At water’s edge, tiny town teeters

Louisiana village wills itself to survive as sea levels rise

JEAN LAFITTE, La. — From a Cessna flying 4,000 feet above Louisiana’s coast, what first becomes evident is how much is already lost. Northward from the Gulf, slivers of barrier island give way to the open water of Barataria Bay as it billows toward an inevitable merger with Little Lake, its name now a lie. Ever-widening bayous course through what were once dense wetlands, and a cross-stitch of oil field canals stamp the marsh.

Saltwater intrusion has killed off the live oaks and bald cypress. Stands of roseau cane and native grasses have been reduced to brown pulp by feral hogs, orange-fanged nutria and a voracious aphidlike invader from Asia. A relentless succession of hurricanes and tropical storms — three last season alone — has accelerated the decay. In all, more than 2,000 square miles, an expanse larger than the state of Delaware, have disappeared since 1932.

Out toward the horizon, a fishing village appears on a fingerling of land. It sits defenseless, all but surrounded by encroaching basins of water. Just 2 miles north is the jagged tip of a fortresslike levee, a primary line of defense for greater New Orleans. Everything south of that 14-foot wall of demarcation, including the town of Jean Lafitte, has effectively been left to the tides.

As climate change contributes to rising sea levels, threatening to submerge land from Miami to Bangladesh, the question for Lafitte, as for many coastal areas across the globe, is less whether it will succumb than when — and to what degree scarce public resources should be invested in artificially extending its life.

One sweltering evening in July, almost everyone from around Lafitte gathered near dusk at the bayou’s edge to celebrate the expenditure of nearly $4 million of those scarce public resources. There were shrimpers and crabbers, tug captains and roughnecks, teachers and police officers. All were attending the ribbon-cutting for a grand new seafood pavilion, the latest gambit by the longtime mayor, Timothy Kerner, to save the town from drowning.

To some, continuing to build on land that is submerging seems counterintuitive. But Kerner did not see it as his job to take a 10,000-foot view. In the years since Hurricane Katrina, he had grown weary of being rebuffed in his campaign to encircle Lafitte with a tall and impregnable levee. He could rhapsodize all he wanted about preserving his community’s authentic way of life. The cost-benefit calculus — more than $1 billion to protect fewer than 7,000 people — always weighed against him.

So he had set out to change it. His strategy was to secure so much public investment for Jean Lafitte that it would eventually become too valuable to abandon. In a decade, he had built a 1,300-seat auditorium, a library, a wetlands museum, a civic center and a baseball park. Jean Lafitte did not have a stoplight, but it had a senior-citizen center, a medical clinic, an art gallery, a boxing club, a nature trail and a visitor center where animatronic puppets acted out the story of the privateer for which the town is named.

Some of the facilities had been used sparingly, and many at the grand opening questioned whether the seafood pavilion would be much different. To the mayor that was largely beside the point. What mattered was that the structure existed, that its poured concrete and steel beams made Lafitte that much more permanent.

“Do we lose that investment, or do we protect it?” Kerner asked, barely audible above the din. “I hope people will see that, hey, not only are we fighting hard to exist, but, you know, maybe this place is worth saving.”

A fourth of the state’s wetlands are already gone, with heavy losses tallied from 2005 to 2008, when the coast was battered in succession by hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike. In 2011, the federal government retired 35 place names for islands and bays and passes and ponds that had simply ceased to exist.

State planners believe another 2,000 square miles, or even double that, could be overtaken in 50 years as the land sinks, canals widen and sea levels rise because of climate change.

Although the recession of Louisiana’s coast has slowed somewhat this decade, a football field’s worth of wetlands still vanishes every 100 minutes, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That is one of the highest rates on the planet, accounting for 90 percent of such losses in the continental United States.

The Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit conservation group, calculates that there are 358,000 people and 116,000 houses in Louisiana census tracts that would be swamped in the surge of a catastrophic hurricane by 2062. The Geological Survey predicts that in 200 years the state’s wetlands could be gone altogether.

“It is the largest ecological catastrophe in North America since the Dust Bowl,” declared Oliver Houck, a professor of environmental law at Tulane University in New Orleans who has written extensively about land loss in the state.

Last year, Louisiana officials acknowledged for the first time that even with a vast restoration program, even with tens of billions of dollars they do not have, they no longer believed they could build land fast enough to offset the losses. Plotted on a map, their projections show 40-mile swaths, encompassing Jean Lafitte and everything below it, splashed in red to denote that, without action, they will disappear within decades. The crisis has become existential, with policymakers confronting choices about which communities they can afford to rescue.

The people of Lafitte have lived off the water for generations — trapping and skinning muskrats and other marsh dwellers, fishing, crabbing, oystering, building and repairing boats, ferrying workers and supplies to offshore rigs. Many accept the irony that the water may eventually destroy the economy it built.

Yet many cannot imagine living anywhere else.

The policymakers “don’t place value on anything but the money, not the longevity of these communities, not the culture,” said Tracy Kuhns, 64, a longtime resident of the Barataria community across the bayou from Jean Lafitte.

He continued: “One of the problems in this country is that people don’t have any connection to where they live. People really want that. Why would you take it away from people who already have it?”