Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

DEBORAH AMOS: From Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News, this is an American RadioWorks special report, Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing wetlands. I'm Deborah Amos.

Scientists say, every hour, a chunk of land the size of a football field crumbles in Louisiana and sinks into the sea.

BILL GOOD: And if a foreign country came in and took that much of our real estate every year, that would be grounds for war.

DEBORAH AMOS: And they say, it could threaten the future of New Orleans.

WALTER MAESTRI: I don't know that anybody, though, psychologically, has come to grips with that that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone.

DEBORAH AMOS: In the coming hour, Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands, a special report from American RadioWorks, the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. First, this news update.

Welcome to an American RadioWorks special report, Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands. I'm Deborah Amos. We're going to take a surprising trip over the coming hour. We're heading into the heart of one of the most unusual and valuable regions in America, but we might not be able to see it much longer because this vast region of wetlands is crumbling and sinking into the sea. Scientists say, it's one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation's history. It could end up hurting the nation's economy. And it could make New Orleans even more vulnerable to storms. If the wetlands keep disappearing, a hurricane could bury New Orleans.

As DanieL Zwerdling reports for NPR News and American RadioWorks, there's a moral to our story. When humans try to tame nature, it can strike back with a vengeance.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It's hard to grasp how vast this problem is, until you see it from the air. A group of government officials has just buckled up their life jackets because they want to see this potential crisis firsthand.

SPEAKER 1: OK, we're ready to start.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: One official has just flown in from the Pentagon, a few come from the state capital of Louisiana. And now this bright yellow helicopter lifts off the banks of the Mississippi River. And it heads toward a landscape that's vanishing.

Satellite images show that over the past 50 years, more than 1,000 square miles of Southern Louisiana have literally disappeared. A biologist named Bill Good is guiding this inspection. He works with the State's Department of Natural Resources. He says, every couple of years, this region is losing a chunk of land that's bigger than Manhattan.

BILL GOOD: And if a foreign country came in and took that much of our real estate every year, that would be grounds for war.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The helicopter heads South along the muddy Mississippi. We skirt the skyline of New Orleans. We buzz over oil refineries, and shipyards, and freighters loaded with grain. Then suddenly, civilization seems to come to an end. We're flying over Louisiana's wetlands.

Coastal wetlands are land that gets flooded periodically by tides. They're bursting with life like rainforests. And these are some of the greatest wetlands on Earth. They sprawl 300 miles along the Gulf of Mexico, and they go 50 miles inland. They're the heart of the Mississippi Delta. And they're disappearing. Good says if we'd taken this helicopter trip decades ago, this vista would have looked like The Great Plains.

BILL GOOD: Exactly. It would look just like the prairies in the Midwest. They were very solid, vast expanses of grass, a beautiful area of verdant green from horizon to horizon.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But now, we're looking at a ragged patchwork. There are thousands of streams and lakes and canals. They're eating away at the grasslands like cancer. In fact, Bill Good knots his head toward the window. He says, look down there. See those fishing boats in that bay? When he flew over this spot the first time back in the 1980s, that bay was solid ground. Studies show that every hour, a chunk of land the size of a football field crumbles and turns to open water.

BILL GOOD: That scale, it's monumental. And the significance is really hard to put into words.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: That's why the government officials are inspecting the coasts on this day. They say if the country doesn't do something dramatic to save this region, it could hurt the American economy. Bill Good says it would cripple the state.

BILL GOOD: It's very hard to get your mind wrapped around how large and important and productive and unique all of this is. And to see it simply dying is a tragedy, a tragedy of immense proportions.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It took nature thousands of years to create these wetlands. If you want to understand how Americans are destroying them, it helps to get back on Earth.

OLIVER HOUCK: Well, we're on the banks of the Mississippi River. And these are the levees we're about to cross.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Oliver Houck runs the Environment Program at Tulane University's Law School. And on a recent evening, he leads the way to one of the spots that helped trigger the wetlands crisis in the first place. To get there, we parked near some old wooden houses next to the railroad tracks in New Orleans. And we scramble up the grassy embankments that look out over the river.

OLIVER HOUCK: The banks here are about 20 feet high. And when we cross the banks, you'll see on the other side, if this levee were not here, that water would be at about eaves level across the houses behind us.

So levees, I always wondered what it meant. A levee is a wall. A levee is a wall to keep the river out of your living room.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Houck says before people built these walls, the giant Mississippi helped build America. Every day, the river and its tributaries washed millions of pounds of soil from all over the country down to the Gulf of Mexico.

OLIVER HOUCK: You can imagine what it would take in dump trucks to bring half a million tons of silt every day to South Louisiana. Well, it would take about 200,000 2 and 1/2 ton dump trucks every day driving from Minnesota, from Rapid City, from Pittsburgh, from Denver. In so doing, it brings down these enormous, enormous loads of Earth to the mouth of the Mississippi.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Every year or so, it rains so much that the river would gush out over its banks, and all that mud and goo would spread out along the coast.

OLIVER HOUCK: And that's what built South Louisiana. The Mississippi built five million acres of land, a huge amount of land. And that was wetland.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But when French settlers showed up in the 1700s, they tried to stop the Mississippi from flooding. They started building these walls. Eventually, the US Army took over the job. And every time they thought they'd conquered nature, the river proved them wrong. So the army built more walls, and they built them higher. They've built 2,000 miles of levees as of today. And Houck says the army has finally won the war. They've tamed the Mississippi River.

OLIVER HOUCK: And so the project was, from an engineering point of view, brilliant. Brilliant. It was hugely successful. From an environmental standpoint, it was a disaster.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now scientists like Denise Reed are trying to figure out how that disaster is changing the state.

DENISE REED: OK. We good.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: We've just left the dock in a scruffy town called Cocodrie, right in the heart of the wetlands. Reed moved here from England so she could study them for the University of New Orleans. She steers the boat down a bayou, which is the Cajun word for a slow stream. It looks like we're floating through fields of grass. We pass houses and trailer homes, hoisted way up on stilts. White storks swoop over our heads. And we pass fishing boats draped in nets.

DENISE REED: This marsh that we're going to look at now is pretty typical of many, many acres, thousands of acres of marsh in coastal Louisiana. It's really hanging on the edge.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Reed says here's one reason why. After the Mississippi River built these wetlands thousands of years ago, this whole region began to subside, and it still is. All that rich, heavy soil that the river used to dump here keeps compressing under its own weight. But that was never a problem in the old days because the river would keep flooding and dumping more soil on the wetlands, and that would build them right back up.

DENISE REED: So when we built the levees along the Mississippi River, that cut off a supply of fresh water and sediment to these marshes that they would have got, say, every three to five years when a big flood came down the river. So what that means is that the land is sinking.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The wetlands are literally sinking into the sea. The Gulf of Mexico is essentially drowning them.

The moment we get out of the boat, we can feel that this wetland is dying.

DENISE REED: Oh, my God.

SPEAKER 1: Scientist overboard.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Reed says if this were a healthy marsh, we'd be able to stroll through it like a field. But every time we take a step, we sink up to our calves in water.

DENISE REED: I don't know how many times you fell in over your knees, but I fell in several times. It's full of holes.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now if I were just here on my own, sloshing around in this water that we keep falling in, I'd think, oh, marsh, that's what it's supposed to be, land and water together. So why is this a sign that this marsh is dying?

DENISE REED: Well, what it tells us is that there's not much holding it together apart from the plant roots. There's nothing very firm down there. It's not anchored very well.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And that's bad?

DENISE REED: That's bad. And of course, we're standing here right next to a pond. This is not a very big one. When you fly over coastal Louisiana, you can see that there are myriads of ponds this size and very, very much bigger. But what seems to have happened here is that the plants that were there have just said, I give up. The plants die. And when plants die, there's nothing to hold it together. What you get is a pond like this. And that's land loss. This is what coastal land loss is in Louisiana. Something that's a marsh with grass on turn into open water.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And Reed says there's another reason these wetlands are sick. She says, look back at that waterway we just came down to get into this marsh. Notice how straight it is? Reed says, nature doesn't build lines like that, the energy industry did. In the middle of the 1900s, companies like Shell and Texaco found huge amounts of energy below the wetlands.

DENISE REED: This is the kind of canal that the companies had to dredge through the marsh to actually drill holes to extract oil and gas. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of these across coastal Louisiana.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: In fact, when you wind through the wetlands on a boat, you start to think, this is wilderness. The landscape is hauntingly beautiful. Then suddenly, there's a cluster of oil drilling rigs, like a grove of metal trees. That's made energy the biggest industry in Louisiana. But Reed says there's a price. The wetlands are dying much faster where these canals have carved them up.

DENISE REED: This marsh cannot survive in this state much longer. It's all falling apart from the inside. It's like at the edge of a blanket starting to fray. Once it starts, it goes very rapidly.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Here in Louisiana, it's already affecting people's lives.

RICK EDDY: OK. See over here, here's one of the headstones. It's sticking up-- barely sticking out of the water here. The tide is a little high right now, but usually, you can see anywhere from 25 to 30 headstones.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: This is the cemetery in the town of Leesville. Rick Eddy runs the local bait and tackle shop. He's taking us out on his boat to show us where the townspeople are buried, because this is the only way you can see it.

RICK EDDY: It's definitely all underwater. The cemetery is all underwater, which eroded right away. Some of the headstones are all busted up, the mausoleums, it's just-- it's a pile of rubble, really. It's-- I've been in this area for 15 years. When I first came into the area, there was all land there. When someone dies, you put them in the Earth for eternity. And it's very heartbreaking. I mean, hard to put it in words.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Actually, a few scientists began worrying about all this back in the 1960s. They tried to tell the nation that Southern Louisiana is crumbling, but hardly anybody with cloud seemed to care. Now, that's changing because there's a new kind of activist on the scene.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: We are commercially oriented. About 72% of our business is commercial.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Roswell King Milling is probably one of the last people in Louisiana who you'd expect to fight for the environment. He's president of one of the oldest banks in the South. He's modest about it.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: We're a $7 billion bank, which in today's world, is not a large bank. Well, I mean, it's large for us.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: People call him King. When he walks across the marble floors at headquarters in New Orleans, he looks like a Hollywood version of Old Money. Milling is tall and gracious. He has a dazzling white mane.

AUDIENCE: How are you doing?

ROSWELL KING MILLING: Fine. Thank you. And yourself?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: King milling is a friend of the governor. He was King of Mardi Gras. There's a whole town named after his family.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: Hey, big man. How are you doing?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And before he took over the Whitney National Bank, Milling was one of the most powerful lawyers for the oil and gas industry. But a few years ago, Milling had a revelation. And today, this banker is spearheading an environmental crusade. He takes me to his wood-paneled chambers to show what changed him.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: I think you begin to understand the magnitude when you look at this.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Milling unfurls a map of Louisiana on his conference table. The way he tells the story, an environmentalist stopped by a few years ago to talk about the wetlands. He told milling that if they keep disappearing, it could wipe out some kinds of fish. It could wipe out millions of migratory birds that stop in the wetlands each year.

Milling says, as the activists kept talking, he started getting annoyed, but then something suddenly clicked. At this point in the story, Milling's voice drops, almost to a whisper. When he talks, people tend to lean forward to hear him.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: Finally, I looked up at him in the middle of it and said, my friend, the heck with the birds and the fishes. And I think it jolted him a little bit. And I said, this is not about the birds and the fishes, this is about whether or not the economic prosperity of Louisiana can continue.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DEBORAH AMOS: We'll return to our story in a moment. I'm Deborah Amos. You're listening to Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands, a special report from American RadioWorks, the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. From NPR, National Public Radio.

Welcome back to our American RadioWorks special report, Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands. Scientists and environmentalists have been worried about the wetlands for more than 30 years. Over the past 50 years, more than 1,000 square miles of wetlands have crumbled, they've disappeared into the Gulf of Mexico. But hardly anybody with political cloud seemed to care that the wetlands are crumbling until just a few years ago. That's when a powerful banker named King Milling had a revelation.

When we left Daniel Zwerdling a minute ago, he was in Milling's office in New Orleans, poring over a map. We return now to our story.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: King milling hunches over the map of Louisiana on his conference table. And he says, here's what made him finally see the wetlands for what they're worth. Banks like his have invested billions of dollars in businesses across this region. Milling points to the dots sprinkled across the map, he says, you'll find a Whitney National Bank in the heart of every one of these towns.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: This whole area is composed of shipbuilding yards, fabrication yards, gas processing plants, chemical installations, those towns that are located up and down the various bayous and rivers form the cornerstone of wealth throughout South Louisiana.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And on this map, these towns are surrounded by splotches of red and pink, which signifies that the wetlands around them are vanishing. Milling says the more he looked at the map, the more he realized that if the wetlands wash away, his banks investments could wash away. The state's whole economy could be crippled.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: It has everything to do with whether or not Louisiana, as we know it, will survive in the future.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So now this powerful banker is helping to lead a campaign to save the wetlands. King Milling is barnstorming around the state. He's preaching to powerbrokers who'd think twice about letting an environmentalist through their doors. He's giving speeches to the Chamber of Commerce and the top 50 businessmen's club. He's lobbying fellow bankers and lawyers. And Milling keeps telling them, if you still don't understand why the wetlands are so crucial, please drive to a spot on Louisiana's coast.

We talked to a man named Ted Falgout.

TED FALGOUT: This little dot on a map, this small place in Cajun, Southeastern Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico provides this country with somewhere between 16% to 18/% of its entire hydrocarbon supply, that's oil and gas.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: They call this place Port Fourchon. This is the base. This is the command center that supports the huge oil and gas industry out in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's like a giant scar in the middle of the wetlands. There's a jumble of ships, and docks, and helicopters, and oil refineries, and barbed wire. And then just beyond them, you can see the beginnings of miles of grassy marsh.

Falgout runs Port Fourchon for the states. He says, you think the Alaska pipeline is important? This place handles more oil than that.

TED FALGOUT: There's no other place in this country that plays such a great role to this nation's oil and gas supply.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: There are thousands of offshore drilling rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico. A lot of the oil and gas they produce plus oil from the Middle East gets to the mainland through this port. Then the industry distributes that fuel through pipelines, which are buried under the wetlands, all along this coast.

And here's the problem. When the energy companies buried those pipelines deep in the soil, they assumed it would keep them safe. But now the land around them is crumbling. At the moment, we're standing on the shoulder of the highway that leads into the port. The telephone poles beside us are sinking in water. There are little waves lapping near our shoes.

TED FALGOUT: 20 years ago, this was dry land. You could go out 500, 600 feet out here and not wet your shoes.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now it's basically a lake.

TED FALGOUT: It's exactly what it is. In two weeks from now, you have shrimpers, the inshore season opens. And there will be vessels right up against this roadway, catching shrimp. We are seeing thousands upon thousands of acres of land just disappear.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So now the pipes that used to be deep in the ground are getting exposed in open water. In fact, there was a nasty oil spill earlier this year. State officials say a boat cut right through one of British petroleum's lines. Falgout says the company has reburied seven miles of pipeline right near where we're standing, and it cost them millions of dollars. So consider the fact that there are 20,000 miles of pipelines under this crumbling coast.

TED FALGOUT: So we're talking billions of dollars to come in and repair and hopefully, fix these things before we have a major disaster where we have pipeline ruptures and we have huge oil spills as a result of the coastal land loss.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And that's just one reason why the state's business and political leaders say the whole country must try to save the wetlands. Scientists say it'll take one of the biggest construction projects in America's history. They want to change the flow of the Mississippi River. And that's just the start.

The project could easily cost tens of billions of dollars. And it doesn't take a banker like King Milling to realize that Louisiana can't afford that. So Milling and other powerbrokers are going to launch a national advertising campaign to persuade you, the nation's taxpayers, that you should foot the bill.

On a recent morning, Milling and the governor's staff huddle in the state capitol.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: Let's look at the focus group findings.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: They've hired a consultant to hammer out a strategy.

VAL MARMILLION: The first objective of the campaign is the designing of the message itself, the themes that define the problem, and the impact of the erosion of Louisiana's wetlands. Any thoughts on this?

ROSWELL KING MILLING: The environmental side is very important, but our issue here is fundamentally economics. I mean--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Business leaders like Milling don't know much wetland science, but they do know the power of marketing. Their consultants, Val Marmillion, looks very Los Angeles, buzzcut, bright blue glasses. He knows it's going to be tough to get money from Congress for wetlands when everyone's worried about the economy and terrorism. So he's been test marketing patriotic brand names for the ad campaign.

VAL MARMILLION: America's wetland was the outright choice in the Pennsylvania focus group. All said that if this is of national importance, we've got to move away from branding it the Louisiana this, that, or something else, we have got to make this America's issue, not Louisiana's. And so the brand has got to talk about how Louisiana benefits the nation in economic terms and others. We're going to get to those--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: After the meeting, I sit down with Marmillion. The marketing meeting has sounded almost like they're selling soap or cereal. Some people might wonder, is this a seemly way to educate the public about vanishing wetlands?

VAL MARMILLION: Yeah, I think it's an honest way. We are in a media age that people decry, oftentimes, but we are in competition with a lot of other stories out there. And you use the mechanisms of the day to tell your story.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But these political and business leaders don't have any illusions. They're going to face lots of hurdles when they get to Congress. For instance, Louisiana's corrupt political past could haunt them.

JACK CALDWELL: That is correct, We. Have a very checkered history.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Jack Caldwell runs the state's Department of Natural Resources. He just took part in the marketing session. Now he's strolling under magnolias on the Capitol grounds. Caldwell says he realizes that some members of Congress might hesitate to send money to a state where everybody from governors to sheriffs has gone on trial.

JACK CALDWELL: For example, on insurance commissioner, you're not going to believe this. The last three in a row have been convicted of felonies. Three in a row of elected insurance commissioner.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: You're not giving me much confidence about Louisiana.

JACK CALDWELL: No, what I'm telling you, though, it's changing.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Caldwell says the governor is trying to stamp out corruption. But there's another touchy issue. Louisiana's leaders want the nation's taxpayers to pay to fix the wetlands, but they're not demanding money yet from the industry that helped destroy them.

OLIVER HOUCK: It's ludicrous and it's unjust.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Oliver Houck runs the Environment Program at Tulane University's Law School. As Houck says, major studies show that the wetlands are crumbling, partly because the oil and gas companies tore them up. Over the last 50 years, the companies dredged thousands of canals through the wetlands to make it easier to drill wells and lay pipelines.

OLIVER HOUCK: Everybody knows the oil and gas industry is a huge actor in this. But no one goes to the next step. No one says, well, since they're a big part of the problem, hey, why don't they help clean it up? It's unjust because they happen to be walking away from a scene of destruction that they have caused. So in fairness to the American people, they should be paying their bill.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The leaders of the campaign to save the wetlands say it's true, the oil and gas companies have played a big role in destroying them. But King Milling says it's not fair to punish the companies today for something they did years ago, back when it was legal. He says, the fact is, government officials encouraged the industry to tear up the wetlands. Everybody wanted their oil and gas.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: I don't remember anyone at that time suggesting that this country should stop these activities and not have that petroleum product. Everybody was doing what they thought was the right thing at the right time.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Oliver Houck says, come on, that's not why they're tiptoeing around the energy industry.

OLIVER HOUCK: Oil and gas is the dominant source of revenue in this state. It's like coal in Wyoming. It's like sugar in South Florida. It wags the dog. And for that reason, it would take an extremely bold public official in South Louisiana to take any position that would be to the disfavor of the oil and gas industry. And one thing that will clearly be to disfavor is to have to pay part of the bill for the cleanup.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: An energy industry spokesman says they'll consider helping pay for the wetlands projects if and when they see a firm plan. But the nation can debate all that in the future. First, business leaders like King Milling need to convince you and Congress that a national treasure is dying in their backyard, and that you have the power to save it.

A lot of debates in this country have pit the economy against the environment, but back at his headquarters at the Whitney National Bank, Milling says he's learned a lesson. When it comes to Louisiana, at least, the environment is the economy.

ROSWELL KING MILLING: And if it's allowed to fail, the economy will fail. And then we've lost everything.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DEBORAH AMOS: Americans have tried to restore nature before in other parts of the country. Scientists are trying to shore up eroding beaches on the East Coast. They're trying to revive wetlands near San Francisco. They're trying to resuscitate the Everglades in Florida. But they say nobody has ever tried to launch a project as big as the one they're proposing in the wetlands of Louisiana. Daniel Zwerdling discovered that when scientists tried to repair nature, they might trigger new side effects.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Fishermen like George Barisich know, better than anybody, how much the economy depends on the environment. He practically grew up on this boat, working with his father.

GEORGE BARISICH: Oh, let him slack off, Mickey. Get a little slack, Mick.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: At the moment, he's bobbing along Louisiana's Coast. The sun is dropping. The sky is turning pink. And Barisich is dropping shrimp nets like giant spider webs into the bay.

GEORGE BARISICH: I worry about the coastline, I worry about the environment because I am 100% dependent on what the environment is capable of producing.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Yeah, I'm worried. Barisich such knows all the basic facts. He knows that these waters produce more seafood than any state, except Alaska. He knows it's because we're surrounded by some of the greatest wetlands in the world. And he realizes that the shrimp, and crabs, and fish need these wetlands to thrive.

Barisich says it's already harder than ever to make a living. There is foreign competition. He complains about government regulations. But he says, that's nothing compared to what's going to happen if the wetlands keep disappearing.

GEORGE BARISICH: I know in the long run, it's going to be worse when everything's gone. Southeast Louisiana cannot do without the commercial fishing industry. Maybe it's a selfish way to look at it. I got a plan for my family.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So Barisich was encouraged when he heard that government officials and scientists were launching a pilot project to see if they could save some of the wetlands along the coast. He never dreamed that he'd become a protagonist in a battle that's shaken the state government. He's living proof that when the government tries to solve one problem, they sometimes create another.

GEORGE BARISICH: Now I know for a fact that nothing has ever been done on this scale before. That's what bothers us. Duty scientists really know everything they're talking about because a lot of predictions they made were so far from the reality, it's funny.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: They call the pilot project the Caernarvon Water Diversion project. It's a steel and concrete structure on the banks of the Mississippi River. It looks like a dam.

JACK FREDINE: We're downstream of New Orleans, about 20 miles. We have a structure that's built here into the levee of the Mississippi River, which is here for flood control.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Jack Fredine supervises the project for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

JACK FREDINE: It's like five square holes going underneath the river for 500 feet. And each hole is 15 feet square.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The government launched this experiment a little over 10 years ago. They wanted to see if they could reverse some of the damage in the wetlands that the US Army caused when it built all those levees along the Mississippi. When Fredine gives the word, a workman presses some buttons.

And suddenly, the placid surface of the Mississippi River begins bubbling and roiling. Huge gates are opening underwater and uncovering the giant holes. And the river is pouring through the levee into a marsh on the other side.

JACK FREDINE: The original concept of this was to mimic the spring floods to replenish the marshes with fresh water that would have been coming through if the levees weren't here in the way to block out the floods.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So in a way, technology helped hurt nature in the first place. Now you're using technology to--

JACK FREDINE: Repair it. --repair nature--

JACK FREDINE: Right.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: --and mimic it.

JACK FREDINE: It's a start.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Some scientists say it's exactly the kind of start that the wetlands need. Denise Reed, the researcher from the University of New Orleans, takes me out in the marsh to show me.

DENISE REED: We're going to go over to see some marsh over there by those trees. And that's where we're going to see how the freshwater, the nutrients, and the sediments coming out of the diversion structures, revitalizing the marsh. So we're going to go see that just over the other side there.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: She'd make a great scout leader. She's got no nonsense hair and infectious smile. When we hop off the boat, Reed forges through the grasses and the wetland like she's leading an expedition.

DENISE REED: Look at all this wonderful green. There's lots of nice, big growth on these plants.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Reed says before they started the Caernarvon project, this wetland was sick, just like the marsh we visited before. Remember how it was all mushy and we kept syncing up to our calves in water? In this wetland, we're walking on firm ground. And Reed says that means that the marsh is coming back.

DENISE REED: You look at those ponds over there in the distance, you see how the grass is gradually moving in from the edge and filling in. You can see that just here. You see that grass growing out into the middle of this area. This would have all been bare.

What is land loss? Land loss is marsh turning to open water. Here, we've got open water in ponds, filling in and becoming marsh. A lot of people think it's hopeless down here in coastal Louisiana, but just coming down here and looking at this makes us believe that we can do this.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So the coalition that's trying to save the coast wants to build a chain of projects like Caernarvon all along the Mississippi River. They're still hammering out the details, but they say it could be one of the biggest construction projects in America's history. They say, that's the only way to save some of the key wetlands that are left. But the history of the Caernarvon project suggests that when you try to control nature, there are bound to be surprises.

GEORGE BARISICH: Catch it if you can, Mick.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Fishermen like George Barisich say the first sign of trumple was the shrimp.

GEORGE BARISICH: [INAUDIBLE] on one of y'all.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: At the moment, he's maneuvering his white and orange boat across a bay at dense Louisiana's coast. Barisich says over the years, he's mastered the craft of catching shrimp, like an old angler hooks his trout. He's learned where shrimp like to feed. And he's learned the best cycles of the moon. But a few years after the government built the Caernarvon project, some kinds of shrimp stopped showing up.

GEORGE BARISICH: They never came in. They never came in. So you lost the production from that particular area. And you just had to get up and leave.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Then strange things started happening to his oysters. Barisich and his family had been producing oysters in this area for years on oyster farms.

GEORGE BARISICH: These are the best things that's on the market. I mean, you could stack them against any other oyster, any part of the country, and it was always in demand.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: But suddenly, a plague of mussels swarmed into the bay. You can't eat this kind of muscle. They are just a nuisance. They swarm around the oysters and attack the shells.

GEORGE BARISICH: The mussels are encapsulated and covered the whole oyster. The whole oyster became covered with mussels, the way, sometimes, you couldn't even see the oyster. It was in there, but you couldn't see it.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Barisich says within three years, those prized oysters were worthless.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

DEBORAH AMOS: Coming up next, the very survival of New Orleans could depend on what happens to the wetlands.

WALTER MAESTRI: The hurricane is spinning counterclockwise. It's now got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees. The water comes over the top. And we've now got the entire community underwater, some 20, 30 feet underwater.

DEBORAH AMOS: You can explore Louisiana's wetlands and learn more about the problem on our website, americanradioworks.org. Major funding for American RadioWorks comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You're listening to Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands, a special report from American RadioWorks, the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. Our program continues in just a moment from NPR, National Public Radio.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And now back to Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands. This is an American RadioWorks special report. I'm Deborah Amos.

Over the past 50 years, more than 1,000 square miles of Louisiana's wetlands have crumbled into the seas. Scientists say if the trend continues, it could disrupt America's oil and gas and seafood industries, but it turns out that the potential solutions could trigger new problems. That's the case with a pilot project called Caernarvon. Scientists unleashed the Mississippi River so it can flood the marshes and rebuild them. But Daniel Zwerdling tells, what happened next?

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Fishermen like George Barisich say their world turned upside down. First, one of the main kinds of shrimp that he used to catch disappeared. They stopped showing up in this bay. Then his oyster farms got ruined, they got overrun by a kind of mussels. And state researchers acknowledged today that all these changes happened mainly because of Caernarvon.

When the government unleashed the Mississippi and sent river water and mud gushing into this area, they lowered the salt content of the bay. Scientists wanted to do that to help rebuild the wetlands. But as Barisich says, the changes pushed out the shrimp that liked saltier water, and they attracted the gangs of mussels that don't.

GEORGE BARISICH: And that's what gets fishermen hot. It'd be just like if you had a piece of property and you farm tomatoes on it. And they wanted to build an interstate, and they just took it. i said, too bad.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Barisich and other fishermen sued the state of Louisiana for hurting their oysters, not the shrimp. And the courts have ordered the state to pay the fishermen staggering amounts of damages. The cases are tied up in appeals, but the oystermen could theoretically win more than $700 million. It could bankrupt the state budget.

Researchers say there's one more reason why it's perhaps, more crucial than ever to try to save some of the wetlands, no matter how much some individuals might get hurt. They say, if the wetlands keep disappearing, the city of New Orleans might disappear.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

On a recent evening, a scientist pulls up in the French Quarter. Joe Suhayda takes a plastic rod out of his trunk. And he proceeds to show us what could happen the next time a hurricane hits New Orleans.

JOE SUHAYDA: OK. This is a tool that I have, a range rod. It'll show us how high the water would be if the city were hit with a category 5 hurricane.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Which would mean what? How many feet?

JOE SUHAYDA: About 20 feet of water above the ground that we're standing on right now.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: 20?

JOE SUHAYDA: 20 feet. So I'll extend this up.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Category 5 hurricane is the most powerful storm on a scientific scale. Suhayda plants the rod on the sidewalk next to a 200-year-old building that's all wrought iron balconies, and faded brick, and wooden shutters. Every click marks another foot that the flood would rise up this building.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Can't believe you're still going.

JOE SUHAYDA: Yeah, I know. Shocking.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Until a couple months ago, Suhayda ran a prominent research center at Louisiana State University. They've developed the most detailed computer models that anybody's ever used to predict how hurricanes could affect this region. Studies suggest that there's roughly a one in six chance that a killer hurricane will strike New Orleans over the next 50 years. Suhayda is still extending his stick.

JOE SUHAYDA: It's well above the second floor there. And it's just about to the rooftop.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: It's hard to comprehend, really.

JOE SUHAYDA: It is really to think that that much water would occur in the city during this catastrophic storm.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit New Orleans in our lifetime?

JOE SUHAYDA: Well, I would say, the probability is yes. In terms of past experience, we've had three storms that were near misses that could have done at least something close to this.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: So basically, the part of New Orleans that most Americans and most people around the world think of as New Orleans would disappear under water.

JOE SUHAYDA: It would. That's right.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And just across the Mississippi River, Walter Maestri is struggling to help New Orleans prepare. Maestri is the tsar of public emergencies in Jefferson Parish, that's the county that sprawls across a third of the Metropolitan area. He points to a map of the region on the wall of his command post.

WALTER MAESTRI: A couple of days ago, we actually had an exercise where we brought a fictitious category 5 hurricane into the Metropolitan area.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: The map is covered with arrows and swirls and erasable marker. They show how the fictitious hurricane crossed Key West and then smacked into New Orleans. When the computer models showed Maestri what would happen next, he wrote big letters on the map, all in capitals.

WALTER MAESTRI: KYAGB, Kiss Your Ass Goodbye, because anybody who was here as that storm came across was gone. It was body bag time. We think 40,000 people could lose their lives in the Metropolitan area.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And some researchers say that figure is conservative. Of course, people have known for centuries that New Orleans is a risky spot. Most of the region is below sea level. That's why they built 2,000 miles of levees along the Mississippi River, to keep the water out. But researchers say they've been learning just how serious the threat is only in the last few years. And they say the nation isn't prepared to handle it. The first warning shot came in 1969.

SPEAKER 2: The remnants of killer Hurricane Camille continued to spread death and destruction today, triggering flash floods in Virginia--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Hurricane Camille shook the country. It was one of those rare category 5 storms. And here's the problem, when the government built the levees to protect New Orleans, they designed them to hold off much smaller storms. Government officials didn't expect that such a massive hurricane could hit the city in our lifetimes or in our grandchildren's lifetimes.

SPEAKER 2: The country's chief hurricane expert declared today that Hurricane Camille was the greatest storm of any kind ever to hit the nation.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Camille missed New Orleans but only by 100 miles, which suggested that maybe government officials had been short-sighted. Then another category 5 storm hit the country in the early 1990s. Remember, Hurricane Andrew? Now officials in Louisiana started to worry more about New Orleans. And they got another warning just a few years ago.

SPEAKER 3: Forecasters saying Georges could strike New Orleans with 115 mile an hour winds. Thousands packed up and moved out, clogging evacuation routes.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And that taught everybody a troubling lesson. Joe Suhayda, the scientist with a big stick, drives me through the city to explain.

JOE SUHAYDA: Well, hurricane George or Georges was one for which the track had the potential of flooding the city. So the people were given a mandatory evacuation order, evacuate the city.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And government officials had made elaborate plans so the population could evacuate smoothly. We keep passing blue street signs marked Hurricane Evacuation Routes. The government had organized fleets of buses to rescue tens of thousands of people who didn't have cars. At the last minute, hurricane Georges faded to a weaker storm and it veered away, which was lucky because the evacuation was a fiasco.

JOE SUHAYDA: And what happened to the people that did evacuate is that they got into massive traffic jams. And many of them spent the worst part of the hurricane either on the highway, stopped, or had pulled off to the side of the road.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Now supposing the hurricane had really walloped New Orleans, here are all these thousands and thousands of people in their cars, trapped on the roads. What would happen to them?

JOE SUHAYDA: Many of our evacuation routes are subject to flooding. And they would be washed away. And there would be really no way for the help that is emergency services people to get to them to help them.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And there's still another reason why scientists are worrying more about hurricanes in New Orleans every single year. It's the vanishing wetlands. The wetlands have always been like a huge natural shield that helps protect New Orleans from storms moving in from the gulf. Suhayda says when a hurricane blows across those miles and miles of marshes, they sap it's energy, they diminish its power.

JOE SUHAYDA: So the hurricane can move closer to the city before it starts to decrease its intensity. So in effect, the city is moving closer to the gulf as each year goes by.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Scientists say if the shield keeps crumbling over the next few decades, then it won't take a giant storm to cause a disaster. A much weaker, more common kind of hurricane could devastate New Orleans.

That's why Walter Maestri and his colleagues are getting ready at the Emergency Command Center in Jefferson Parish. He says if the hurricane comes, they'll seal themselves inside.

WALTER MAESTRI: This is the communication center here. At every station, we've got fire, we've got emergency medical, we've got public works, National Guard because--

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Maestri says, picture what happens if a huge storm strikes just to the East of the city.

WALTER MAESTRI: The hurricane is spinning counterclockwise. It's now got a wall of water in front of it some 30, 40 feet high. As it approaches the levees that surround the city, it tops those levees. The water comes over the top. And first, the communities on the West side of the Mississippi River go under.

Now Lake Ponchetrain, which is on the Eastern side of the community, that water from Lake Ponchetrain is now pushed on to that population, which has been fleeing from the Western side, and everybody's caught in the middle. The bowl now completely fills. And we've now got the entire community under water, some 20, 30 feet underwater.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Remember all those levees that the US Army built around New Orleans to hold smaller floods out of the bowl, Maestri says now those levees would doom the city because they'll trap the water in.

WALTER MAESTRI: It's going to look like a massive shipwreck. Everything that the water has carried in is going to be there, and it's going to have to be cleaned out. I mean, alligators, moccasins, God knows what that lives in the surrounding swamps have now been flushed literally into the Metropolitan area. And there's no way for them to get out because they're inside the bowl now.

There's no water to drink. There's no water to use for sanitation purposes. All of your sewage treatment plants are underwater. And of course, the material is floating free in the community. The petrochemicals that are produced all up and down the Mississippi River, much of that has floated into this bowl. I mean, this has become the biggest toxic waste dump in the world is the city of New Orleans because of what has happened.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Study suggests that most of the buildings in the city would be demolished. If the water didn't destroy them, the hurricane's horrific winds would. And that raises a question, how many people would die? Some researchers say 20,000, some say 40,000.

The US Army Corps of Engineers has been studying the potential disaster. Their lead researcher is a man named Jay Combe. And Combe says those projected death tolls are probably too low.

JAY COMBE: I think of a terrible disaster. I think, about 100,000.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Federal officials are so stunned by these sorts of findings that they're rethinking their assumptions about New Orleans. Officials in the US Army say, there's got to be a way to prevent some of that devastation. So they'll study whether they should build more levees and build them higher. They'll study whether the region needs new highways so people can evacuate faster.

But most officials say there's only one strategy that'll help protect New Orleans in the long run, and they say it's the same strategy that'll help prevent the state's economy from washing away. Walter Maestri says they've got to rebuild the region's natural defenses.

WALTER MAESTRI: I think we need to have, in essence, a concerted effort, a war on the issue. We know that we've got continued loss of the wetlands. We've got to reclaim the coast.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: And that's exactly what political and business leaders in Louisiana plan to do. They say they'll need at least $14 billion from the federal government to launch their project so they can start rebuilding the wetlands. Some of the nation's most influential environmental groups say the wetlands are one of their top priorities, and they'll throw their weight behind the plan.

Curiously, one of the scientists who's working on the project says he's feeling a little worried about it. Joe Suhayda says the project could backfire if they try to spend too much money too fast.

JOE SUHAYDA: I do not believe, at this point in time, that we're, perhaps, ready to scale to a $14 billion effort.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Until a couple of months ago, Joe Suhayda ran a prestigious research center at Louisiana State University. He says Louisiana's wetlands are a national treasure. And he says the country should urgently try to protect them. But he says, projects like Caernarvon won't work magic. The damage in the wetlands is too vast.

JOE SUHAYDA: I was in fact, talking with the governor. And he actually asked the question, can we save the coast? No, I said. From the standpoint of returning it to a former condition, I don't think we can save the coast. There will be small areas that may be improved.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Suhayda says nobody's tried to restore nature before on such a massive scale. And they need to do more studies to figure out which strategies will really work best.

Back in the wetlands, Denise Reed says she's heard those arguments before. She and Suhayda worked together in the coalition that's trying to restore the coast. But Reed and most of the other scientists say there's no time left for doubts. They say the country has to do something dramatic to start saving the wetlands now.

DENISE REED: We can't wait another 10 years. There won't be much marsh left to save. We can't afford to go slower. The problem is so serious that action is clearly needed. I mean, this is not really just about marshes, this is about the future of coastal Louisiana.

DANIEL ZWERDLING: Reed says it's true, they don't know yet exactly how they'll save the coast, but they'll learn from projects like Caernarvon as they go along. And she says, everybody should have learned something from trying to tame the Mississippi River. There is no quick fix when you try to fix nature.

DENISE REED: No it's not going to be easy. We're going to alter the way things are going to look down here. They're not going to be the same anymore. I mean, they're not going to be the same if we don't do anything because it's all going to go to hell in a handbasket. People's lives are going to change.

DEBORAH AMOS: The naturalist, John Muir, could have been talking about the wetlands almost 100 years ago. He wrote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Nature's Revenge, Louisiana's Vanishing Wetlands was produced by Daniel Zwerdling and edited by Nils Bruzelius and Ann Gudenkauf, mixing by Neil Tevault and Craig Thorson. Web production by Emily Thompson, Michael Wells, and Rebecca Smith. The American RadioWorks editor is Deborah George. Coordinating producer, Sasha Aslanian. Project coordinator, Misha Quill. The managing editor of American RadioWorks is Stephen Smith. The executive producer is Bill Buzenberg. Special thanks to producer William Brangham with the PBS program now with Bill Moyers. I'm Deborah Amos.

Major funding for American RadioWorks comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. To listen to this program again or to print a transcript and see photographs, visit our website, americanradioworks.org. American RadioWorks is the documentary project of Minnesota Public Radio and NPR News. This is NPR, National Public Radio.