Danger to Louisiana coastal roads

Kathrine Schmidt in the Daily Comet (LaFourche Parish, Louisiana): Global warming could pose a threat to Port Fourchon and the roads that serve it, according to transportation advocates and port officials. The La. 1 Coalition, a group that has long pushed for major improvements to the road that connects Fourchon to the rest of the state, has asked scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to work up a rough calculation of how sea-level rise would affect the highway, which is increasingly surrounded by encroaching water from the Gulf of Mexico.

Their conclusion: With a conservative estimate of sea-level rise and erosion, in the next 20 years La. 1 will be flooding up to 30 times a year just from high tides, cutting off access to the trucks that supply the offshore industry and for residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana's only inhabited barrier island.

“It won't just affect Port Fourchon,” said Chett Chiasson, executive director of the port. “It's affecting every coastal community throughout the world. If in fact sea-level rise is a reality, which it looks like it is, we're certainly going to have to combat that.”

With several attempts frustrated to get $300 million in federal money to complete the next stretch of the new La. 1 between Leeville and Golden Meadow, lobbyists for the transportation improvements aim to try a different tack. Their hope is the environmentally minded Obama administration may be more responsive to an application in the context of a global environmental issue, said Henri Boulet, a lobbyist for the coalition….

Soldiers of the Louisiana National Guard's 527th and 769th Engineer Battalions put together a wall of sand-filled Hesco Concertainer units in Port Fouchon, La., to help keep oil-tainted water from reaching Bay Champagne, May 21 2010. Shot by Senior Airman Jeffrey Barone