LOUISIANA LETTER:If the marsh areas are destroyed, the consequences for the flow of the Mississippi will be significant – with serious and lasting repercussions for the US economy
LEWIS HATTY, faced burnished like a well seasoned walnut, expertly steers his aluminium hulled boat through the creeks and channels of the vast wetlands of the Mississippi Delta.
“If you like the ride, tip the guide” is the message scrawled on the boat.
“Me, my father and his father before him were all shrimpers,” says Hatty, his southern drawl like a slow-running motor.
“Now I take tours round the bayou. It’s the only job to do round here.”
Shrimp imports, mostly from Thailand and Vietnam, have killed the local industry.
“Twenty years ago my dad would get three dollars a pound for his shrimp – now he’s lucky if he gets seventy cents.”
We pass by a group of alligators, languidly drifting about in the shallow waters.
The bayou is a flat, confusing world, more than a little threatening with its overhanging trees, reeds and lychen blowing in the wind.
The death of the shrimp industry is not the only problem facing local communities.
The wetlands of the Mississippi Delta, stretching from the state of Mississippi in the east along the shore line of Louisiana and on into Texas in the west, is one of the most environmentally rich areas on earth.
Long ago, French settlers came to the bayou to fish and farm: towns and villages have names that echo that past – Jeanerette, Napoleonville and Lafayette. But the entire area is sinking. Every year more salt water from the Gulf of Mexico flows in.
We pass a shoreline graveyard. People down here don’t bury their dead: because of rising waters they elevate them in stone tombs.
“When hurricane Gustav swept through here last year, it took a whole lot of our dead miles up river” says Hatty.
“We never found a lot of them.” Mark Twain called the Mississippi “a lawless stream”. Yet over the years the mightiest of America’s rivers, the aorta of the nation’s trade, has been dammed, diverted and channelled along its entire length.
As a result sediments which once built up and sustained the bayou have been trapped upstream. Every hour a slice of land the size of a football pitch is lost to the sea.
Round a bend in the bayou, we pass a flaring oil installation. Oil and gas dominates in this region. Refineries line the banks of the Mississippi north and south of New Orleans, thirty miles up from the Gulf.
The bayou has been dredged, dug and crisscrossed by oil wells and thousands of miles of pipeline, creating convenient channels for the sea water to rush in.
The US military corps of engineering, charged with building and maintaining waterways throughout the US, is accused of catering to the needs of the powerful oil, gas and shipping industry above all else.
In what’s considered to be a landmark judgment, a New Orleans court this week found the corps guilty of negligence in not maintaining navigation channels and, in the process, causing some of the worst flooding and loss of life following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The judgement could lead to compensation claims amounting to billions of dollars.
Chris Macaluso is a coastal protection officer on the bayou. Over a belt-busting lunch of fried shrimp and oysters washed down with ice cold beer, Macaluso says that while New Orleans gets all the attention, the really big issue is the disappearing wetlands.
“I give it seven more years” he says.
“If the bayou is not protected and the sea continues to rush in, the the whole area along with its ecosystem will collapse . . . if the wetlands go it’ll impact on the whole flow of the Mississippi and have big knock-on consequences for the US economy.”
Hatty points to holes in the bayou banks caused by nutria, giant rat-like creatures imported from South America years ago for their pelts – known as the poor person’s mink.
The animals eventually collapse earth defences, adding to the problems of the wetlands.
“People don’t focus much on what’s happening down here,” says Hatty.
“We’re the forgotten people. It really is sink or swim in the bayou.”