Louisiana Coastal Wetlands Lawyer & Attorney : Erich P. Rapp : Kean Miller Law Firm : Serving New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Louisiana

The New Orleans Times Picayune has created an interactive graphic to depict the scope of coastal land loss in Louisiana.

Select the interactive graphic entitled: The Rise and Disappearance of Southeast Louisiana. The presentation will explain in about seven minutes how the hydrologic cycle described in my last blog entry applies to the Mississippi River and Southeast Louisiana.

Most important when the active presentation ends, you will be left with a map of Louisiana and to the right side of the screen, you will have the ability to select a map of Southeast Louisiana as it existed in 1932, 2000, 2005 and a projection for 2020. Leaving aside what might come to be in the future, alternate views between the map as it was in 1932 and as it was in 2005. What you see will take your breath away.

The interactive graphic is an excellent presentation of the basic geology, but it leaves out an important part of the story. Dams are destroying the wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi River and not levees. Near the mouth, there are no levees.

Erich P Rapp. 

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The Mississippi River built the part of Louisiana now being lost to the sea. All water running across land carries sediment. All rivers and streams carry sediment. Rivers, streams and the sheet flow over the adjoining land are eroding sediment in one place and depositing it in another.  This natural process has existed as the earth has existed.

Transport of sediment in rivers is part of the hydrologic cycle. 

Water evaporates out of the ocean. The clouds moves over land, and the water returns to earth as rain. The rain runs across the land eroding sediment as it gathers in streams and rivers and makes its way back to the ocean. This description is a gross simplification, of course, because some of the water goes into storage as ground water, in lakes, plants and elsewhere along the way from falling as rain to its return to the ocean. 

As a result of the hydrologic cycle, water transporting sediment in the Mississippi River and depositing it at or near the coast built much of Louisiana over a very long period of time.

The law applies to this process. The transport of sediment in rivers is a natural process that creates a legal relationship between the land along the upstream portions of a river and the lands adjoining the same river system much closer to the ocean. If the process is disrupted, the land building and maintenance stops and as will be described later, the land slowly turns back to open sea.

This blog will show how the law protects property rights associated with the sediment transport process in rivers.

Erich P Rapp.  

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The article published on August 6, 2007 on CNNMoney.com is worth reading. The article is titled: The next energy crisis. More than a quarter of America's oil flows through southern Louisiana. Too bad the land is slowly sinking into the sea, and was written by Fortune Magazine senior writer Nicholas Varchaver. This article is different because it was written about the views of business people in the energy industry on Louisiana coastal land loss. This article describes how important the Louisiana coastal wetlands are to the production of 27% of America's oil and 30% of its natural gas. It also describes the challenges that businesses in the energy industry are facing as Louisiana's coastal wetlands are lost to open sea.

Erich P Rapp.

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