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buy gabapentin online usa Heading back to New Orleans from the Atchafalaya I spoke with Randy about the possibility of the Corps opening distributaries from the Mississippi in order to build the coastline back up. The way he spoke had been encouraging. He spoke of the current model – channeling the river so it flows fast and deep straight to the deep water of the Gulf – as being great for navigation (which was what the Corps had been empowered by congressional mandate to engineer the river for) but wasteful of an important natural resource – the sediments carried by the river. “Like I told you, once they get shot into deep water, they’re unrecoverable,” he said. “It’s a waste.”

http://vintagegoodness.com/featured-collectible-bennington-pottery/ “So what has the Corps been doing?”

“Well,” he said, looking behind him to merge onto the highway and dropping into high gear, “this is all very new. But we have several sediment distribution pipelines that we’ve been putting into the river, so we can dump the sediments into the swamps and marshes.”

“I saw some coming up, I think. What do they look like?”

“They’re just pipes. You see them coming up over the levee?”

“Precisely. Well, the idea sounds great.”

“Well, there’s been opposition,” he said. “See, here in Louisiana there’s always opposition. There’s so many interests all around the river; some people have homes, some people have businesses, there’s crawfish fishermen, oyster fishermen, shrimp fishermen, and they all want different things. And basically, no one wants it in their back yard. We have another big spillway, which you’ll see as you bike up, the Bonnet Carre spillway, which enters Lake Pontchartrain. People don’t like us using this, because when we dump all those sediments into the lake you get a big algae bloom which kills the fish in the lake. And it’s not very pretty, and people have all their lakeside homes right there.”

Atchafalaya Basinkeeper was an example of this. They were complaining that the Atchafalaya basin was silting up – in other words, it was receiving sediments. This was changing the ecosystem, and in particular turning swamp into bottomland forest. This was bad for the existing forest. But the other options were probably worse. If the river came down the Atchafalaya, it would completely alter the existing ecosystem, flooding out some parts and dumping huge banks of silt and mud elsewhere. And the only way it would not come down the Atchafalaya is if the Corps kept on doing what it was doing: by putting sediment there, it was slowly building up the level of the basin – plugging the hole, so to speak. Lake Pontchartrain was another good candidate for receiving sediment: it was the ocean lapping right at the edge of New Orleans. It was dangerous. “I think Lake Pontchartrain should just get filled in and turned into swamp completely.”

“Right. You can imagine how that would go over with the people who have their houses there. ‘We’re going to take your nice lakeside property and turn it into a mosquito hole.’ It’d be safer for New Orleans, although I’d say that New Orleans really does benefit from having all that navigable water on its north side. There are tradeoffs. There are always tradeoffs.”

“I read about the Corps sediment diversions online, and read that some of the opposition was for environmental reasons: the water is not clean – it contains pesticides and agricultural runoff and pharmaceuticals and all sorts of other things in it, and there was a study done suggesting that diversions from the river will kill the swamp vegetation, making the coast even more vulnerable to being ripped apart by storm surges.”

“Right. That’s possible. And that’s why the Corps projects are small. We’re just running pipelines. It’s nothing like the Atchafalaya. The Atchafalaya is thirty percent of the water.”

“What are the diversion pipelines?”

“Oh, less than one percent. Much less than one percent.”

“Is that going to be able to do anything?”

“Probably not,” he said. “But you have to start small. The Corps has never rebuilt a coastline. That’s never been part of the mission. We don’t have experience doing this. No one really has any experience doing this. So you can’t just rush into it.”

“But isn’t there some kind of urgency on this project? The coast is losing thirty square miles every year.”

“Well, that’s why we’re doing the pipelines, despite the fact that some people say we shouldn’t even be doing that.”

I found myself thinking of the lady at the post office in Pointe a la Hache, who said that it was too late and everything should have been done fifty years ago. Sero sapiunt Phryges, the Trojans are too late wise.

“Are there any thoughts of opening up the old distributaries like Bayou Plaquemines, or building a new spillway for the area south of New Orleans?”

He just shook his head as if in polite condescension to someone who just didn’t understand the world very well. “Those would be big, big projects,” he said. “You have to understand, the Atchafalaya can take all this water because it’s not developed. Look around here, there’s no one here. But everywhere lower on the Mississippi, shit John you saw it as you came up, there’s houses and people and businesses all along that river. Big distributary projects would expose thousands of being to being flooded out. Projects like that are going to require a huge mandate, which we don’t have. People don’t want the Corps or the government in general making decisions as to who is going to get flooded.”

“But the coast probably does need to get flooded in order to survive.”

He looked at me and laughed. “That’s the problem. You see, it’s like I’ve been telling you, the Corps is subject to our political system. If we don’t have a mandate we’re not going to do it. The only reason we can flood Morgan City if we need to is we had a mandate to keep the Mississippi River where it was. But sediment distribution is going to be a much harder sell.”

The problem, in short, was this: we had taken over nature’s management of the river, and replaced it with our political system. This actually functioned reasonably well – I am not a pessimist in these matters – but it functioned slowly and typically lurched forward in reaction to disasters. There was, in fact, demand for rebuilding the coastline. And I think there were potential candidates for locations for replacing the levees with dams that could be opened to flood the swamps. At West Pointe a la Hache, for instance, there is a clear channel from the river to the swamp without towns or businesses; and both north and south of Pointe a la Hache on the eastbank there were several possible locations. These would be big projects, but they would be necessary. In the end, the only way forward was a more accurate imitation of nature’s system of distributaries throughout the delta.  But in the meantime, it looked like the coast erosion was going to get very bad.

“One percent isn’t going to do very much, is it?” I asked. “The coastline was maintained by getting one hundred percent of the river-water in the past.”

“No, it’s probably not.”

Two, three, or five percent isn’t going to do very much either, is it?”

“Probably not.”