Land Lost

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped away 217 square miles of Louisiana's fragile coastline, with each turning huge swaths of land to water overnight, accelerating a process that already posed grave threats to coastal communities, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study.

Survey scientists compared satellite images taken in 2004 with similar images from October 2005 to match areas that were wetlands, undeveloped dry land and farmland with what looked like open water several weeks after the storms.

The survey underscores the state's repeated demands that federal officials speed efforts to rebuild the Louisiana coastline, both to protect fragile fisheries and wildlife and to augment the buffer of plants, soils and barrier islands that can slow the approach of killer storm surges.


Indeed, Gov. Kathleen Blanco last week brandished the study, then not yet publicly released, to buttress her lawsuit attempting to block the federal Minerals Management Service from holding additional offshore oil lease sales. The governor seeks to force the agency to first perform a proper environmental assessment of the effects of oil and gas production on the state's wetlands.

"I am using every tool available to me to fight the federal government and will not allow them to continue to disregard the safety and environmental health of our fragile coastline any longer," Blanco said in a statement.

from the Times Picayune