destroyed homes and demolished the landscape. Now, much of the area remains vacant and appears more as a dumping ground than as the neighborhood full of families it once was.

“The area was so devastated. We had houses that were wiped out—gone—they just floated away,” said Jimmie Harris, a Lower Ninth Ward firefighter who was on duty during Hurricane Katrina. He described the area after the surge as being layered in three inches of mud and debris that reeked of a “raw, sewer-like smell.”

After a few weeks, Harris was able to return to his own house in the neighborhood to find everything had been swept to his front door with the residing water. His family, who had been sheltering in Huston, remained there for three more years while he rebuilt. Even then, Harris admitted it took a bit of effort to persuade his wife to return.

“The community tried to help each other, but everybody needed help,” Harris said. “It was kind of everybody on their own.”

Many residents, the majority being elderly or retired, never returned, and the ward became a reclusive section of the city.

People are coming back slowly now, but not at the rate Harris had once hoped. On his block alone, there are four empty lots with no prospective buyers.

Fifteen years from now, Harris said hopes to see, “all the houses rebuilt, kids playing, families going to work like it was before.”

Deep Bayou Country 

Patricia Reels has lived her whole life in Houma, deep in Louisiana’s bayou country. When a strong storm is predicted, she boards up her house and evacuates the area, as she did in 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, which brought 140 mph winds ripping through Houma.

“I remember seeing the neighbor’s porch spinning around in the air in a hurricane,” said Reels says, who has both flood and wind insurance. “Some people still can’t afford to have their homes raised up.”

Reels says these financial disparities are proportionate to racial inequality and prejudice in the area, as Confederate flags are paraded off porches down the street. “Why should I be racist? How you hate me, and you don’t know me?” said Reels, who says she has indigenous Choctaw, Asian, Black and White roots. “Treat people of color the way you want to be treated yourself.”

The post Feet Rooted, Waters Rising appeared first on Rising Waters.

If a Katrina-sized (or larger) hurricane were to strike anywhere from New Orleans to New York during the pandemic, communities along the coast would be given a few days to evacuate in massive hordes. Social distancing would become irrelevant and infection rates would soar in mass shelters like the Superdome. Where would evacuees go? How would they protect themselves from a storm and a virus?

“It would be catastrophic,” said coastal Louisiana resident and Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribal member Chris Brunet. “How do you begin putting together a response for that?”

Brunet lives and grew up on Isle de Jean Charles, an island in the bayous of South Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Though the Louisiana Department of Health reported just under 500 cases of COVID-19 in Terrebonne Parish, Brunet and his family have kept a safe distance. While schools and stores remain closed for public health, Brunet said he doesn’t feel worried about leaving his house on the isle because the community is so isolated itself.

“The people are not close together as you would see in a city—it’s mainly us,” said Brunet.

But the real hub of the virus is about 80 miles northeast in New Orleans, with high transmission rates traced back to late February’s Mardi Gras crowds. By the beginning of May, the city confirmed more than 6,000 cases and early forecasts are predicting a busy hurricane season.

John W. Day Jr., an emeritus professor of oceanography and coastal science at Louisiana State University, said “it’s not a new problem, but I think the intensity and magnitude of it is what’s going to change.”

The Gulf Coast is projected to see larger hurricanes more frequently, according to his research, where more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes are expected to be more intense and move slowly over larger areas.

“If a storm can intensify that quickly into a Category 5 hurricane, there’s not time for people to leave the city—it takes more than two days to evacuate,” said Day. “There’s a real sense of foreboding. The impacts are a part of real life from now on and it’s just going to get worse.”

In April, Gov. John Bel Edwards ordered state agencies to prepare emergency guidelines to accommodate an evacuation order during the pandemic. Updated hurricane evacuation guidelines include social distancing regulations in shared shelters and public transportation. Evacuees awaiting transportation to a shelter will be provided a mask and screened for symptoms at Evacuspots, while those with a temperature more than 100 degrees will be isolated.

Similar emergency plans are under construction along the Atlantic Coast to keep populations safe from both storms and the virus. In New York City, which took about $19 billion in damages from 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, the pandemic has delayed progress on major resilience projects like sea walls. The question of preparedness has now forced major cities to rethink their emergency plans and to respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

“Nobody can be spared from this pandemic; not the smallest community or the largest—then add the uncertainty of a hurricane for the Gulf or Atlantic Coast communities,” said Brunet. “As hurricane season gets closer, you hope that storms hold back. And if anybody does get anything, you hope it’s not too severe.”

For Miami Beach, a city threatened by frequent gulf flooding and sustained by a currently floundering tourism industry, COVID-19 has been detrimental to the economy. Climate resilience projects like elevating roads and installing new pumping infrastructure have been set aside while the city funnels its resources into COVID-19 response efforts.

“Look how quick it changed,” said Brunet. “It just makes you think that no matter how prepared you think we are something can destroy us. Katrina was the storm that should have never happened, but everybody knew that one day it was going to happen.”

Last summer, Hurricane Barry reached the Isle de Jean Charles in late July right before the start of the school year. Brunet hopes that “we don’t get no hits,” but if they do, they may be better equipped to handle an emergency once the virus recedes.

Outside of Brunet’s home, raised on stilts to avoid floodwater, is a repurposed toilet displaying a sign; “climate change is not worth___.” Though the island is subject to frequent flooding and shoreline erosion, Brunet said he feels climate change is only a small part of the problem.

Now, he is considering swapping out his iconic commode for a new symbol this season: a roll of toilet paper. “When the pandemic took over the climate change talk, the community was looking for toilet paper,” said Brunet.

The post COVID-19 on the Coast: Concerns About Disaster Preparedness appeared first on Rising Waters.