Louisiana loses 30 miles a year off our coast. We lost 100 miles last year off our coast thanks to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We have lost a size of land equivalent to the entire state of Rhode Island.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.
I love Louisiana, and I love being from there.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.
My great-grandchildren will not be able to enjoy the Gulf Coast of Louisiana the way I have.
I love Louisiana. It's amazing.
I needed to explain that Louisiana's coast accepts the drainage from two-thirds of the United States and, while the necessary levees constructed upstream have prevented floods, they have also contributed to problems downstream.
Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.
Eighty-five percent of us in this country, by the way, live in coastal areas, so again, Katrina and Rita were not just about New Orleans. There were a lot of lessons that the nation can learn from us if they just pay attention to the things that are going on down here.
Natural erosion had reduced the critical barrier islands in the Gulf, the result of the destruction of some 300,000 acres of wetlands. This amounted to 30 miles of marshlands.
There was a period of time in Los Angeles when I wondered if I was just going to lose everything.
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