Gustav's Lessons for New Orleans

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The focus right now should be simple: better levees for New Orleans and real restoration of the coast. Southern Louisiana began to disappear after the Corps imprisoned the Mississippi River and converted it into a barge channel that stopped depositing sediment into its Delta; satellite images of this spring's floods showed the river wasting huge plumes of sediment out to sea, sediment that could be diverted to restore coastal marshes and rebuild barrier islands. There is already $1 billion worth of small projects on the books to start that process, but restoration work is moving much, much more slowly than levee work, and scientists have estimated that it could cost more than $20 billion to make a serious dent in addressing the coast's land losses. "I'm not worried about money; this country has the wealth and the capacity to do amazing things," says Davis, the former head of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. "The resource that keeps me up at night is time. We lucked out with Gustav. But there may be fewer sands in that hourglass than we want to believe."