And it's going to get worse, even quicker.
Scientists now say one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation's history is rushing toward a catastrophic conclusion over the next 50 years, so far unabated and largely unnoticed.
At the current rates that the sea is rising and land is sinking, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists say by 2100 the Gulf of Mexico could rise as much as 4.3 feet across this landscape, which has an average elevation of about three feet. If that happens, everything outside the protective levees -- most of Southeast Louisiana -- would be underwater.
The effects would be felt far beyond bayou country. The region best known for its self-proclaimed motto "laissez les bons temps rouler" -- let the good times roll -- is one of the nation's economic linchpins.
This land being swallowed by the Gulf is home to half of the country's oil refineries, a matrix of pipelines that serve 90 percent of the nation's offshore energy production and 30 percent of its total oil and gas supply, a port vital to 31 states, and 2 million people who would need to find other places to live.
The landscape on which all that is built is washing away at a rate of a football field every hour, 16 square miles per year.
For years, most residents didn't notice because they live inside the levees and seldom travel into the wetlands. But even those who work or play in the marshes were misled for decades by the gradual changes in the landscape. A point of land eroding here, a bayou widening there, a spoil levee sinking a foot over 10 years. In an ecosystem covering thousands of square miles, those losses seemed insignificant. There always seemed to be so much left.
Now locals are trying to deal with the shock of losing places they had known all their lives -- fishing camps, cypress swamps, beachfronts, even cattle pastures and backyards -- with more disappearing every day.
Louisiana Is Drowning, Quickly
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