Just as plants and animals adapt to their environments, so too do humans. One Louisiana man proved that in the most stunning way possible, protecting his city from devastating hurricanes when even those at the highest levels of the federal government said it wouldn't work.
Windell Curole of the South Lafourche Levee District led an effort over 42 years to build a 48-mile levee system around Lafourche Parish, as the Guardian detailed. He was so integral to the project that he stayed on even following his retirement.
After Hurricane Katrina and its massive storm surge caused levee breaches that inundated New Orleans in 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rewrote federal guidelines for levees, which are basically earthen walls and protect low-lying areas from storm surges, for example.
The SLLD's levee was not wide enough at the base, and it was too steep. Curole had built it to 18 feet rather than the standard 13. The USACE, worried that the levee was unstable and would collapse, pulled funding for cleanup and repairs, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency decertified the system in 2011, all per the Guardian.
Flood insurance costs soared, but Curole and Co. held their ground.
Hurricane Ida in 2021 brought 17 feet of water, and the levee didn't budge. Surrounding areas were swamped. "The unauthorized, DIY levee was the only thing keeping the area from being subsumed by the water," the Guardian wrote. South Lafourche hasn't been flooded by storm surge since Hurricane Juan in 1985.
"We wouldn't have a community [with a regulation levee]," Curole told the outlet.
Still, this is a temporary solution, as the newspaper stated. Increasingly intense hurricanes — Ida did damage in the SLLD with its strong winds — are just one consequence of rising global temperatures brought on by the burning of coal, gas, and oil. Oil and gas companies, which "dredged navigation and pipeline canals," are also at fault for over half of the land lost in Louisiana.
Rising sea levels are the complementary problem, though the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is working on that. Part of the issue with flooding along the Gulf Coast is subsidence, the sinking of land. Before the Mississippi River was tamed in the 19th century to open worldwide trade opportunities, it deposited mud, silt, and sand at its mouth, creating one square mile of land every year.
That stopped by the 1930s, per the Guardian, and the trend reversed to as much as 70 square miles lost annually by the '70s. The CPRA is spending billions of dollars to establish a canal from the Mississippi so land can grow again.
Even then, Curole is not sure his levee will always hold back the water.
"But I know it has a better chance than air," he told the paper.
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