The terrible damage recent hurricanes did to New Orleans was worsened, in part, by federal projects in Montana.
Montana? Right.
After Hurricane Katrina, journalists rediscovered a decade’s worth of scientific reports warning that the Big Easy was vulnerable to major storms. But some environmental woes that worsened the damage actually were born more than 1,500 miles away in the shadow of the Rockies.
A 2000 Scientific American article explained how human activity has destroyed barrier islands and caused the Mississippi River Delta to sink. In past centuries, the islands and delta offered New Orleans some protection against big hurricanes.
A wrinkle has been added to the debate by former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who says federal actions far from the Gulf Coast bear some blame.
The sands and sediments that nature needs to replenish Louisiana’s delta and barrier islands normally would wash down from the Rockies and Great Plains via the Missouri River and then the Mississippi River, which meet at St. Louis.
Yet today, 80 percent of those sands and sediments get trapped behind dams on the upper Missouri, including the huge Fort Peck project in Montana. The Depression-era Fort Peck Dam was the first of several federal water projects built on the upper Missouri, but later dams in North and South Dakota also have been stopping sediments from going downstream.
Since the lower Mississippi’s islands and delta aren’t being replenished as much as in the past, the land on which southern Louisiana rests is today sinking into the Gulf of Mexico, making New Orleans more vulnerable to big storms than it was in past centuries. So your federal tax money made the Gulf Coast’s misery worse than it would have been if Uncle Sam hadn’t messed up nature’s balance here in the West.
If federal taxpayers help rebuild New Orleans (and we should, if national unity means anything) we should insist that the city be better built. But the burden to make smarter land-use decisions doesn’t fall just on the city and state. It also rests with Congress and the Corps of Engineers, which runs Fort Peck Dam as well as New Orleans’ canals and levees.
That dams in Montana have worsened erosion in Louisiana is a prime example of how federal actions lead to improper land use nationwide, Babbitt said during a recent visit to Colorado.
Babbitt recently wrote a book criticizing such federal policies. Sprawl and loss of open space have been some of the results of poor federal decisions, but they were not inevitable and should not be perpetuated, he says in “Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America.”
Nowhere is the damage more evident than the decline of river ecosystems, but the Mississippi isn’t the only waterway at risk.
The Colorado River, born as a crystal-clear stream high in the Rockies near Granby, is becoming increasingly salty as wastes from farms, oil fields and roads wash into it. Worrisome salt levels once were confined to the river’s lower stretches but now can be detected far upstream. (Indeed, the Colorado is so overused it dries up before reaching its natural delta in Mexico. )
Today, frenetic oil and gas drilling on the West’s public lands increases the risks that pollutants could foul the Colorado’s tributaries, including streams on our state’s Western Slope.
In previous eras, such errors could be explained because engineers and certainly politicians didn’t understand the long-term consequences of their actions. But we can’t use that excuse anymore. Today, federal policies that inflict continent-wide environmental damage result from arrogance, not ignorance.
