How to tame the fury of hurricanes

Down in bayou country, the Mississippi River's spreading fingers have spent the past 7,000 years building, then deserting, old riverbanks as they course through the delta toward the Gulf of Mexico. Topped with crushed clamshells, many of these old banks have become virtually the only roads through the region.

When New Orleans native Donald Boesch was younger, he'd drive along some of these roads, pull over, and see marsh grass stretching to the horizon. "There would be little lakes in there," he recalls. "But from that vantage point, it looked for all the world like it was a huge sea of grass."

Today, many of those same spots look like vast lakes, dotted by the odd stand of grass, adds Dr. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science.

As federal, state, and local officials begin planning for New Orleans's recovery, many specialists say they expect the disaster to jump-start efforts to rebuild these wetlands and the barrier islands just offshore. These natural features represent New Orleans's first line of defense against the storm surges that accompany hurricanes. But over the past half century, levees and canals, which were designed to reduce flood damage and support oil and gas pipelines and facilities, have substantially weakened these defenses.

Meanwhile, funding for comprehensive plans to rebuild the wetlands has run at a trickle. In 1998, state and federal agencies offered up a $14 billion, 30-year restoration blueprint. The first $2 billion appears in a water-resources bill now working its way through Congress. The measure would authorize three major water-diversion projects and a barrier-island restoration effort.

This is a critical starting point, analysts say. But Katrina has raised the overall effort to that of "a national emergency," as one specialist puts it.

Held up against the bill for Katrina's damage, estimated to reach at least $26 billion, and with Congress focused on a $10.5 billion recovery package, wetlands and barrier-island restoration increasingly looks like a cost-effective insurance package.

"There are a number of barrier island and water diversions projects that are clearly ready to be built today," says Scott Faber, a water-resources expert with Environmental Defense in Washington.

"Unfortunately, we've not treated this issue with as great a sense of urgency as we probably should have in the wake of what's happened" since Katrina made its Gulf Coast landfall last week, he adds. "The time frames that we've imaged for completing coastal restoration, which have been decades, must now be shortened to years."

Rebuilding won't be easy.

"This is one of the most industrialized, highly engineered delta systems in the world," says Robert Twilley, director of the Wetlands Biogeochemistry Institute at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge.

If successful, the techniques applied to Louisiana could be used on river deltas around the world where population growth and industrial development are undermining the natural processes that serve as bulwarks against storm damage, he adds.

For New Orleans, however, the effort is critical to the city's long-term survival.

"New Orleans will not be safe from another disaster like hurricane Katrina unless we begin to restore this natural hurricane buffer," Mr. Faber says.

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