Levee inspections and levee boards, wetlands as a natural hurricane buffer and environmental health issues are now at the attention of the general population, according to panelists discussing the environment and Katrina on a panel held Thursday, Feb. 9, in Roussel Performance Hall.
Katrina was a landmark event with national implications, according to Craig Colten, the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography and Anthropology at LSU.
“It demonstrated the inadequacies of the human component on a national level,” Colten said.
These inadequacies include the levee system’s problems.
“Historically, there has not been a ‘let’s go look at the levees every five years to see what has happened to the levees,'” said Mark Schleifstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning Times-Picayune environmental reporter, in response to how Katrina has changed or reshaped issues.
“The great lessons out of Barry’s book [Rising Tide] is that the levees-only policy for the Mississippi was a big mistake and the levee only policy for flooding would be a big mistake,” said Richard Campanella, assistant director of environmental analysis at the Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research.
The panelists agreed that the importance of the wetlands as a natural hurricane barrier has now become more apparent. Carlton Dufrechou, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, stressed the importance of the need not only for levees but also for coastal restoration.
“The coast has always been the first line of defense for all of Louisiana. It is imperative that we repair and get the coast into a self-sustaining condition,” he said.
“We now have evidence. The areas where earthen levees disappeared were in areas without wetlands. The wetlands took the brunt of the waves, which wore away the levees,” Schleifstein said.
They also discussed the health factors involved for those who have returned and those deciding whether to return. Maura Woods, senior Louisiana representative of the Sierra Club, and Schleifstein both said that finding information on the current status of areas is difficult to find and almost impossible to compare. “You have to take a common sense approach. There is no simple model that everyone can read and make decisions. Your health should be considered. Some places are fine to come back to – like Loyola – but know where you are going to be. Other areas are hot spots,” said Robert Thomas, chair of the Loyola University Center for Environmental Communications.
Thomas added that health issues need to be reported on and then explained so people know what the findings mean.
The panel discussion was the third in a series of four forums sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Forum and the Loyola First-Year Experience.
Tara Templeton can be reached at [email protected].
