Turning the Tide

Still, Terrebonne residents and parish leaders are less committed to the Great Wall’s alignment than to getting some kind of levee in place. They believe that however long it takes the Corps to build the Great Wall it will go up faster than any alternative, because the project has been studied since 1995. They’re in grave danger, and they’re desperate. They claim that the Corps, with all its studies, modeling, and endless paper shuffling, moves like a glacier. And they’re right.

“Every day that passes without the levee system in place increases our risk of losing lives, homes, businesses, and entire communities to deadly tidal surges,” proclaims the website of the Morganza Action Coalition, a group of Terrebonne Parish residents and business owners lobbying for the Great Wall. Indicative of local desperation, anger, and sense of abandonment is the motive ascribed by coalition president Dan Walker to George W. Bush for his administration’s dilly-dallying and for his attempted sabotage of the project with a WRDA bill veto, which Congress overrode last November. The president, Walker contends, wants to further enrich his home state: “Terrebonne Parish is vital to the oil and gas industry. If it is completely obliterated and we can’t give the assistance to the industry we now provide, it all goes to Texas.”

At the new Government Tower in Houma I met Terrebonne Parish president Michel Claudet, a friendly, soft-spoken public servant who described at length and in accurate detail the value of wetland buffers. “Something is better than nothing,” he declared when I inquired why he was fighting for the Great Wall when it would degrade so many wetlands. Then, in answer to my question about why he didn’t back the cheaper, more wetlands-friendly northerly route advocated by the environmental community in the multiple lines of defense strategy report, he said: “I represent 125,000 people, and I’d be telling 40,000 of them [those who live, work or own property on the seaward side] that they’re not very important.”

Not surprisingly, Natalie Snider—whose Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana co-produced the multiple lines strategy—joins Paul Kemp in dismissing Claudet’s assessment. While they understand Claudet’s distaste for a levee that supposedly protects fewer people, they point out that the multiple lines of defense plan would enclose only four percent fewer floodplain residents. “People outside our alignment wouldn’t be excluded or abandoned,” Snider explained. “We’d elevate their homes.”

Snider and Kemp also disagree with Claudet that something is always better than nothing—especially when that something is inadequate flood protection that encourages human settlement of wetlands by providing a false sense of security and when extremely limited funds could be used to deliver such real and immediate protections as elevating houses and pumping or diverting sediments into eroding marshes. “New Orleans had ‘something’ before Hurricane Katrina,” Kemp remarked.

Nothing is what Terrebonne Parish had when Hurricane Rita flooded 10,000 homes, a fact that the media and the nation basically ignored. And Claudet worries that nothing is what his parish will continue to have if the Corps insists on building the Great Wall to its new standards, because it will be too costly to construct. “The levee is hopelessly over-engineered,” he complains. “By the time it’s studied and re-studied and triple studied, they’re going to have to move it north to Assumption Parish. And then they’ll start studying it up there. If we were being attacked by Russians, Washington would spend whatever it took to defend us. Well, we’re being attacked by Mother Nature, and our cries are going unanswered.”

When Claudet was a farm boy he watched his dog corner a cat in the barn. Finally the cat leapt into the air and landed on the dog’s back. Claudet says the torpor of the feds and the swiftness of the advancing sea make him feel like that cat.

It was also in Houma that I met Win-dell Curole, the effervescent, good-humored levee manager for Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. In a family that has been retreating from the advancing sea since 1893, he’s the first to learn English before French. Curole is fiercely committed to the Great Wall and angry at proponents of the multiple lines plan, which, to his disgust, is now being studied by the Corps as a possible alternative. “The discussion was there, and everyone was invited,” he said. “But to come in at this late hour is not fair. It’s very discouraging that a minority of people who live behind levees can change things for people who have no levees.”

I was accompanied to my interview with Curole by Natalie Snider, a tireless promoter of the multiple lines of defense levee. So it astonished me to see them greet with an embrace and kisses. I understood the reason when Curole delivered precisely the same message I’d been getting from Lopez, Kemp, and Snider. “Why did Grand Lake get little and Little Lake get grand?” he asked in his rich Cajun accent, pointing to a map he’d unrolled on the floor. Grand Lake, he explained, got little because the Atchafalaya River, a Mississippi distributary (offshoot) that carries away 30 percent of its flow, has been allowed to build its delta while Little Lake is being sediment-starved by levees. This, plus a lengthy and impassioned dissertation on the value of wetlands and the sour fruits of 150 years of gross mismanagement, revealed Curole for what he is—a dedicated wetlands advocate working with the environmental community to reconnect the river to its floodplain. The Great Wall is about the only thing they argue over. Curole didn’t admit it, but it was clear to me that beneath the bubbles he, too, felt like a cornered cat.

The Great Wall was supposed to be a cost-share venture, but with no federal dollars forthcoming, the citizens of Terrebonne Parish began raising the local match in 2001 by voting themselves a special sales tax. Paul Kemp drove Snider and me past dying wetlands and cypress stands killed by saltwater intrusion, out to Pointe Aux Chenes, where we inspected the stillborn Great Wall of Louisiana. All that exists so far is three miles of the eight-foot-high “first lift” or layer. It was just a low dirt pile connected to nothing and built entirely by a community fighting for its existence—a useless, $25 million monument to desperation.