Turning the Tide

[ Birds squawking ] [ Insects chirping ] America's largest and most productive river delta is in crisis.

If we were losing this much land to a foreign nation, there would be a war over it.

2,000 square miles lost to the Gulf of Mexico in the last half-century.

'Cause we're talking about wholesale loss, communities threatened.

Fixing the problem is no simple task.

We've turned the Mississippi River from a great natural land builder to a land destroyer.

If we don't do anything, 10,000 to 13,000 square kilometers will be lost by 2100.

But saving this delta will require enlisting powerful competing interests, billions of dollars, monumental engineering, and public confidence that plans are scientifically sound and a good investment for the nation.

Again and again, disaster has drawn the world's attention to this unfolding crisis.

How that goes, whether it's a natural disaster or a manmade disaster, has an impact on you.

It's sinking so fast, and rising sea levels are so high.

[ Thunder rumbling ] There is always a bigger storm out there.

Now new scientific discoveries challenge old assumptions about what will work -- turning the tide on this endangered coast.

[ Birds calling ] [ Insects chirping ] This program was funded in part by the McKnight Foundation and by The Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

People have always been drawn to the water's edge, building great civilizations in the world's river deltas, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Ganges, Mekong, Yellow, the Mississippi.

The mighty rivers that feed these deltas sustain and protect life.

Nearly a third of the Earth's population lives in coastal deltas.

Population growth will demand more energy, more water, more food, meaning dramatic changes for these regions.

It has to do with what's going on in the delta, like dikes, hydrological operations, drilling for oil, pumping out groundwater, dams retaining sediments, water being used, especially in arid areas.

And then, there's also fertilizers getting into the river that affect the coastal zone.

Deltas, like the one at the mouth of the Mississippi River, face the added threat of climate change and global-sea-level rise.

Over the 7,000 years it took the Mississippi to build this region, sea level was rising at a rate of one millimeter per year.

Now it's three times that rate.

Already, it's -- in many areas of the coast, we had up to 2 feet or more of sea-level rise this past century.

And predictions for the 21st century are even higher.

Some recent reports indicate, well, it may be a meter, so we got this much.

And then, the coast may sink a meter, so we've got 6 feet of water-level rise in some areas.

The changing climate means more frequent and intense hurricanes and dramatic cycles of crippling drought and much wetter conditions.

Some projections are maybe 40% more mean river discharge.

That's really... dangerous, you know?

Because our flood-control system along the river down here in the delta is not built for that.

As we go forward in the future, we'll see if what we do in the Mississippi.

It could be that it would serve as a good example, but it might serve as a bad example of what not to do.

40% of America's coastal wetlands are concentrated in the Mississippi River Delta here on Louisiana's Gulf Coast.

But these wetlands experience 90% of the nation's wetland loss.

The way we manage the Mississippi River and the coastal marshes of Louisiana is a dead-end proposition right now.

We're managing it into oblivion, and there's a strong interest in trying to change that trajectory.

But changing the way we manage this region requires buy-in from influential and conflicting interests that depend on the system for survival, from the nation's agriculture, manufacturing, shipping, and oil and gas industries... to the estuaries that sustain much of America's seafood supply and wildlife... to communities upriver that rely on hydropower, water resources, and flood protection... all the way down to private property owners protecting land and oil and gas rights on the coast.

And the reality is, coastal Louisiana, for the most part, is held within private hands, and so we're going to have to work with private landowners to implement projects.

It's in their best interests.

It's in our best interests.

And the fact that it will not be possible to save the entire coast looms large.

There's no way that we can maintain the entire coast of Louisiana.

In fact, we estimated that, if we don't do anything, 10,000 to 13,000 square kilometers will be lost by 2100.

And it's due to these two effects -- a rise in sea level and a lack of sediment input to the system.

Sediment is the real key.

And I don't know if the general public understands that or not.

It took the [Chuckling] scientific community a long time to understand it.

But the sediment needed to build up the coast is a limited commodity.

It is a real uphill battle.

You can kind of do the math on, you know, what kind of accretion rates we're gonna need.

And, you know, we're talking about at least a half an inch per year.

And that may be possible, perhaps, locally, but it's not gonna be possible over very large areas, over, you know, most of our coast.

I think being honest with the public about what restoration means is absolutely critical.

A lot of people think that restoration means going back to some previous state.

Well, we know, as scientists, that there is no going back.

This is a dynamic coast.

It's been constantly changing -- not only for centuries, but for thousands of years.

It's gonna change in the future.

Recent scientific discoveries provide new tools to help manage this delta, including a better understanding of how the modern river actually works.

This program explores techniques that could help turn the tide by repairing damaged wetlands and bringing sediment back to starving marshes through pipelines or by diverting it from the river.

Recent estimates put the cost of protecting the delta at more than $50 billion.

The cost of inaction is far greater.

But without embracing what's truly causing the problem and the economic and societal barriers to solving the problem, it will be an uphill battle to move forward.

In 2011, a historic flood raged through the nation's midsection.

The flood tested the near-century-old Federal levee system protecting millions of people and more than $100 billion in property and infrastructure.

It was also a rare chance to test long-held assumptions about the river's potential for sustaining Louisiana's embattled delta.

As high waters entered Louisiana, passing through the Federal flood control system, they split, limiting the Mississippi's flow passing cities to the southeast, including New Orleans.

The rest of the water was shunted down the Atchafalaya River and through the Morganza Spillway into the leveed Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest bottomland swamp.

At the southern end of the swamp are two of the only areas on the coast that are building land here, in this shallow bay in the Gulf of Mexico.

I always tell everybody I'm an oceanographer in water up to my knees.

The last time these deltas grew significantly was during the record flood of 1973.

And the flood of 2011 jump-started delta building again.

I'm standing here in some of the newest land in Louisiana.

The water has gone down from the big flood of 2011.

You can see all this growth has happened in the last two months.

This is good, solid sandy soil with a little mud on the top.

This is how it happens, and this is how it has always happened in the Mississippi River Delta and other deltas around the world.

This is the closest thing left in Louisiana's coastal landscape to a naturally occurring system, but even this delta is the result of human engineering.

Land building on the coast started nearly a century ago, 100 miles inland, as the leveed Atchafalaya Basin began silting in.

And today, large floods help push long-stored sediment out to the coast, adding just over 20 square miles since 1970.

Some belive this kind of delta building could be replicated across the coast by letting the river loose to create new marshes.

But like anything on the coast, nothing is simple.

If you were going to rebuild and rehabilitate the coast of Louisiana, just to contend with sea-level rise, subsidence, and all the other factors, user groups, navigation, fisheries, and the habitats themselves to open up the river and let it go, it would be simple, but, unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Adding to the complexity is a new scientific understanding of the way water and sediment flow through the modern river system.

Early in this restoration game, in the 1970s, for instance, there was this thought that we've cut the system off from delivering sediment to the adjacent wetlands, and that is, in fact, true, but it also assumed that, if you cut a new hole in the system, there was an endless amount of material available to replenish the wetlands, and what we're discovering is that it is a limited resource.

What we choose to do with that limited resource will determine the fate of this region.

The state is gonna have to make some difficult choices about where it sends that sediment and where it doesn't send that sediment.

There is not enough sediment -- there is not enough money to put this coast back.

Difficult decisions are gonna have to be made.

[ Insects chirping ] The sands and sediment necessary for sustaining the delta gave rise to coastal Louisiana out of the Gulf of Mexico over thousands of years.

Today, these same precious sands shape the story of this drowning delta, its rich cultural heritage, and wealth of natural resources.

[ Insects chirping ] It is very rare to be able to build new land, and we've done that over a period of a few weeks.

It's incredibly exciting to see, as soon as you're done dredging and the sediment starts to settle, birds will immediately move in to feed in this newly created mud flat because there's food in there.

I am Melanie Driscoll, National Audubon Society's Director of Bird Conservation for the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi Flyway.

We are at the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary.

It's a 26,000-acre sanctuary that is Audubon's oldest and largest sanctuary.

About three years ago, we conceived of the idea of doing this dredge project to do dredging at a smaller scale, to clean out nearby canals and start to fill in what we call these Swiss cheese marshes, marshes that are starting to get holes and break apart, but before they've become wide-open ponds and lakes.

Individual property owners probably could afford to rent, lease, or buy one of these dredges, just in the daily maintenance of their canals.

There are a lot of good marsh-management techniques, and individual landowners can make a big difference.

We know that, in Louisiana, we lose an area about the size of Manhattan every year due to coastal marsh loss.

And as that habitat goes away, we lose homes for birds.

The Mississippi Flyway has probably about 40% of the nation's shorebirds and raptors that move through this particular flyway.

It is in a landscape that is a globally important bird area for many species of birds.

The coastal marshes of Louisiana provide about 30% of the domestic production of seafood, about 30% of the natural gas and oil.

We have 4 of the nation's 10 largest ports.

Coastal marsh loss has been referred to as a Louisiana problem, but it's a problem that impacts the rest of the nation.

I think that apathy and fear may be the biggest impediments to coastal restoration.

People hear about sea-level rise, they hear about disasters, and they feel like the situation is hopeless, and we tend to turn away from that which we cannot change.

Everyone's individual actions can roll up to be something that actually does make a significant improvement in the habitats down here.

Of all the natural ecosystems in the United States, wetlands are the only ones protected by law.

They filter polluted air and water, help manage floods and protect against storms.

Louisiana's wetlands are one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet, supporting the largest commercial fishery in the lower 48 states.

We are nursery grounds for numerous fisheries' organisms.

They need protection.

Marshes and wetlands -- all of those provide excellent habitat, and it's the edges of these habitats, even down to every blade of grass that would be flooded.

You take away that edge, turn it into open water, so when we lose all that, we expect to see the fisheries collapse.

These critical wetland estuaries are fed and nourished by the nation's largest river, Father of Waters, the Big Muddy, Ol' Man River.

We call it by many names, but it is the mighty Mississippi, America's river, a gathering of waters.

Down the Kaw and Kaskaskia, the Red and Yazoo, down the Cumberland, Kentucky, and the Tennessee, down... For thousands of years, melting snow and rains washed soil and sediment across 41% of the nation's landscape.

The untamed river scrawled out new paths and carried its heavy load 2,300 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.

You know, the river has a large ability to create land, and the best proof of that is that we are in one of the largest deltas of the world right here.

The active delta built where the river hit the Gulf and in places where powerful floods broke riverbanks.

As land piled up in one region, gravity forced the river to switch course, seeking an easier path to the sea, building out new delta lobes and leaving older ones to fall apart.

And as the ocean eroded the land, barrier islands formed.

They formed from the river bringing sediment to the coast, but they'll eventually disappear.

They will eventually go away.

It's a dynamic interaction between the building power of the river and the erosive power of the sea.

The other important thing to understand about the delta is it's sinking.

This part of the delta's sinking, or subsiding, at one of the highest rates in the world, from the compaction of thousands of years of sediment faulting occurring deep in the Earth's crust and pumping out water, oil, and gas.

This rapid subsidence, more than a third of an inch per year in some areas, plays a larger role in Louisiana's coastal-erosion crisis than understood in the past.

The majority of our wetland loss is not due to increases in salinity -- it's due to the fact that our wetland landscape is sinking, and as a result of that sinking, those wetlands are being submerged to a much greater extent.

Wetland scientists say the best way to counteract the sinking is to make sure wetland plants are healthy and continue to build their own soil through natural root production, growth and decay, with new sediment from floods and storms.

This type of organically building marsh makes up 80% to 90% of this delta plain, and so far, it is keeping pace with relative sea-level rise.

The big question is whether they will still be in a reasonable balance with the rates of sea-level rise that we expect for the next century.

And right now, the answer to that question is "no."

[ Insects chirping ] The dynamic river that built this land provided a bounty of natural resources that drew people to the water's edge for thousands of years.

These early people adapted to the ebb and flow of the water and land.

But today, these Native people struggle to hold onto their heritage as the land washes away beneath them.

[ Water burbling ] I don't know how much we're going to be able to exist in our present-day homeland, in our present-day communities.

It's more than just the loss of a home -- it's the loss of a culture.

It's the loss of our traditional medicines, our traditional plants, our traditional lifestyle of the hunting and the trapping and the fishing.

You know, it's a part of our soul and who we are as Houma people that's being threatened.

My name is Brenda Dardar Robichaux, and I am Former Principal Chief of United Houma Nation.

Land is, to us, like the air we breathe.

It's a provider for us.

It's something that's been a blessing for us.

Oftentimes -- unfortunately, more often than not -- any levee that's being built leaves us out, and so it's unfortunate that the cost of including us in any type of levee protection is not worth the value of the community.

We had Katrina and Rita.

Three years later, we had Gustav and Ike.

And that strength and that strong spirit that I saw in our people for Katrina and Rita -- I didn't see it as much for Gustav and Ike.

You could tell they were starting to be weary.

And so it has really taken its toll.

We're already seeing a general migration of some of the younger generation moving further inland, further north.

We can see the changes happening.

For us, we see it as a death threat.

As natural forces batter this landscape, other damage, much of it self-inflicted, also hastens erosion.

Early in the 20th century, enough timber was cut out of coastal forests to make Louisiana the leading lumber producer in the world.

In the last hundred years, more than 12,000 miles of navigation and pipeline canals have been dredged out of Louisiana's coast.

They account for 11% of all the loss of coastal Louisiana.

You know, there's no argument about that.

That had the effect not only of dredging through wetlands, but, also, disrupting the way that water flows that caused much, much greater loss.

Canals bring damaging saltwater surges into freshwater areas.

Spoil banks block flood and tidal flows and new sediment that helps sustain the wetlands.

It's cooking through here.

The 2011 flood demonstrated the impact of canals, even as far as 100 miles from the coast.

If water moves through the pipelines, it misses the swamp, so you just have this pocket of no-oxygen water that never gets sediment, so you have a subsidence issue.

The trees eventually die.

They can't regenerate.

Meaning even these healthy wetlands will be vulnerable to subsidence in the future without steps to restore natural flows.

We often talk about the influence of the oil-and-gas canals to our land-loss issue, and there's no question we've caused great damage.

Beginning in 1972, there were permits required.

If you dug a canal in a wetland, you needed to get a 404 Federal Permit.

And the states and the agencies all had a chance to say yes or no to that permit application.

We, most often, said yes.

We all, each and every one of us, have to share in some of the blame for that.

In a lot of other parts of America, and with a lot of other industries, we required them to pay for their divots.

We have federal laws that say, "You will pay for the harm you're causing."

We did that for the chemical industry back in the '60s, when we were discovering these chemical-waste pits, and that became something called the Superfund.

That's a federal law.

There's another one for coal mining, and it's the Surface Mine Restoration Fund.

Now we come to [Chuckling] Louisiana, and we have a huge mess caused by yet another industry giant, the oil-and-gas industry.

It's no leap of law and it's no leap of imagination to say, "Hey, how about paying for your divots?"

When these canals and the sites were actually put in many, many years ago, they were done in compliance with all the state and federal laws.

What percentage of that has attributed to our coastal-wetland loss?

That's debatable and has been.

But we pay millions of dollars in taxes, income taxes and sales taxes, severance taxes.

We pay bonuses, rents, and royalties to the state of Louisiana.

A percentage of oil-and-gas revenues that come in the state go into a Coastal Restoration Fund.

Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico account for a little over a third of the oil produced in America.

The bulk of that is funneled right through Louisiana.

It is incredibly important to America's energy security.

It's a blunt industrial process.

You know, it took heavy equipment to build these spoil banks and to dredge the canals, and it takes heavy equipment to -- to get rid of them.

Small demonstration projects, like this one southwest of New Orleans, can begin to repair some of the damage caused by canals.

If you dredge a canal in the marsh, there's this direct effect, but there are these indirect effects, which are seven times larger than the canal and the spoil bank in and of itself, and that's the cause of a lot of the wetland loss in Louisiana -- at least a third or a half.

If you reverse that cause-and-effect relationship by taking down the spoil bank and filling in the canal, you've had a reversal of that 7 acres for 1 acre surface.

Backfilling will help restore and protect hundreds of acres here, but could have a much larger impact.

Individual landowners, who just have a few miles of canals, can, with the right incentives, can start doing these kinds of projects and create new marsh or new swamp overnight.

I mean, that's the beauty of this -- it restores things in a very quick and cost-efficient way.

Some of the scars left on this delta landscape are not so easily erased.

Oil from the 2010 BP disaster caused devastating marsh loss, but the true cost may never be known.

Other human activities, ones intended to protect American commerce and industry, have also taken a toll.

The river has become our enemy.

We built levees against it.

We're at constant war with this thing, and it's a war in which -- although we win by staying dry, we lose by subsiding and sinking and making ourselves terribly vulnerable to the Gulf of Mexico.

Today, 1,600 miles of levees lock the Mississippi River in place.

The original justification for the levees was not at all flood protection -- it was entirely for interstate commerce.

By the early 1800s, a growing network of leveed waterways connected the nation's midsection to the world, fueling growth of America's Steel Belt and its breadbasket.

Originally, there was an attitude that this navigation artery could be controlled with levees only, but in 1927, the Great Mississippi River Flood proved levees could fail and demonstrated the need to protect people from the river.

In total, there are probably approaching a million people almost in the United States, and the nation did make a commitment not to have anything like that happen again.

To relieve pressure on the levees, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built massive spillways, including the Bonnet Carr and Morganza in Louisiana, and they reinforced river levees with concrete.

High floods in years past prove the system worked, but decades later, when the Mississippi began shifting course down the Atchafalaya River, threatening the navigation artery again, the nation took new action.

In 1963, the Corps built the Old River Control Structure at Simmesport to keep the Mississippi in place.

Other changes to the river itself may also play a role in marsh loss, as water quality declines due to agricultural and industrial practices upriver.

The water quality within the Mississippi River has changed dramatically.

There are higher levels of nutrients, like nitrate.

There are higher levels of sulfate.

Studies indicate these changes may speed root decay by stimulating marsh growth aboveground instead of stabilizing roots below.

Anything that affects the root system, the way it's growing -- some chemicals -- whatever it is -- has the potential to completely collapse this, so that, if you have a storm surge or some kind of hydraulic energy, like a daily tide, that easily disintegrates the marsh and pulls it apart.

Added nutrients also decimate Gulf marine life, creating an oxygen-depleted dead zone larger than the state of Connecticut every year, and drastic changes in the river basin cause greater problems for the starving coast.

At Fort Peck, Montana, the Army Engineers are constructing the biggest earth dam in the world.

Thousands of dams that provide irrigation, power, and drinking water to millions now trap most of the river's sediment upriver.

Where the Mississippi once dumped 400 million tons of sediment on the coast every year, it now carries only a fraction of that.

we're probably looking at about 75% less sediment in the river than what was there in the 1950s, before the dams went through.

There are six dams on the upper Missouri River, in Montana and North Dakota and South Dakota, that retain more sediment than the entire rest of the Mississippi River System delivers to the Gulf of Mexico.

80% of the sediment that comes down the river is this very fine-grained material.

If you form a new delta lobe on the open coast, you're gonna be exposed to waves, tides, currents.

As a result, that fine material will be carried out onto the shelf -- it will not really contribute to building land in the delta.

So, what do we need to build land?

Well, if we've got an open water area, then, clearly, we have to get some sediment deposited, and in order to get sediment to build up there, it has to be fairly big sediment, coarse sediment, that's gonna settle down through that water column and start to build up the bed.

With much less land-building sediment to work with, it is critical to know when and where to find it.

New technology is making that possible.

Startling new data shows that, for more than seven months a year, there's almost no heavy sandy material flowing in the river at all.

This heavier material, key to building land quickly, sits on the riverbed, requiring much more energy to move.

Periodic high floods, like the one in 2011, can do the heavy lifting, but this historic flood also proved that, in order for the coarsest sediment, suspended by fast-moving floodwaters, to settle out and build land, the water has to slow down significantly and spread out over a shallow area, protected from wave action in the Gulf.

But safely guiding sediment-rich floodwaters through spillways and low-lying delta communities so they can build land on the coast is a delicate balancing act.

More than 14,000 structures, including residential homes and businesses, could be impacted by flooding from this event.

And the Guard is working 24-hour operations to fortify and elevate levees to prevent backwater flooding in Morgan City and Amelia.

You're talking about the largest flood in the history of the country that turned into a nonevent.

Morganza did a terrific job.

Bonnet Carr did a terrific job -- the amount of material that we diverted off the river.

So those structures were key, and that's why you didn't have any flooding down here.

[ Insects chirping ] [ Water burbling ] Waters used to rise and fall across this delta.

And people who settled in this ever-changing landscape, like the Acadians, lived off the riches it provided.

Today, their Cajun descendants face tough decisions to hold onto their way of life.

[ Chirping, burbling continue ] When they open the Morganza, it's gonna give us more water over here.

It'll be right at the doorstep.

So we're sandbagging.

A lot of my friends are sandbagging.

I'm building a levee.

My name is Troy Landry, and I'm from Pierre Part, Louisiana.

They built the levee to keep us dry in the 1930s.

My grandpa worked on that levee to protect the people that lived there, and it was all done with good intentions.

I guess you could consider me a Cajun.

People call us Cajuns and you name it, but -- swamp people -- but, you know, it's more than just a name -- it's a way of life.

You know, you live off the land.

You live in the bayous.

And just look around you.

I mean, this is my office.

This is my work area.

There's no noise.

There's no caution flags.

And, you know, I wish this way of life would continue for a long time, and I can see it slipping away quick.

We have an extremely high water year this year, and when the basin's high, the backwater -- it backs up on us.

It's gonna silt up the basin a lot.

It changes the landscape.

It changes the way you fish.

You know, it changes everything about it.

I don't know if the government ought to step into an area and say, "Look, y'all have to move out of here.

This is a flood zone."

But what the government has to do is say, "Look, we're not gonna protect y'all no more.

We're not gonna build y'all -- You know, we're not gonna come and rebuild your home for you after you flood.

If you choose to live within these boundaries, you live here like they lived here 100 years ago, at your own risk," and you leave it up to the people, you know?

People living in this delta are not the only ones threatened by changes along the Mississippi.

U.S. industry and agriculture depend on this navigation system to get products to market.

At its heart, this is the largest port system in the world.

It's bigger than Singapore, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Shanghai -- any of the larger international ports you traditionally think of.

Keeping the Mississippi open for navigation is expensive.

Periods of drought choke river traffic.

High water brings fine silt that settles at the river's mouth.

Each year, the Corps of Engineers dredges enough silt from the riverbed to fill the Louisiana Superdome 30 times.

Congress is appropriating somewheres around $63 million or $65 million a year to a project that needs $104 million a year.

But as seas rise and the coast subsides, sedimentation and dredging costs will only increase -- so will the depth needed to keep these ports competitive in a global market.

In the next decade or so, the ships are actually gonna get bigger and have deeper drafts, and so the question is, can you modernize the mouth of the river to allow those ships to come in?

And you can't do that unless you figure out something -- someplace else to put the sediment.

And the best place to put it is places like this.

Build marshes with it.

Fine sediment threatens more than the river's mouth.

Scientists have located a vast sediment deposit deep in the riverbed further north, between the Old River Control Structure and Baton Rouge.

You have a lot of passes, both manmade and natural passes, that are diverting water and sediment.

And the more of the water and sediment you take out, the less energy there is available to carry it in that reach below those particular passes.

The channel bottom has extensive sand deposits in the form of these lateral bars that extend all the way down the river channel.

These massive sand bars could be used for restoration.

It's still there as a potential resource to be mined and put into, for instance, a long-distance pipeline that you might be able to build land with.

Using dredge material to build land is not a new idea.

Piping dredge sediment has been used to build road beds, golf courses, and restore wetlands, shorelines, and barrier islands for decades.

This is the only way that we can take what are now shallow ponds and lakes that have degraded over the last, say, 50 years.

This is the only way we can bring these back rapidly.

Since 2004, pipeline-sediment projects have built more than 21 square miles of new land in Louisiana.

This project south of New Orleans is the first time sediment was pumped directly from the river.

It's a very good way to build wetlands quick, but it's very fossil-fuel-energy intense.

And it's one thing to pump it out of the sediments, but if you had to do this, you know, over and over, you would have just massive recurring costs.

We've been evaluating the idea of using natural gas to drive the pumps and pipe sediment.

Conceivably, this could cut the cost by as much as 2/3.

We're working right now on a pipeline network from the Lower Mississippi River System that would be able to distribute sediment long distances around the entire coastal basin, to where the Corps can just hook up their dredges and pump the sediment out and just have this backbone of infrastructure.

It will lower the cost for the Corps of Engineers to dredge the river.

Using the best available dredge technology could also cut costs, but one U.S. law, known as the Jones Act, makes this a challenge.

Under the Jones Act, which is a century-old law, all dredges must be U.S.-built, U.S.-crewed, and U.S.-flagged.

The challenge is, is that it appears to have had a detrimental effect in that it has allowed for some complacency in terms of innovation in the dredging industry.

And so while you can go overseas and see more innovative technologies, larger investments in these industries, in the United States, you're not seeing comparable investments or comparable use of technologies.

On the southern edge of the Persian Gulf, the nation of Dubai has demonstrated that dedicated dredging on a massive scale is possible, adding more than 300 miles to its coastline.

Here, as in most cases, money and necessity drove innovation.

Technology developed in Dubai by Belgian and Dutch dredge companies is brought home to places like this in the Netherlands to expand industry and to shore up the nation's coastline against the North Sea.

Not only do the Dutch export this knowledge worldwide, but they use it at home to stay competitive in a global economy.

This $1.5 billion project in Rotterdam added nearly 10 square miles to expand Europe's largest port.

Dutch dredges moved enough sand to fill the Louisiana Superdome 68 times to compete this project in less than five years.

As world leaders in water management and engineering, the Dutch have literally reclaimed much of their land from the sea and marsh areas.

Their levees and flood-control structures, called "Delta Works," protect 60% of the population, which lives below sea level.

But in the process of engineering this landscape, they set in motion dramatic changes that destroyed a majority of the nation's wetlands and estuaries.

If you start to deal with water management, realize there is always an effect to it.

So don't think that there is no effect.

In the past, we thought there was no effect.

When we made our Delta Works, we just said, "Let's close the dikes."

And for the rest, we are safe.

But the effect to the environment was enormous.

Now we are working on it to compensate it again.

Facing a changing climate, the Dutch are looking for more natural solutions to balance wetland restoration and flood protection by removing and lowering levees, relocating residents, and compensating landowners when floods happen.

But this is a much safer solution and much cheaper solution than that we have to higher the dike.

Finding economic strategies to prepare for rising rivers and seas is a matter of survival for the world's most populated regions.

There is a long list of cities around the world that are facing issues similar to those of New Orleans.

The difference is, in New Orleans, we've had the Katrina catastrophe, which has woken us all up to that risk.

What you need is vision, because you've got to get free from current-day issues and problems, because they'll mire you.

The danger is the uncertainties are so large and the friction between different uses of the river can be so great as to prevent any action.

And what we found is, if you explain the science in terms that people can understand, they do get it.

And once they've got it, they become your strongest supporters.

Unfortunately, most coastal regions of the United States do not have the potential to build land on a large scale.

But here, the Mississippi River could provide the needed advantage in turning the tide.

Using periodic floods to push heavy sediment to the coast is promising.

There's no reason we should be wasting a flood.

It's got water and sediment that we should be using to rebuild the coast.

Finding more ways to let the water and sediment out of the river during floods could be a way of doing that.

Many scientists argue mimicking floods by building river diversions is the best strategy for sustaining the delta, but there's debate about whether diversions could create significant land fast enough, considering droughts, reduced sediment load, subsidence rates, sea-level rise, and storm threats.

I think the uncertainty is how much of that sediment, actually, we can redistribute and reuse -- that's where the debate is mostly in.

During floods, river diversions could threaten estuaries and coastal communities.

During droughts, they can impact drinking-water supples and other demands on the river.

Scientists are learning from older river diversions, ones that draw water from the top of the river and were originally designed to bring nutrients to wetlands and prevent saltwater intrusion.

Fresh water and nutrients alone in a subsiding environment is not enough to rehabilitate and restore and to even be beneficial to our wetlands.

We might even propose that the large diversions we have should be re-engineered to allow for more sediment input.

Researchers also monitor other diversion projects, like this one near the river's mouth, to see if a diversion this far south can build significant land.

So, we are out here, trying to figure that out.

The West Bay Cut has increased costly sedimentation in the river, but new research suggests the diversion is slowly building land, averaging 3 centimeters per year since it opened in 2003, and growth accelerated significantly with help from dredging in the flood of 2011.

Current plans for a new diversion southeast of New Orleans at Myrtle Grove mark a new era in coastal planning.

This project is being designed to maximize sediment capture, pulling water from deep in the river where sediments flow, and operating when sediment load is high.

But are any of these diversions large enough to have an impact?

Many scientists say no.

We do need the scale of diversions that we've built in the past, such as the Old River Control Structure or even a Bonnet Carr one.

That's the scale.

We need to open up access of the Atchafalaya and Morgan City to Western Terrebonne, access of the river somewhere in Barataria, southeast of New Orleans.

Building new diversions the size of existing spillways could create other challenges.

You can talk about ecological benefits of massive water diversions as if there were no people in the area, but there are people in the area.

There's people living here.

There's houses here.

There's refineries here.

We cannot flood people in the name of restoration.

To me, it's like building the interstate system.

You have to decide that you have a plan, and then you have to convince people that it is the right plan, and you have to compensate people that are going to be negatively damaged by this plan, and you have to compensate them fairly.

Large-scale diversion projects would require managing the costs and impacts to society and public expectations for land building.

People need to realize that this is a long-term commitment to something that may be 30 to 50 years before you see significant land building, but, ultimately, may be a significant land builder.

[ Insects chirping ] The people who built and populated the shining city of New Orleans over the past three centuries have infused the world with cultural flavor and tempo.

Now they're exposed like never before to the impacts of a rapidly changing climate and the ever-present threat of new storms.

[ Singing ] New Orleans is just like this beautiful mosaic that's been created of all of these different cultures and musics and foods.

And so we have a lot of things going for us that I think has set us up to be an engine of change and an engine of innovation and an engine of creativity.

My name is Kent Jordan.

I'm a musician.

I have a family of seven siblings, and everybody basically played music.

I teach woodwinds here at the Louis Armstrong Jazz Camp.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster for everybody.

My mother and father's house was washed away.

My sisters' houses were washed away.

It was devastating.

And I think that sense of loss -- when you see that, you know, for one family, and then you can extend that to thousands of families.

I lost my house.

I had 12 feet of water in my house.

If it floods again and it floods again, we just have to dry out and start all over.

You know, New Orleans is a place that will never die, and if we let it die, I don't know what'll happen to this world, you know?

'Cause everybody in the world loves coming to New Orleans.

You know, we sort of have to find that way of, how are we gonna sustain this great city?

Music is a part of it, obviously.

Culture is a part of it, obviously.

But at the same time, you know, let's find now this technological solution, 'cause it's not gonna be a cultural solution.

You know, we all know that.

It's not gonna be a musical solution.

This has to be an engineered solution.

New Orleans, like coastal cities around the world, is seeking ways to protect itself against storms and rising seas.

This is the largest design-build Civil Works project in the history of the Corps.

This $1.3 billion surge barrier was built to shield New Orleans against a deadly storm surge, like Katrina's.

Its first test -- Hurricane Isaac in 2012.

This barrier's part of a $14.6 billion investment linking 350 miles of levees, floodwalls, and pump stations, but many criticize federal standards used to upgrade and build new levees on the coast, known as 100-year protection standard.

It's the worst standard in the developed world.

You know, statistically, in an average person's lifetime, they have a 56% chance of seeing a flood greater than a 100-year protection.

So, if you were investing in a retirement fund, I don't think you'd invest in something with a 56% chance of catastrophic failure.

The federal system ties in with storm protection in Louisiana's own Master Plan.

The new plan strives to balance hurricane protection with restoration.

Therein lie some challenges.

When you come -- one choice or another -- people want levees right around where they live, so it's been a factor which has consumed a large amount of the resources.

Secondly, we need to make sure that, in providing flood protection, we don't make the coastal-restoration problem that much more difficult -- we don't do things which actually cause our land to continue to erode away.

One of the most controversial protection projects includes a large-scale levee system across the coastal zone.

Most wetland scientists, from the standpoint of protecting wetlands, do not think these are good ideas.

Everything we know about what maintains healthy wetlands would tell us not to do this.

I think one of the things that happens when we build levees is we give people a false sense of security, and they really feel like they're protected, even though we know there is always a bigger storm out there.

Imagine if we put the same amount of money into helping people flood-proof their houses, elevate their houses, you know, move to different locations if they wanted to.

They could be safer tomorrow.

Providing tools and incentives for communities to retreat from vulnerable areas, build smarter, and limit coastal development will significantly reduce risk.

We don't abandon the coast.

We can have fortified outposts to protect important infrastructure -- shipping and fishing and other natural resource activities.

I think we need to decide, you know, really, about what we can afford.

[ Bird chirping ] This working coast has provided critical resources to support the nation for centuries.

Threats to the coast now put those resources at risk and have left the region facing tough choices and a ticking clock.

I always felt like, you know, Camille was the worst thing we could ever have.

Katrina was like six times Camille.

And who knows?

There might be a storm that's six times Katrina.

I'm Pete Gerica.

I'm a fourth-generation commercial fisherman.

I fish shrimp, pinfish, and crabs -- done it all my life.

We try to get along and build ourselves back to where we were, and all of a sudden -- bam -- Gustav and Ike set you back again.

Last year in April, we got the Horizon spill.

Then, all of a sudden, the river starts coming up.

And I started telling everybody, "Don't look good."

[ Chuckles ] And sure as hell, it don't look good.

I mean, we -- you know, we got two spillways open, plenty of freshwater that we don't really need during the brown shrimp season, and small shrimp with a low price and high fuel, and none of that works out.

Oh, I'm telling you -- it's another day in the life of a fisherman.

[ Laughs ] Oh.

Oh, I think -- I think Louisiana's going to survive.

I think that, you know, people are at a point right now where they're at a crossroads, where they know that they got to do something.

I still think that the main thing we got to do is protect the barrier islands.

I mean, the pie in the sky of putting things back the way it was -- you can't put it back the way it was.

Let's save what we got.

In 1904, President Teddy Roosevelt moved to protect Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands, making them America's second National Wildlife Refuge.

Today, these barrier islands struggle to survive after recent hurricanes reduced them by 85%.

These islands help buffer against storms, the staggering subsidence rates, and wetland loss behind the islands speed up their erosion by expanding the volume and velocity of water moving in and out with each tide.

Restoring the barrier islands is a complex task.

No one should expect that you can go in there and fully restore barrier islands and you can walk away from them and they'll be fine.

It's not gonna happen.

If you start this process, you're starting a maintenance program.

And coarse sand needed to save the islands is in short supply.

The sediments that have been captured, historically, along the coastline are mostly mud.

The repositories of very nice sand is limited.

Identifying restoration techniques that work has been a challenge.

Hard structures have little effect, but dredging to build islands up can help them survive storms.

You put more sediment out there to be eroded, and so the time scale over which they may disappear has been pushed into the future.

You got another one in case they start biting?

I'm Ken Wells.

I currently write for Businessweek magazine and am part of the Bloomberg News organization's Projects and Investigations team, but I'm also a novelist of the Cajun bayous.

And one of the issues of writing fiction and satire about Louisiana, especially, is that you have so much competition from reality.

You know, the stuff that happens down here is always more interesting than anything you could make up.

Well, we grew up in a farmhouse just not more than a mile across the bayou from here.

[ Insects chirping ] And as you can see or hear around us, we are in the swamp.

And so, you know, as a kid, you know, with a father who loved the outdoors and loved being outside and loved to hunt and fish, this was boy paradise.

There was no place like it.

You have to go a long way in America, and even in the world, to find a place where sort of the soul and psyche of the culture is so tied to the ecosystem.

I think there's a lot of stuff that's being lost that just cannot be recovered.

Lake Boudreaux is probably about 30% bigger than what it used to be, I would say, just because you can see where the tree line out here was and stumps that come way out here, so that's land loss.

So, pretty soon, I mean, pretty soon, it's all gonna be open water, all the way to -- all the way to the Gulf, yeah.

We just cannot afford to let this slide into the ocean and pretend that, "Oh, well, it's no one's fault."

You know, we have to -- I think we have to step up, and -- and everybody, you know, needs to step up and help -- help us save it.

Problem is, I don't think the country understands what's happening down here.

Educating people about how the problem affects the nation is the first step to solving it.

These aren't local problems.

They're national problems.

They have to do with national security, energy security, economic security for every family in this country.

Recent polls show the nation's support for protecting the valuable resources the region provides, but protecting America's delta will take more than investment.

There are a number of plans.

They all require money.

They also require that people and communities can adapt to the changes that are going to be required.

One silver bullet's not going to address the whole issue.

It's going to take many different solutions to address this -- this problem.

We're also gonna have to deal with all the other user groups within coastal Louisiana.

We have to understand that there are going to be impacts.

There are going to be people affected.

I mean, we're affected, unfortunately, if we do nothing.

Enlisting those competing interests and making sure solid science leads the way will improve the chance for success.

Recent storms prove what happens on this coast will be a test case for the nation and the world.

We understand the dynamics of the Mississippi River -- the water flow, the sediment that's coming down is changing with time.

Given the limited resources, the social and economic landscape of Southern Louisiana, we have to look to say, you know, "Where should we be putting the resources that we have?"

It is a political challenge that will require national resolve and collective compromise.

The fundamental question is, will we find a way to live with the river and to use the riches the river provides to save the coast?

Is this type of a system that is allowed to expand out and grow naturally -- is this type of system really compatible with all the things we want to do along the rivers, where we live, where the navigation channels are?

If it's not compatible, we're gonna lose it all.

We're gonna have to figure out ways to live with the natural processes of the river because we actually need them.

We can't live here without these wetlands.

[ Insects chirping ] This program was funded in part by the McKnight Foundation and by The Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

[ Insects chirping ] For a copy of this program, call 1-800-973-7246 or go online to www.lpb.org.