For our last day in New Orleans we headed down to the coast!
Our first mission was to see a small neighborhood called “New Isle” outside of Houma. New Isle is where the people from Isle de Jean Charles have been “resettled” after a 20 year battle to find support and funding. As we learned the other day, Isle de Jean Charles was a small community of about 50 families who are on the frontlines of climate change and a long history of environmental damage caused by the actions of the oil and gas industry. As their island became permanently flooded, members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe applied for federal funding from HUD to resettle the entire community further inland. Last year people were able to begin to move into their new houses. We drove through the neighborhood and observed that although the houses looked to be physically safer from flooding, the impacts to the community’s culture and way of life appeared to be extreme.
Next we drove down to Isle de Jean Charles. There is one road that can take you to the island and we were lucky to hit it at low tide so it was passable. On the island we saw many decaying houses and some properties where you could only tell there had been a house because of an old mailbox still out front. This community has long considered themselves America’s first Climate Refugees. Seeing the already severe impacts of climate change in this part of the country provides critical perspective on the immediacy and scale of the climate crisis.
Our next stop was Port Fourchon, one of the most critical ports in the entire country. It was also interesting to see the investment in local infrastructure because of the economic importance of the port, as compared to the investment in infrastructure for the surrounding communities.
Our final stop of the day was just down the road in Grand Isle. This was also the area where Hurricane Ida made landfall in 2021. Three years later there was still extensive damage. Many roofs still have blue tarps, some homes are boarded up. Some homes have been knocked down and are awaiting rebuilding, but many seem to have been untouched since the hurricane.
We got some po-boy’s for lunch and then headed to the beach. In the distance you could see a number of oil rigs off-shore, behind us, newly roofed houses. Most notably was the temperature of the water. Throughout the trip we kept being alerted to the alarming hurricane season forecast. Feeling the water in the Gulf of Mexico helped us understand why – the water is VERY warm. Warm water is hurricane fuel, so although swimming was fun, we were also worried about what the next few months may bring.
