Breaking records

They're going for it. All the mud. 

The state is undertaking two “record-breaking” restoration projects aimed at reviving 7 square miles of coastal habitat and bolstering natural storm defenses east of New Orleans and near Venice in lower Plaquemines Parish.

Long planned but now funded with $215 million from money BP set aside after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, the projects amount to the largest marsh restoration and the largest coastal ridge-building effort the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has ever attempted.

“The only way to describe them is 'massive,'” CPRA Executive Director Bren Haase said. “They’re both record-breaking projects."

The Deepwater Horizon disaster happened 10 years ago.  These aren't the first projects that settlement has funded but they do give some idea of how long it takes to put that money to use. Which is a maddening thing to think about when we consider just how late in the game all of this is. This, for example, is from May of this year.

 A new study says Louisiana’s coast cannot be saved.

Researchers looked at how the marshes have survived over thousands of years and concluded that they are past a major tipping point and sea level rise will eventually wash the entire coast away.

The study, published today in Science Advances, found that marshes can survive a certain amount of relative sea level rise — about a tenth of an inch per year. Sea levels are currently rising 1 to 2 inches a year in Louisiana due to climate change and subsidence.

“Previous investigations have suggested that marshes can keep up with rates of sea-level rise as high as half an inch per year, but those studies were based on observations over very short time windows, typically a few decades or less,” said Torbjörn Törnqvist, Lead researcher and Tulane University earth and environmental science professor.

He said officials have perhaps been too optimistic: “Unfortunately we have already reached the tipping point for marsh drowning in Louisiana. There is no way back anymore.”

Yeah... but you gotta do something.  And since we do have some money to throw around right now, we might as well throw at something at least a little bit useful.  And these "record breaking" projects do sound a little bit useful. One project aims to save and reinvigorate 3,000 acres of marsh around Lake Borgne. 

Restoring marshlands in Lake Borgne, actually a large saltwater bay, is part of a wider effort to rebuild wetlands in the Pontchartrain Basin for both ecological and storm protection functions. Like much of the coast, the basin has been rapidly losing land from erosion, storm surges, rising seas and subsidence, the natural compacting and sinking of the soil.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment found that boosting the marshlands in Lake Borgne could provide significant storm surge protection for New Orleans.

See, that helps. Now, if they could get all of this done by, say, Thursday evening that would be great. 

Tropical Storm Delta was strengthening in the Caribbean Monday morning and is expected to become a hurricane Tuesday on its path toward Louisiana, forecasters said.

The current track from the National Hurricane Center has Delta making landfall Friday as a Category 2 hurricane in southeast Louisiana, but the track has an average error of 160 to 200 miles this far out.

Here is Delta's track which, appropriately for something called that, is still subject to change.. but.. yikes!

We're in the Greek alphabet for only the second time in history.  That other time was, of course, the infamous 2005 season when we got all the way up to Zeta. Just a couple more to go now and maybe we can break that record too.