Storms, rising seas and salty drinking water threaten Lower Louisiana

First, the flowers and vegetables in Cherie Pete’s backyard in Venice, La., began to die. Then she had to eliminate sweet tea from the menu at her roadside snack bar, while salty water flowed from her taps.

“There is no way I can offer this to my customers,” said Ms. Pete, 59. “I don’t make people sick.”

All summer and fall in Louisiana, people in Plaquemines Parish, a swampy strip of land southeast of New Orleans, battled salty showers and avoided drinking from the tap. Their water comes from the Mississippi River, which runs through the parish like a central nerve.

But this year, drought in the Midwest has undermined the thousands of tributaries that supply the Mississippi, weakening the river and allowing a patch of saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico to creep dozens of miles upstream.

“You could taste the salt,” said Mary LeFort, 62, of Boothville, which borders Venice. ‘And then they put so much bleach or chlorine in it that you could smell it so strongly. Sometimes it is so strong that it wants to burn your eyes.”

People in Plaquemines had been suffering for months when the situation became even more urgent: forecasts showed that salt could reach treatment plants in New Orleans by the end of fall, contaminating hundreds of thousands of people’s drinking water and potentially hazardous materials, including lead, could leak. , from the city’s antiquated pipes.

The state requested federal assistance in September, President Biden approved an emergency declaration as city officials rolled out an ambitious plan to move water upstream — a project with a potential price tag of a quarter of a billion dollars.

The crisis highlighted growing concern among communities across America, especially in the South, where extreme weather events, exacerbated by climate change, have emerged as a threat to safe drinking water.

Last year, a flash flood destroyed a water plant in Jackson, Miss., that serves 150,000 people. That came just weeks after deadly floods ravaged eastern Kentucky, bursting water pipes as raging rivers and streams swept away entire neighborhoods. Wildfires in New Mexico, summer heat in Texas and a western megadrought have all threatened people’s drinking water in recent years.

Salt water from rising seas, a growing threat to freshwater worldwide, has ravaged southeastern Louisiana before. But this was the second year in a row that the region has suffered a drinking water crisis, and experts predict that breaches will become more frequent as climate change continues to cause shifts in rainfall in the Midwest.

The trade adds another complication. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been dredging parts of the Mississippi for decades to accommodate its ever-growing cargo ships. known for a long time those are efforts could make saltwater intrusions more likely.

Since 1988, the Army Corps has used sills, or underwater dikes, to hold back the salt, drawing from the same fund as the dredging project. And as the wedge approached New Orleans this year, the Army Corps fortified a sill about twenty miles southeast of the city.

It helped, as did some rainfall in the river’s tributaries. By November, the threat to the city had largely subsided, although it provided a stark reminder of climate vulnerabilities.

But the reprieve for New Orleans meant little to those living south of the sill.

The region experienced an epidemic of broken boilers and rusted dishwashers. Residents worried about smelly taps and strange rashes, and they rushed to the fire station every time local officials delivered cases of bottled water — which they used to rinse their hair, feed their pets and make their coffee and sweet tea.

The corps shipped fresh water to treatment plants in the lower Plaquemines, and parish officials used booster pumps to bring water upstream. In mid-October, they told residents that the water was finally safe. But that did little to allay concerns.

“I still don’t trust it,” Ms. LeFort said. “I’m not going to drink it.”

In a parish ravaged by disasters—hurricanes Katrina, Ike, Isaac and Ida over the past two decades, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010—clean water is especially precious. Ironton residents can remember fighting for access to it. The predominantly black community was not connected to running water until 1980.

Wilkie Declouet, 59, remembers that he and his neighbors used rainwater and water tanks to survive. This year he became concerned when salt water crept upriver under the passing ships he could see from his porch.

Ironton’s water is supplied upstream, and like New Orleans, the salt hasn’t reached it this fall. But residents say they still avoid drinking the water after decades of neglect. Mr Delouet buys dozens of bottles of water every week.

“With the environmental issues changing around us,” he said, “we don’t know how long we’ll be here.”

New Orleans could also be vulnerable again if the drought returns, allowing salt water to advance further. “It’s definitely going to be a recurring problem,” said Joshua Lewis, research director of Tulane University’s ByWater Institute.

However, city officials have no immediate plans to build the pipeline they considered in September. Instead, they’re counting on upgrades to municipal water treatment plants so they can handle additional salinity — a solution that is still in the planning stages and would take years to complete.

“Funding is going to be a big challenge,” said Ghassan Korban, executive director of the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, adding that the cost of the upgrades could be about $200 million. “But we trust that we are now receiving enough attention so that we can receive support.”

In Plaquemines parishHowever, the residents feel abandoned. Gaynel Baham, pastor of Trinity Christian Community Church in Buras, helped distribute extra water to residents this summer, including from a large tank installed on the church grounds.

She is determined to stay, but knows some of her neighbors are tired of the setbacks.

“This will cause people to leave,” Ms. Baham said. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”