Louisiana Wants to Change River's Course to Save Coast

In what would be an engineering feat unlike any in the nation's history, Louisiana wants to move the Mississippi River as part of a master plan to save the state's vanishing coastal wetlands. Many experts believe it's the only thing that will work.

Southeast Louisiana is the fastest disappearing landmass on Earth. On average, every half hour or so, a piece the size of a football field slips into the Gulf of Mexico.

"It's like the Gulf of Mexico has gotten 20 to 30 miles closer to everybody in southeast Louisiana," Windell Curole says as he stands on top of the levee system in Bayou Lafourche. As general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District, it's his job to try to hold back the sea.

To the south, people have abandoned their homes as the land has turned to marsh, then to open water. Soon, Curole says, even the earthen levee may not be enough to protect them.

"We either start tackling the problem or we help people move and communities move out, and all the infrastructure along with it," he says.

Coastal erosion threatens New Orleans, as well as oil facilities vital to the nation's energy supply, ports that handle more than half of its grain shipments, and the estuaries that produce a third of its seafood. But to understand why the coast is vanishing, it is necessary to know how it got there.

Denise Reed, a geology professor at the University of New Orleans, says the whole coast of Louisiana was built by the river, which kept changing course, squiggling back and forth like a loose garden hose and spreading sediment everywhere it went. But since humans tamed it with levees, the river can only build land in one place — farther and farther out to sea.

"Until we're at the point where we are now, where the water and the sediment that comes out of the mouth of the river goes straight into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico," Reed says.

more from NPR