Louisiana village will not be moved despite rising sea and hurricanes

By Cain Burdeau
4:00 AM Wednesday Jan 6, 2010 …Bourg is a tidy Cajun bayou town a few kilometres north of Dardar’s hurricane-smashed Indian village, in the marsh to which holdout families are being urged to move by a tribal chief, scientists and public officials. Why? Because life on this spit of soggy land 10km from the Gulf of Mexico soon may be impossible for the interrelated families with French, Choctaw, Houma, Biloxi and Chitimacha bloodlines that go back 170 years, to when a Frenchman came here with his Choctaw wife and named the island after his father, Jean Charles. The road to the island is caving in. Hurricanes are flooding homes more often. The Gulf gets closer every year. Isle de Jean Charles is at risk of disappearing under the Gulf of Mexico. …An end-of-the-world nausea sets in on the narrow road that rolls across open water toward Isle de Jean Charles. A crooked yellow sign warns: “Water On Road”. When high tides and a stiff southern wind combine, the road is slick with water. Half the road caved in after last year’s hurricane season. Half the houses are empty shells, blown apart by hurricanes. Most of the others are raised high on pilings, not for the view, but to keep sofas, beds and Grandma’s photos out of the Gulf’s regular inundations. The church is gone, the store is gone, most of the children too. The islanders are living the doomsday scenario that many researchers say awaits Miami, Houston, Savannah, New York, and other cities that have a rising sea at the doorstep. The village sits outside the main levee systems of south Louisiana, and in the middle of some of the fastest eroding wetlands in the world. For the past 80 years, oil drilling, logging and the Army Corps of Engineers’ levee building on the Mississippi River have doomed the island. The knockout is the combination of sea level rise and intense hurricanes. …