"The $50 Billion Plan To Save Louisiana's Coast Gets A Rewrite"

Coastal restoration planners for Louisiana issued maps showing shocking floods and land loss in 50 years if nothing is done.

"The entire land bridge between New Orleans East and Slidell is gone, making Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne a single body of brackish water. To the west, the land bridge between LaPlace and Pontchatoula also has vanished, subsuming Lake Maurepas into an even bigger Pontchartrain.

That's the alarming prediction of a brightly stained map that researchers are shopping around Louisiana as they rewrite the state's master plan for coastal restoration and hurricane protection. The map is the latest estimate of what Louisiana will look like in 50 years if no further restoration efforts are undertaken and the worst estimates of sinking land and rising seas come to pass.

A second map map uses shades of blue, green, yellow, orange, red and purple to show how high storm surge water might rise above ground level in 2067 if the Gulf Coast is hit by a hurricane with just a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year, the so-called 100-year storm. This map assumes less land loss will occur, but it is equally bracing."
 
Mark Schleifstein reports for the New Orleans Times-Picayune October 13, 2016.