Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louisiana. Show all posts

Monday, February 26, 2024

Moving Out: Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana

Background


Isle de Jean Charles is a small fishing community at the south end of Island Road in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. It feels like the end of the world. The town was the home of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians for almost 200 years. All the houses now are elevated on piles or stilts, and there is limited dry land. One low and vulnerable road, a spur off of Louisiana 665, leads to the town. 

Because Island Road is often flooded, sometimes for days, and safety services can not be guaranteed for the residents, the community needs to move. According to a January 2024 BBC article, "This Louisiana town moved to escape climate-linked disaster," the residents of Isle Jean Charles are in the process of relocating to The New Isle Community, much further inland and safe from flooding. Building a major levee system to protect the town from hurricane surge was too expensive, and relocation was the only alternative.


Sediments of the Mississippi Delta


The title of the BBC article is somewhat deceptive. Rising sea level is making the road to Isle de Jean Charles more vulnerable to storm surges and even normal high tides. And the rising sea exacerbates other issues throughout south Louisiana such as infrastructure, drainage, pollutants, and sea water incursion further into the swamps. But at least four other major factors account for land loss in southern Louisiana:

1. The sediment is sinking. All this marshy deltaic sediment came down the Mississippi River. As the immense sediment mass of the Mississippi Delta dewaters over centuries, it compresses. 

2. Oil and gas producers dredged channels through the marshes. These channels allowed seawater to enter the marshes and kill fresh-water marsh vegetation. Without the root structures and emergent plants, storms washed away the limited soil. And the lack of plants means minimal new sediment gets trapped.

3. The path of the Mississippi River has been channelized by levees for 200 years. During floods, sediment no longer spreads out over the adjacent delta. When the US Army Corps of Engineers dredges the navigation channel, they place some of this material onto the nearby marshes. Openings in the levees also allow flood water to spread. But these two placement and diversion mechanisms still do not replicate the pre-engineered river when it flowed unconstrained.

4. Less sediment is brought down to south Louisiana. Compared to the era before the late 1800s, levees line all of the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries. The era of mass tree deforestation is over. Farming practice considers erosion control much more than it did 100 years ago. Dams on the Missouri and Ohio River systems trap sediment in their ponds. The Corps of Engineers reduces bank sloughing and erosion with concrete mats. In effect, we are retaining sediment on the continent. 

This is a complicated topic. A vast technical literature examines sediment, hydrology, climatology, and geotechnical issues in Southern Louisiana.

A March 2019 article in The New Yorker, "Louisiana's Disappearing Coast," is a readable and detailed description of the factors that cause land loss. 

John McFee's seminal 1987 article in The New Yorker, "The Control of Nature, Atchafalaya," describes the heroic efforts to prevent the Mississippi River from changing its path to debouch into the Gulf of Mexico at the Atchafalaya delta, not the present delta.  


Isle de Jean Charles in 2019


Bayou or boat canal parallel to Island Road, Isle de Jean Charles, April 28, 2019
Pedestrian bridge over boat canal

My wife and I drove out to Isle de Jean Charles in spring of 2019. We were on a trip to explore the Acadian Parishes of Louisiana and revisit some towns that we had seen before, such as Dulac and Lafayette. We had read about Isle de Jean Charles and wanted to see the town. Driving on Island Road felt like we were on a boat crossing the marshes and lakes. In many stretches, the pavement was only a foot or less above the water.

We stopped at the marina. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and the town gents were drinking beer and having a good old time out on the deck. They said they had seen the plans to move everyone to a new town and were somewhat skeptical. Some of the town residents already had homes further inland. They watched the tide predictions, and if high water or a tropical storm was predicted, they would head north to stay with relatives and wait for the weather to pass. The gents also wondered if the plan was to move the Chawtaws out and then the developers would build condominiums. 



Wood crossovers to provide access to Island Road
Boat canal almost filled with vegetation
Elevated Isle de Jean Charles house


This was a nice afternoon. The few people we met were friendly. But we were not in town long enough to get a sense of how many people lived there at that time. It felt quiet. If the BBC article is correct, Isle de Jean Charles may be much quieter soon. I am glad that my wife and I had the chance to visit when it was still possible.

I took these photographs with a Hasselblad 501CM camera on Kodak Panatomic-X film using 50mm and 80mm Zeiss lenses. Some were tripod-mounted. Praus Productions in Rochester, New York, developed the film in Xtol. I scanned the negatives with a Minolta Scan Multi film scanner. Panatomic-X is a mid-century wonder product for this type of subject matter. 
 

Monday, June 26, 2023

Fun in South Shreveport, Louisiana

On the way home from Houston in early 2023, my wife and I decided to break up the trip and overnight in Shreveport. 

To get to our hotel, we took I-49 south and exited to East 70th Street. We entered "that" type of neighborhood:  car shops with razor wire, closed and crumbling shops, burned houses, Popeye's Chicken, plasma centers, dead gas stations, nail salons, Pay-Day loan shops, car bling shops (behind razor fences), and an occasional resident shuffling along in a heavy parka or electric scooter. 

Heading east on E. 70th, we crossed a bayou and oops, what happened? A bicycle trail, insurance offices, the Lexus and BMW dealers, Whole Foods Market, new chain hotels, la Madeleine French Bakery. The contrast is so Southern, so typical. But even after all these decades living in the South, I am still amazed and disgusted.

The next morning, we went back to E. 70th and took a few pictures. It looked worse in daylight. It was an overcast day, and we saw almost no one out and about.


558 E. 70th Street (35mm ƒ/2 Summicron lens)
Apollo Liquor - probably a money-maker (5932 Linewood Ave.)
Grant's Automotive, 6912 Fairfield Ave.
King Tire, 437 E. 70th St.
Fixer-upper house, E. 69th St.
Southern Avenue 
Another fixer-upper house, 249 E. 69th St.
E. 66th St. (25mm ƒ/4 Voigtlander Color-Skopar lens)
No one home, E. 66th St. (25mm ƒ/4 Voigtlander Color-Skopar lens)

Well, this part of Shreveport is pretty horrifying. Why is this type of decay so endemic in American cities? I just don't understand.

I took these photographs of Fuji Acros film with my Leica M2 camera using 25mm, 35mm, and 50mm lenses, all hand-held. I scanned the negatives with a Plustek OptiFilm 7600i film scanner operated by SilverFast software.


Sunday, July 31, 2022

Panoramas on the Dixie Overland Highway - Mound, Tallulah, and Delhi (XPan 04)

As I wrote in the previous article, a generous friend loaned me his fabulous Hasselblad XPan panoramic camera. You may recall that I wrote about using an XPan in western Washington and Seattle during 2004, when I worked there for a few months. 

This offer was much too kind to resist. Loading a roll of Kodak Tri-X 400 film, I crossed the Mississippi River bridge to Louisiana and drove west on historic US 80, once known as the Dixie Overland Highway. I have photographed in Mound and Tallulah before with regular cameras, but the area offers topics for a wide view. Please click any picture to enlarge it. Unenlarged, they look like skinny sideways pictures, especially on a mobile phone.  (An aside: one day I plan to follow the former route of the Dixie Overland all the way to San Diego.)

Delta


Mount Zion BC Church, near Delta, Louisiana (45mm lens, med. yellow filter)

Tallulah


Tallulah is a bit beat-up. I have photographed there over the years and sometimes bicycle through town if I bike the loop on LA 602 and US 80. 

No shopping here, West Green Street (US 80), Tallulah (45mm, med. yellow filter)
No shopping here, either, West Green Street
Waiting for a load, West Green at Fourth Street (45mm at ƒ/8, yellow filter)
Fixer-upper house west of Tallulah, US 80
Willow Bayou Rice & Grain, west of Tallulah, US 80

Delhi


Delhi (Del'-high) is an agricultural town west of Tallulah on US 80 (no, not the Delhi in India - I have been there, too). It looks a bit more prosperous than Tallulah, and the downtown strip has some stores and restaurants.

Mooney's Auto Sales & Repairs, First Street (US 80) at Rundell Street, Delhi
No more pumping, Delhi Water Works
The Air Man of Delhi, First Street (US 80)

I took these photographs on Kodak Tri-X 400 film exposed at EI=320. Northeast Photographic in Bath, Maine, developed the film. Because the frames are 68mm wide, I scanned them in two pieces of 36mm with my Plustek 7600i film scanner and merged them with the Photomerge function in Photoshop CS5. The Tri-X is a bit grainy and does not let these lenses show their true potential.

Thanks, Bill, for letting me use your XPan!

Standby for more Xpan photographs in the future, including examples in color.

Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Checking out Monroe, Louisiana (Part 2)

KCS rail yard from Desiard Street, Monroe, Louisiana (80mm ƒ/2.8 Planar-CB lens)

Dear Readers, in the last article, I showed you the Ouachita River and the Kansas City Southern railroad bridge. Let's move east and see what else is interesting in the big metropolis of Monroe. 

New York Furniture, Desiard Street, Monroe (1/250 ƒ/11.5, yellow filter)
707 Desiard Street, Monroe (80mm Planar-CB lens, 1/250 ƒ/11.5, yellow filter)
Old City Cemetery, Monroe (80mm Planar-CB lens, green filter)

Desiard Street was once one of the prominent commercial streets passing through the city and then crossing the Ouachita River. Today, it is pretty sad, with empty lots, boarded-up buildings, and trash. The Old City Cemetery has numerous ornate tombstones of prominent citizens.  

Beth Eden MB Church, Milhaven Road, Monroe (1/250 ƒ/5.6)
Abandoned house, Milhaven Road, Monroe

Proceed west following the railroad yard, and you enter modest neighborhoods of mid-century houses. Sadly, we saw many closed or abandoned homes. 

KCS rail yard off Oak Street, view west
City of Monroe workshop, Oak Street (1/250 ƒ/11.5, 80mm Planar-CB lens, yellow filter)

Monroe has three rail yards, underscoring its importance as a rail junction city. I have not yet visited the yard south of I-20. Next trip....

120 Cotton Street, West Monroe
Cotton Street, West Monroe (orange filter)

Cross the Ouachita River to the Cotton Port Historic District of West Monroe, and you are in Antique Alley. This features an impressive collection of stores selling antiques, furniture, knickknacks, craft beer, and miscellaneous stuff designed to separate visitors from their money. The streets are busy many evenings with Open Houses, Champaign Strolls, Christmas on the River, and other events. Good for them! Come and spend money.

This ends our short trip to Monroe. We will return some day to explore some more.

All photographs are from Kodak Tri-X film exposed with my Hasselblad 501CM camera, all hand-held. I posted the pictures at 2400 pixels wide, so click any photograph to see more detail.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Checking out Monroe, Louisiana (Part 1)

Dear Readers, Happy 2022 to you all. I hope you are all prosperous, safe, and optimistic this year.

Kansas City Southern rail bridge over the Ouachita River, Monroe (Tri-X film, Hasselblad 501CM camera, 80mm ƒ/2.8 Planar-CB lens, green filter)

Monroe, formerly Fort Miro and now the seat of Ouachita Parish, is the "big city" of north central Louisiana. The family and I used to attend theater productions at the Monroe Civic Center and have flown out of MLU airport, but otherwise have not spent much time there. Readers may remember that in 2020, I followed part of historic US 80 through the northern part of the city (it was not too exciting). 

A Virginia friend asked about someplace to explore, and I suggested Monroe. We drove there on a sunny warm day and headed to the Ouachita River at the historic city core.


The railroad tracks come right through the business district and cross the Ouachita River on a beautiful old pivot bridge. Some railroad maintenance workers let us enter the railroad property and take photographs. They said the bridge still occasionally pivoted when a barge was passing on the river. The Ouachita is a Federal Navigation Project, meaning to is maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers:  

"The Ouachita-Black Rivers Navigation Project provides dependable year-round commercial navigation from the mouth of the Black River to Camden, Arkansas, a distance of approximately 330 river miles." (from the Ouachita River Valley Association

I showed my Hasselblad to one of the railroad workers, and he was fascinated to look through the waist-level finder and see that the view was reversed left to right. Maybe I made a film convert.


South Grand Street may have once been the main commercial strip paralleling the river. The area looks reasonably clean and well-maintained. Empty lots show where old commercial buildings have been demolished. But the standing buildings have businesses or occupation. 


Many of these late-1800s or early-20th century shops and buildings used cast-iron frames and supports on the facade. This was a common construction method, and you still see millions of buildings around the country with the cast iron beams. Any old-town downtown will have these buildings. The big advantage of cast iron was that the vertical supports could be much more slender than masonry supports of similar bearing capacity. 


The side of buildings that faced the railroad were typically a bit rough or industrial. You definitely see this when you take the Amtrak through the Northeast Corridor.

These photographs are from Kodak Tri-X 400 film, developed by Northeast Photographic in Bath, Maine. I exposed them at EI=320, all hand-held. The light was bright and glarey.

This ends our short tour of the riverfront region of Monroe. Standby for Part 2.

Monday, August 30, 2021

Grand Isle, Louisiana, before Hurricane Ida

Grand Isle, Louisiana (from Google maps)

We will temporarily interrupt the trek through the Kingdon of Lo (Mustang, Nepal) for a few photographs of Grand Isle, Louisiana, in a cheerful time before it was torn up and inundated by Hurricane Ida. According to the Weather Channel (Aug. 29, 2021), "Ida officially made landfall at 11:55 a.m. CDT near Port Fourchon, Louisiana, about 18 miles southwest of Grand Isle and about 60 miles south of New Orleans. Maximum sustained winds were 150 mph, making Ida a high-end Category 4." Any category 4 hurricane in the northern Gulf of Mexico is serious trouble because of the shallow continental shelf. This lets lets the winds push a surge of water ahead of the storm. Louisiana is so flat, the bayss and marshy islands are inundated. 

Grand Isle is the only inhabited barrier island along the southern Louisiana coast. The island is at the mouth of Barataria Bay, where it merges into the Gulf of Mexico. The island has been repeatedly hit by hurricanes during its era of recorded history, when storm surges rushed over the most of the island and destroyed building. I will not try to list the many storms here. 

Plantations existed on Grand Isle before the Civil War. The war effectively ended agricultural activity. Developers began to advertise the island as a resort in the 1870s, and steamship service soon brought vacationers from New Orleans. Meyer-Arendt (1985) in the Annals of Tourism Research (Vol. 12.pp.449-465) provides a readable and interesting summary of the island's development over the last two centuries. 

Grand Isle did have a short-lived gilded age. The New Orleans, Fort Jackson and Grand Isle Railroad carried sophisticated vacationers most of the way to the island. But the opulent Ocean Club hotel, built in 1891-1892, only survived one year before an immense hurricane with 175 mph winds overwashed the island and destroyed most of the buildings. The storm killed an estimated 1,600 along the Gulf Coast, and Grand Isle's gilded age came to an abrupt and terminal end. 

1953 aerial photograph of Grand Isle near Coulon Rigaud Lane (US Army Corps of Engineers Beach Erosion Board archives, Vicksburg, MS)

Grand Isle has been an erosion problem for the State of Louisiana and the US Army Corps of Engineers for decades. The Beach Erosion Board conducted one of its earliest studies of the island's erosion problem in 1937. The Corps also presented a Beach Erosion Control Study to Congress in 1955 (84/I H. Doc. 132-). The 1953 photograph above was one of the aerial photographs used for this study. Many other studies have followed. Mid-century, some agency built cross-shore groins to try to stabilize the ocean shore (see the 1953 photograph). These were rebuilt numerous times. Since then, the Corps of Engineers has built segmented detached (meaning offshore) breakwaters along the entire Gulf side of the island. They have added beach sand from offshore sand deposits numerous times. 

We do not yet know what Hurricane Ida has destroyed on Grand Isle. Late August 31, the Jefferson Parish president reported that 100 percent of the properties suffered damage. 

Long-term, the bigger issue might be relative sea level. The southern Louisiana coast suffers from the most extreme relative sea level rise in the United States (meaning the combination of water elevation rise and land sinking). Will Grand Isle be viable 10, 20, or 50 years from now?

By the way, there is a terrible 2019 movie titled Grand Isle, starring Nicholas Cage.


Morning at the Blue Dolphin Inn & Cottages is a sunny delight (in good weather).


Lunch or dinner at the Starfish Restaurant, with an old-fashioned ambience and friendly service. Chairs and tables from the 1960s? Very nice. But this building is at ground level and vulnerable. 

Cottage on Medical Lane, Grand Isle (Hasselblad 50mm ƒ/4 Distagon lens)
Cottage on Chighizola Avenue
Cottage on Nacari Lane

On any barrier island, look for the Oak forest and you know you are in the most stable part of the island, the part that has withstood erosion and serious overwashing for decades or centuries. Only a small section of Grand Isle shows this stability, and only a few of the early 20th century cottages remain. Most of the other houses are newer and raised on pilings. You also see mobile homes up on piles, many rather nasty. Even the Our Lady of the Isle Catholic Church is a modern structure up on concrete piles. 

Over the next few weeks, surveys and news reports will reveal the extent of damage from Ida. Rural Louisiana will be forgotten as the news concentrates on New Orleans, but people live and suffer in rural areas, too.

Long-term readers may remember some of my photographs of Hurricane Katrina damage in New Orleans: 
Hurricane Katrina struck exactly 16 years ago. What an amazing coincidence. And recall, the botched federal response to Katrina's damage and flooding largely destroyed President Bush's presidency. War in Iraq was another factor.