NEARING ‘POINT OF NO RETURN’
Sinking Louisiana island now uninhabitable after Ida
GRAND ISLE, La. – Jules Melancon stepped over roofing shingles littering his yard, around a downed tree and ducked beneath a twisted aluminum beam of the shed in his backyard.
“I was lucky, I tell you,” the thirdgeneration oyster farmer said. “My house came through OK.”
Looking around, Melancon pointed out the destruction caused to this tortilla-flat barrier island when Hurricane Ida roared ashore 10 days prior, ripping holes in the island’s defensive levees, pouring saltwater onto low-lying areas and inundating others with several feet of sand while ripping apart homes and businesses.
Virtually every building suffered some damage, and as many as 40% of the houses and summer homes known as “camps” were destroyed, according to authorities. The island was declared effectively uninhabitable, water service was severed, and power is not expected back until month’s end.
With insurance and FEMA assistance, Melancon, 63, is already making plans to repair his oyster-sorting shed, to clean his yard of debris, and to replace the lawnmower swamped by Hurricane Ida’s storm surge.
Although Melancon suffered relatively little damage this time, things could have been much worse, not just for him but for all of the approximately 1,500 people who call this island home, and for the tens of thousands more who vacation here each summer. Experts
said Grand Isle is a harbinger for things to come: rising sea levels, stronger storms and more destruction for coastal areas.
With sea levels rising an average of 3.6 millimeters annually from climate change, Louisiana’s coast is simultaneously sinking, possibly in connection with the vast amounts of oil, natural gas and water that have been extracted over the past decades to fuel and power the United States.
That means places like Grand Isle, reached by a long causeway from mainland Louisiana, is demonstrating today what other coastal areas will see in the coming years.
And it raises questions about how long governments will try to protect property and how much tax money they’re willing to spend rebuilding roads and power lines and homes before ceding it to the sea. In 2014, federal scientists said Grand Isle sank 1.3 inches in five years, one of the largest drops globally.
“The Louisiana coast is in general a canary in the coal mine,” said Samuel Bentley, a Louisiana State University expert on coastal erosion. “We are experiencing conditions now that other areas will face in the future. From the perspective of a homeowners or a city official, it doesn’t matter if it’s subsidence or sea level rise. It becomes a political decision at some point.”
History of ‘hauntingly beautiful’ Grand Isle
Federal, state and local officials have long known the danger faced by Grand Isle, which under usual circumstances is a bucolic, sandy island with shave ice shops, fishing rodeos and beach bar after beach bar.
Last year, The New York Times declared the island one of its top places to visit for 2020, ranking it with Greenland, Tokyo and the British Virgin Islands. But the reporter also asked, “Does a place appear more hauntingly beautiful when you know it’s disappearing?”
First used by indigenous, nomadic natives, the Grand Isle and nearby Chenière Caminada and Leeville areas grew in the early 1800s as the French, Spanish and growing United States colonized Louisiana. Pirate and privateer Jean Lafitte frequented the area, and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War occupied an unfinished fort on adjacent Grand Terre Island, fleeing after the United States retook New Orleans.
After the enslavement of people was banned following the Civil War, plantations on Grand Isle were replaced by vacation resorts for the wealthy. They were themselves destroyed and then rebuilt following the 1893 Chenière Caminada hurricane, which sent a wall of water 16 feet high across the area, killing about half of the residents of the nearby farming community and erasing the fields that once grew produce for New Orleans. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been trying to repair and protect the island since 1976, and in some areas installed a giant sand-filled tube known as “the burrito” running parallel to the ocean’s waves at the highest point on the beach.