John M. Barry

After Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana congressional delegation asked John Barry to chair a bipartisan working group on flood control. In 2006 the National Academy of Sciences invited him to give the 2006 Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture on Water Resources. In 2007 he was appointed to the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority, which oversees several levee districts in the metropolitan New Orleans area, and the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which is responsible both for the state's hurricane protection and for rebuilding the 2100 square miles of land the state has lost in recent decades. He has discussed Katrina and its aftermath on every broadcast network, and he has written about it for The New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, The Washington Post, and The Smithsonian.

The essential elements of the essay below appeared in The Washington Post May 12, 2007. It was updated in April 2008.




There has been much debate since Katrina over protecting Louisiana from another lethal hurricane, but nearly all of it has been conducted without any real understanding of the geological context. Congress and the Bush administration need to recognize six facts that define the national interest.


- Fact 1: The Gulf of Mexico once reached north to Cape Girardeau, Mo. But the Mississippi River carries such an enormous sediment load that, combined with a falling sea level, it deposited enough sediment to create 35,000 square miles of land from Cape Girardeau to the present mouth of the river.

This river-created land includes the entire coast, complete with barrier islands, stretching from Mississippi to Texas. But four human interventions have interfered with this natural process; three of them that benefit the rest of the country have dramatically increased the hurricane threat to the Gulf Coast.


- Fact 2: Acres of riverbank at a time used to collapse into the river system providing a main source of sediment. To prevent this and to protect lives and property, engineers stopped such collapses by paving hundreds of miles of the river with riprap and even concrete, beginning more than 1,500 miles upriver -- including on the Ohio, Missouri and other tributaries -- from New Orleans. Dams and reservoirs for electricity, irrigation, and flood protection impound enormous amounts of sediment. These and other actions deprive the Mississippi of 60 to 70 percent of its natural sediment load.

A particular problem is a series of dams beginning above Bismarck, North Dakota, extending to Yankton, South Dakota. These dams created reservoirs so huge they have a coastline longer than California's. According to the U.S. Geological Survery, roughly one half the entire loss of sediment in the river is attributable to these dams.

The loss of sediment has starved the coast. So encouraging economic development in much of the country and making these areas safer actually-- and quite directly-- increases the danger to Louisiana.


- Fact 3: To stop sandbars from blocking shipping at the mouth of the Mississippi, engineers built jetties extending more than two miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. This engineering makes Tulsa, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and other cities into ports with direct access to the ocean, greatly enhancing the nation's economy. The river carries 20 percent of the nation's exports, including 60 percent of its grain exports, and the river at New Orleans is the busiest port in the world. But the jetties prevent much of the sediment remaining in the river from replenishing the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts and barrier islands; instead, the jetties drop the sediment off the continental shelf.


- Fact 4: Levees that prevent river flooding in Louisiana and Mississippi interfere with the replenishment of the land locally as well.


- Fact 5: Roughly 30 percent of the country's domestic oil and gas production comes from offshore Louisiana, and to service that production the industry created more than 10,000 miles of canals and pipelines through the marsh.

Every inch of those 10,000-plus miles lets saltwater penetrate, and eat away at, the coast. So energy production has enormously accelerated what was a slow degradation, transforming a long-term problem into an immediate crisis. The deprivation of sediment is like moving a block of ice from the freezer to the sink, where it begins to melt; the effect of the canals and pipelines is like attacking that ice with an ice pick, breaking it up.

The net result of these several factors is that 2,100 square miles of coastal land and barrier islands have melted into the Gulf of Mexico. This land once served as a buffer between the ocean and populated areas in Louisiana and part of Mississippi, protecting them during hurricanes. Each land mile over which a hurricane travels absorbs roughly a foot of storm surge.

The nation as a whole gets nearly all the benefits of engineering the river. Louisiana and some of coastal Mississippi get 100 percent of the costs, and those costs include far greater vulnerability to hurricanes.

Nothing better exemplifies this allocation of benefits and costs than eastern New Orleans including the lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish (nearly all of which, incidentally, is at or above sea level). Three man-made shipping canals-- the Industrial Canal, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet-- pass through this part of the metropolitan area. These shipping channels create almost no jobs in eastern New Orleans or St. Bernard, but benefit commerce throughout the country. (The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, for example, carries barge traffic from Texas to Florida, and it was built in World War II as a national security measure to protect shipping from german submarines.) Yet 175,000 people living in this area saw their homes flooded or destroyed in most cases not because of any natural vulnerability but because of levee breaks on each of these man-made canals.


- Fact 6: Without action, land loss will continue, and it will increasingly jeopardize populated areas, the port system and energy production. This would be catastrophic for America. Scientists say the problem can be solved, even with rising sea levels, but that we have only a decade to begin addressing it in a serious way or the damage may be irreversible.

Despite all this, despite the clear national responsibility for the vulnerability of New Orleans, and the fact that rebuilding is clearly in the national interest, despite President Bush's pledge from New Orleans in September 2005 that "we will do what it takes" to help people rebuild, and despite the fact that the New Orleans area remains prostrate with people trying to scratch their way back, the White House budget request delivered in February 2008 increases the area's cost share for hurricane protection to a point higher than it has ever been.

What the administration wants is, in effect, for the New Orleans area, flat on its back, to subsidize the rest of the country. Generating benefits to the nation is what created the problem, and the nation needs to solve it. Put simply: Why should a cab driver in Pittsburgh or Tulsa pay to fix Louisiana's coast? Because he gets a stronger economy and lower energy costs from it, and because his benefits created the problem. The failure of Congress and the president to act aggressively to repair the coastline at the mouth of the Mississippi River could threaten the economic vitality of the nation. Louisiana, one of the poorest states, can no longer afford to underwrite benefits for the rest of the nation.