Condo & Casino City Taking Shape On MS Gulf Coast - At Exact Spot Of Katrina's Landfall - CSM

Bayou Caddy, Miss. - If America learned one thing from hurricane Katrina, hydrologists argue, it should be this: Don't fill in tideland marshes and build on them. Such human activity, they insist, diminishes the marshes' ability to absorb some of the wallop of storms as they strike coastal communities.

Here on the westernmost reaches of Mississippi's marshes - the very place where Katrina rushed ashore on its path to becoming one of the worst natural disasters in US history - that lesson is being tested, with broad implications for US taxpayers who pay most of the bills for storm repairs.

Bob Metz, a crab dealer who plies the tidelands of Bayou Caddy, has only to look out from his boathouse to see, in the distance, the future: the new Silver Slipper Casino, its bright sign twinkling beneath a dark cumulous cloud stack. To Mr. Metz, plans to augment the casino with a new condo city built on top of a tidal marsh is the prototype of a boondoggle waiting for a bailout. But local and state governments so far are backing the plan, and the US Army Corps of Engineers is considering a permit application to fill the spongy ground so the development will have firm footing. If approved, the permit would, quite literally, lay the groundwork for a project that could create the fourth-largest city on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. "The big guys get what they want; that's the lesson I take from this," says Metz.

Another lesson might be that the dream of living on the ocean's edge dies hard. Some $80 billion in damages from Katrina apparently have not dampened it, nor have scientists' warnings that a $500 billion storm is possible in the US by 2020 and that the sea level may rise as much as three feet in the next century. So long as people gravitate to coastal living, political and economic pressures to allow it will rub up hard against the cautionary notes of scientists and environmentalists.

EDIT

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0521/p01s02-usgn.html

insanity is normal, pretty much.

The Army corp. has been doing nutty things like this for over 100 years..

Seriously, I so recommend this book:
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.
"Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself."




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