Earned Media
Ida Reveals Two Louisianas: One With Storm Walls, Another Without
Quotes David Muth, NWF: The same is happening in other coastal parishes, said David Muth, director of gulf restoration at the National Wildlife Federation.
“The numbers speak for themselves: People are voting with their feet about where they want to live,” Mr. Muth said. The cycle is self-perpetuating: As more people leave, “it becomes harder and harder to justify massive investments in storm risk reduction,” he said.
New Orleans levees passed their first major test
Quotes Kim Reyher, CRCL:
Closing off the channel by building a rock wall at one end is already reducing salinization in the marshes, says Kimberly Reyher, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a nonprofit working to support a variety of coastal wetlands restoration projects. More of that is needed.
“The levees worked this time as intended,” she says. “But we need to think about other lines of defense. We can’t build walls around everything.
Ida churns up tension on infrastructure vs. climate change
Quotes Natalie Snider, EDF, and David Muth, NWF:
In some cases, Ida’s arrival was simply bad timing: Construction on a levee near LaPlace, La., which Ida inundated, broke ground earlier this year but is not yet finished, noted Natalie Snider, associate vice president for climate resilient coasts and watersheds with the Environmental Defense Fund. But those types of projects would get a boost with the Senate bill, she said.
In addition, the bill would fund projects like ecosystem restoration to reverse decades of dredging — largely from oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico — and other human activity that have destroyed marshes and reduced sediment flows through the Mississippi River. While it is unclear how they performed during Ida, restored buffers like the Caminada Headlands near Port Fourchon helped blunt damage from Hurricanes Laura and Delta last year, said David Muth, Gulf restoration director with the National Wildlife Federation.
“What Congress does going forward is going to be critically, critically important to this. We have a long way to go,” Muth said. “And obviously climate change is accelerating the problem.”
Amid the Misery of Hurricane Ida, Coastal Restoration Offers Hope. But the Price Is High - Inside Climate News
Quotes Emily Vuxton, CRCL, Natalie Snider, EDF:
So far, what’s been spent on restoration in Louisiana has been worth it, and may have helped reduce Ida’s impact, environmental advocates said.
“I think we would absolutely be in a much worse condition without the work that’s been done,” said Natalie Snider, associate vice president for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Resilient Coasts and Watersheds program. Even if some newly restored areas are destroyed by Ida, coastal resilience has to be seen on a large scale, she said. EDF is part of a coalition of national and regional groups working on coastal restoration in the region.
“We know living in Southern Louisiana that coastal landscapes are what protects the coast and the levees,” she said. “The resiliency of the system is about multiple lines of defense, swamps, levees, wetlands, all of that working together. If those barrier islands had continued to degrade, that would have opened up the bays, and we would have seen way more wetlands loss.”
In hardest slam since Katrina, New Orleans’s levees stand firm
Quotes Emily Vuxton, CRCL: "Through most of its modern history, New Orleans depended on its natural defenses — the coastal wetlands — for protection against powerful storms. But the steady loss of wetlands in recent decades — along with a gradual lowering of the ground level in the area — made the city more dependent on man-made protection. Now efforts to rebuild those natural barriers is part of the overall strategy.
“The barrier islands are going to attenuate some of the storm surge,” Vuxton said. “Those are the first line of defense.”
Will New Orleans levees hold? Hurricane Ida may devastate 'outlying' areas
Quotes Emily Vuxton, CRCL:
“These systems that maybe were protecting us before are no longer going to be able to protect us without adjustments,” said Emily Vuxton, the policy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental group, at the time. She said repair costs could be “hundreds of millions” of dollars, with 75 percent paid by federal taxpayers. “I think this work is necessary. We have to protect the population of New Orleans,” Vuxton said.
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Amid the Misery of Hurricane Ida, Coastal Restoration Offers Hope. But the Price Is High - Inside Climate News
Efforts to save a vanishing Louisiana coast could be hampered by increasingly powerful hurricanes and funding that, with many other shorelines threatened, is spread thin.