NEW ORLEANS — Today marks the beginning of the 2004 hurricane season and state officials and scientists are taking the opportunity to emphasize Louisiana’s vulnerability to storms due to coastal land loss.

Louisiana’s coast is losing land the size of a football field every 30 minutes, according to current estimates. However, the loss is greatly accelerated when tropical storms and hurricanes hit the state, causing faster erosion and sometimes wiping away entire barrier islands, said Greg Stone, director of Louisiana State University’s Coastal Studies Institute.

In the fall of 2002, Tropical Storm Isidore and Hurricane Lily hit the New Orleans area within a week of one another. The two systems coming back to back caused numerous breaches in the barrier island system that would normally protect the coastline, said Stone.

If a major Category 4 or 5 hurricane hit the Louisiana coast, Stone said the barrier islands would offer little protection. “But we don’t get those major storms on a regular basis,” he said. “What we do get a lot of are the tropical storms and the Category 1, 2 or 3 hurricanes, which are slowly eating away at those islands.”

And with time, those smaller storms will cause greater damage than ever before because of the disintegration of the barrier system, Stone said.

“This year, Louisiana’s citizens and our coastal wetlands are exposed to danger and destruction as never before,” said Gov. Kathleen Blanco in a release from the America’s Wetland campaign. “Because we continue to lose so much of our valuable wetlands, people living along our coast are more vulnerable to the impact of a strong hurricane. For many communities, the only thing standing between them and a devastating storm surge is our vanishing coastal wetlands.”

Scott Angelle, secretary of the Department of Natural Resources, also weighed in on the issue, adding that the destruction of the coastline has far reaching effects on the rest of the country because of the amount of oil and gas that moves through the state. Approximately 25 percent of the oil and gas that powers the United States moves through Louisiana pipelines, according to DNR data.

Stone said initiatives to rebuild the barrier islands need to move fast before more of the islands are lost. “Time is of the essence,” he said. There also needs to be a logical sequence of events, for rebuilding both the coastal marshland and the islands. “You can spend millions of dollars creating new marsh, but if you do not have the outer coast in good shape and being able to absorb a lot of that wave energy and storm surge, then you’re wasting your time.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is forecasting a busier than usual hurricane season this year. NOAA predicts the possibility of between 12 to 15 tropical storms, six to eight hurricanes and two to four of those becoming major storms.

Hurricane season ends Nov. 30.

By A.J. Mistretta
The Biz Network