WWLTV.com | State officials tempted to call for sinking tankers in order to close MRGO
Gibbons Burke
State officials tempted to call for sinking
tankers in order to close MRGO
03:20 PM CDT on Friday, June 23, 2006
Cain Burdeau / Associated Press
Uncle Sam's aging and obsolete tankers, research
vessels and cargo-carriers are being sought by
Louisiana officials tempted to sink ships and
create mounds of steel to act as barriers against
hurricane flooding.
The idea of turning ships into storm barriers is
not new, but since Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana
is looking at every option -- especially
quick-fixes. Levees take years to build, and
restoring lost marshes and cypress forests even
longer.
"When you're in this desperate state, we can't
afford to laugh at anything," said Paul Kemp with
Louisiana State University's School of the Coast
and the Environment.
Sinking ships could be done in a way that is safe
for the environment, he said.
In recent days, state Sen. Walter Boasso has
become the idea's cheerleader -- talking it up on
radio and at forums.
"What I don't want to see happen is we have more
studies and wait 20 years to have something done,"
Boasso said. "I want to see something happen."
For Boasso, haste is everything these days.
He represents St. Bernard Parish, a 486-square
mile chunk of swamp, pasture and towns southeast
of New Orleans. Nearly every square foot of the
parish was inundated by Katrina's storm surge,
which broke levees.
The catastrophic flooding, St. Bernard officials
say, was due in large part to a navigation channel
that runs through the parish.
Boasso says planting ships in the channel would go
a long way to plugging what has been dubbed a
"hurricane superhighway." He added that ships
could be placed in other places, such as on
barrier islands.
The channel, called the Mississippi River-Gulf
Outlet, was dug in the 1960s as a shortcut between
New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, but it soon
turned into an environmental horror story.
The channel tripled in width as tides and ship's
wakes eroded its banks. The Gulf's salty waters
encroached on cypress forest, swamp and marsh,
killing an estimated 18,000 acres of marsh and
1,500 acres of cypress.
Closing the channel has become a top priority.
John Laguens, a St. Bernard community activist
who's sought an end to the channel for years, said
closing the channel is "just as important as
building a levee system to protect St. Bernard."
Shannon Russell, a spokeswoman for the Maritime
Administration, said there are about 125 ships on
the disposal list. Most often, ships are bought by
scrap metal companies, but other options are
becoming more common. For example, a ship was
recently sunk off the coast of Florida to create
an artificial reef, she said.
It can take years to get approval to sink a ship
in open waters, Russell said. But Boasso's
proposal takes a different approach and seeks to
use the ships as levees, something the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers would have authority over, she
said.
Dan Hitchings, a top U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
official in New Orleans, said the agency has not
evaluated the idea.
Boasso said ships would be very cheap to acquire,
and the government might even give them to the
state for free. He added that draining ships'
engines of oil and other contaminants to make them
environmentally safe to sink could cost up to
$300,000 each.
"You can make big mounds out of them," Boasso
said. "Plant some trees on it, and cosmetically
make it look nice."
Some coastal advocates, though, think seeding the
coast with ships is a poor substitute for more
comprehensive restoration measures.
"Personally, I don't want to settle for a bunch of
hulking, rusty ships. I'd rather see a more
natural solution," said Kerry St. Pe', executive
director of Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary
Program. "Our marshes aren't made of rusting
ships."
For years, Louisiana has been trying to restore
its dying wetlands with river diversions, marsh
grass plantings and shoreline work. But that work
has done little to stop the loss of wetlands --
about 2,000 square miles of it since the 1930s.
The state is seeking to get billions of federal
dollars to spend on restoration projects.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All
Rights Reserved.)