Word: rivering
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...south Plaquemines Parish, a sinuous ribbon of land between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, not only were all the towns lost to Katrina's fury, but nature itself seems mortally wounded as well. The 30-mile strip of houses, farms and schools has been transformed into a sump filled with fetid water. Groves of orange trees lie half submerged near Triumph. In Empire, almost 1 million gallons of oil have broken out of a giant Chevron storage tank, coating the levees and seeping into the marshland. A herd of cows staggers ankle deep through greasy waters...
...cruel salvo in a continuing war being waged across much of the U.S. Americans are now predominantly a coastal people, drawn to the shores for work and play. Yet their presence at the water's edge threatens the natural barriers that should be shielding them. In Louisiana, the Mississippi River has been lashed into tenuous submission, its absorbent delta constricted and carved into channels for oil pipelines and navigation routes. In Alabama and Mississippi, the playground of the Gulf Coast has been developed to the edge of the open water, rebuilt bigger and more audaciously after each storm that wipes...
...this magnificent rodeo, starring the Army Corps of Engineers as the wranglers of an untamed river, has been plagued from the start by unintended consequences. To prevent catastrophic floods like the 1927 disaster that left 700,000 people homeless from Illinois to Louisiana, the Corps leveed and streamlined the Mississippi. That effort turned the meandering, porous waterway into the world's largest high-pressure hose, shooting sediment and nutrients off the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico. Starved of silt and undermined by oil-drilling operations, the delta has been sinking at the same time global warming has caused...
...western Louisiana coastline, similarly deprived of Mississippi river sediment, has been losing, in some places, as much as 35 ft. of beach a year, according to biologist David Richard, a specialist in the area's wetlands. By the time Rita hit, he says, the Gulf of Mexico was more than a quarter of a mile closer to the inland cities than it was when Hurricane Audrey struck...
...same time, channels dug for easier navigation, infrastructure projects or flood control are mainlining saltwater straight into the freshwater swamps and bayous, where the brine burns the marsh plants and kills off the freshwater cypress trees. The most controversial of those channels is the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO, known locally as "Mister Go"), which the Port of New Orleans commissioned 50 years ago for quick Gulf access. But quick access to open water also means easy access for seawater. The MRGO and two other deepwater channels carved out of the bayou meet at the Industrial Canal just east...