Can the People Who Live in Coastal Towns Ever Be Safe From Hurricanes?

Earline Verdin has seen storms. After 68 years on Louisiana's coast, she has survived some of the worst of them -- hurricanes like Betsy, Andrew and Rita, which are as much part of the local lore as alligators and étouffé. But as she drove through Pointe-aux-Chenes last month, surveying the wreckage left by this year's evil twins, Gustav and Ike, even she couldn't help gasping at the carnage: her own home larded with mud and marsh grass, the back porch ripped from the house; her neighbors' homes flooded, tossed on their sides, their innards vomited onto the side of the road; and, just a few minutes away, the Isle de Jean Charles blitzed into a state of Ninth Ward-like smithereens.

"Rita was bad, but to me this is the worst," said Verdin, a mother of six whose eldest son is the chief of the Pointe-au-Chien Indian tribe. "Yeah, this is the worst."

All up and down Louisiana's coast, bayou towns and villages are still staggering from the double blows of Gustav and Ike, tag-team storms that arrived in nasty succession on Sept. 1 and 13. Most people don't actually realize that parts of Louisiana got strafed; after New Orleans "dodged" Gustav's bullet, the media skedaddled, and most news outlets never even bothered with Louisiana after Galveston got flattened. But while TV cameras were busy doing their business elsewhere -- in New Orleans' French Quarter, Houston's downtown, Sarah Palin's beehive -- something strange was happening in Louisiana's Bayou Country: It was filling up with water, flooding under a surge that, in some places, surpassed the records set by 2005's tidal monsters, Katrina and Rita. (All in all, however, the cumulative effect of this year's storms was smaller.)

For many bayou dwellers, this is devastation they can't afford; after all, they had barely finished gluing the scattered fragments of their lives back together from Katrina and Rita. But it is also devastation that shouldn't have happened -- particularly in the case of the flooding. The wind damage was one thing, because Gustav did rake itself directly over Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes, peeling the corrugated sides from trailers as if they were sardine cans. But the water, which came mostly from Ike, was a different matter; Ike never even hit the Louisiana coast.

"Ike should not have had the impact that he did on our communities," said Brenda Dardar Robichaux, principal chief of the United Houma Nation, whose members suffered extensive damage -- and the death of a 16-year-old boy -- from the combined whammies of this year's storms. "But there's nothing left. There's nothing left to protect us."

By "nothing left," Robichaux was referring to the wetlands and barrier islands that once formed the southern fringe of Louisiana but have since vanished: 1,900 square miles since the 1930s, an area the size of Delaware, all gone. And it's getting worse. These days the Louisiana coast -- one of the most productive in the country -- is among the fastest-disappearing regions on Earth, dissolving into the Gulf of Mexico at the terrifying rate of 25 to 35 square miles a year.

This is extremely serious, particularly for the Cajun, French-Indian and other coastal communities that have been shrinking alongside the coast. But it is also deeply unnatural, the handiwork of all kinds of efforts to extract as much as possible from the region. The oil companies bear much of the blame since they were the ones that spent the last eight or so decades drilling and dredging the life out of the coast. But the levees and dams that tamed the Mississippi River -- and rerouted the silt that once sustained the coast -- also deserve credit. Together they have left the coast in such tattered shape that storms that might have caused minimal flooding several decades ago became surge-spewing bruisers.