The limits of resilency in Louisiana

NY Times:

Lower Plaquemines Parish, the long marshy finger of Louisiana sticking into the Gulf of Mexico, has become a silent, melancholy monument to Hurricane Katrina, like one of the smattering of European villages preserved for memory's sake since World War II.

The people — shrimpers, oystermen, workers for offshore oil fields — are resilient. But resiliency has its limits in a place that reverted late last summer to its diluvian origins. Here, where the hurricane first struck the American mainland, the 120-mile-an-hour winds pushed the Breton Sound back over the earth.

Once a thriving peninsula dotted with historic fishing and oil villages, this land where the Mississippi River comes to its end, 60 miles and more below New Orleans, is now virtually deserted. Only 2,000 or so people roam this part of the parish, about four per square mile, less than a seventh of the previous population. Of 1,300 registered shrimpers in the parish, perhaps 50 are now working, officials say.

Brave talk about rebounding is muted. Isolated residents, encountered at long intervals, gesture toward the still landscape and wonder whether the old towns will ever come back. Compounding the uncertainty, the federal government has looked at the costs of fixing the levees here — $1.6 billion to protect all of the prestorm population of 14,000 — and said no, not now.

"It ain't going to come back tomorrow, pardner," said Peter Tinson, a 74-year-old church caretaker in Pointe a la Hache, the parish seat. "It's going to be a long, long time. That's for sure."

The old brick St. Thomas Church, looming behind him, was one of the few intact buildings, though all its windows were blown out.

The rubble goes on for mile after numbing mile. Amid it, small hopeful gestures sustain the hardy who remain: a solitary young couple walk arm in arm at sunset between debris piles; a hopelessly rusted pickup truck is scrawled with the words "don't move," next to a trailer that begs, "Bulldoze please"; a cafe is newly reopened in the hamlet of Venice, at road's end.

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There is much more about what little is left in this area of Louisiana. It may be time to let it go back to being a wetland. One of the real downsides has been a loss of off shore oil workers who used to reside in the area. This has slowed the recovery and repair of the off shore rigs.