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Rob Zaleski: UW team aims to aid New Orleans bayou

Rob Zaleski  —  2/01/2008 4:13 pm

Kate Tillery Danzer had been bracing for the worst.

She had seen TV footage in August 2005 of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. She read numerous accounts of the horrifying aftermath and the shockingly inept response of FEMA and other government agencies.

And she had talked to her colleagues on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Water Resources Management team who'd already begun work on a project to determine the feasibility of restoring Bayou Bienvenue, a cypress swamp next to the poor Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, which had been particularly hard hit.

But when the 33-year-old UW grad student was given a tour of the neighborhood upon arriving in New Orleans last June -- nearly two years after the worst natural disaster in U.S. history -- she was shaken to the core.

"It was just so heartbreaking," says Tillery Danzer, who two years earlier had worked on water and sanitation issues as a Fulbright researcher in Indonesia. "The area near where a levee had broke looked like a war zone."

Natalie Hunt, another member of the UW team -- which is part of the UW's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies program -- had a similar reaction upon her arrival.

Although most of the debris and battered vehicles had finally been cleared away, Hunt says she was shocked by "all the basic infrastructural things that hadn't been repaired. I mean, you still see a lot of handmade street signs and stoplights that aren't in operation."

The Lower Ninth Ward, which includes the Holy Cross neighborhood, is slowly coming back to life, thanks largely to the more than 100,000 volunteers from all over the country who have provided everything from meals to medical care to construction help. (A major player in the rehabilitation effort is actor Brad Pitt, whose "Make It Right" project is rebuilding 150 homes.)

But there are those who still say it's foolhardy to rebuild low-lying parts of New Orleans that will forever be susceptible to tropical storms.

Herb Wang, a UW-Madison geology/geophysics professor and the adviser for the "Bring Back the Bayou" project, admits there's some validity to the argument.

"There's a rational side of me that says living in a place that's 8 to 11 feet below sea level is not wise," he says. "But you know what? I can point to lots of places in this country where it's not wise to live. There are fires in San Diego. There is drought in Las Vegas. The fact is, a lot of our built environments require fairly large-scale protection."

Could it be, he muses, that many people oppose rebuilding the Lower Ninth Ward because it's economically depressed and predominantly African-American? Would they feel differently if it were a white, upscale neighborhood and/or a tourist magnet?

Maitri Venkat-Ramani, who lives in New Orleans and is president of the New Orleans chapter of the UW Alumni Association, says people need to understand that New Orleans did not flood because it is below sea level.

Geographically, New Orleans is a "bowl," parts of which are below sea level and parts of which are not, she notes.

When Katrina hit, "large portions of the city flooded because the federal levees broke," says Venkat-Ramani, who is a geophysicist for Shell Oil Co. and has written about the UW project on her blog (vatul.net/blog). "They stayed flooded because water remained in the bowl and our pumping stations failed at a crucial time."

Had the levees and pumping stations done their jobs, she says, "Katrina would have blown by to the east and New Orleans would be just fine today."

Inspired to act

Whatever the case, Wang acknowledges that even some UW officials questioned whether the water resources management team should have accepted the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association's invitation to try to restore the bayou -- although most of the concerns, he says, "had to do with logistics, things like travel costs and funding."

The 10-member team addressed those concerns, Wang says, by securing a two-year $120,000 grant from the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis and $5,000 from the Sierra Club of Louisiana.

There is, Wang suggests, another side to the debate that one can't appreciate unless they've actually spent time in the Lower Ninth Ward: the passion of its residents and their deep, historical connection to the area.

Indeed, to attend a Holy Cross Neighborhood Association meeting "is to see democracy at work," he says. "And to hear these people talk about the problems they face is not just educational it's, frankly, inspiring."

Tillery Danzer says she's embarrassed to admit it, but she had "stereotypical ideas" about the Lower Ninth Ward before seeing the neighborhood, based on things she had read.

"I was expecting a bunch of big apartment complexes, sort of Cabrini-Greenesque," she says, referring to the notorious public housing project on Chicago's south side, much of which has been razed in the last decade.

Instead, she discovered a close-knit neighborhood of small, historic homes that have been passed down from one family to the next over the last half-century -- and a spirit unlike anything she'd encountered before.

"It was more like a small town," she says. "I did not expect to fall in love with the Lower Ninth Ward, I did not expect to want to go back.

"I was just so enamored with this community and the sense of place that's there."

Tillery Danzer says she and other members of her team were completely won over by the residents when they first met to discuss the project at a neighborhood crab boil.

She learned, among other things, that "getting together over food is such an important part of that culture. It's a culture where things happen on the front porch. And it's a culture where you make a deal over tea and crab legs -- not in the boardroom."

Can bayou be restored?

In the 30 months since Katrina, there have been dozens of media accounts of the Lower Ninth Ward and its struggles, but Tillery Danzer says a recent story in The Nation seemed to sum it up best.

"If you measured the Lower Ninth Ward by will, solidarity and dedication, both from residents and far-flung volunteers and nonprofts, it would be among the best neighborhoods in the United States," the story said. "If you measured it by infrastructure and probabilities, it looks pretty grim ... Its uncertain fate has come to be an indicator for the future of New Orleans and the fate of its African-American majority."

The goal of the UW's project, which is expected to last several years, is to figure out what caused Bayou Bienvenue's wetland and cypress forest -- which once protected the Lower Ninth Ward from storm surges -- to disappear, beginning in the 1980s. And, along with that, whether it can and should be restored.

"And if it can't be restored, what are the alternatives?" Danzer says.

The UW team is also working with the University of Colorado's landscape architecture department and the Sierra Club to develop a community nature preserve and environmental learning center.

Hunt says the team -- which will present its findings to the neighborhood this spring -- has concluded there were a complex set of factors that led to the bayou's decline. Chief among those was the construction of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal (known as MR-GO) in the early 1960s, which created a shortcut for shipping traffic, but also destroyed thousands of acres of wetlands, boosted the amount of salt water entering the swamp and left the Lower Ninth Ward vulnerable to storm surges.

Other possible factors include an old landfill east of the bayou and a nearby sewerage treatment plant built in the 1970s, she says. (The New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board is also exploring ways to help restore the cypress swamp.)

Hunt says she personally believes it is feasible to restore the bayou -- at least the 440-acre triangular segment that the UW is focusing on. One option, she says, might be to replace the cypress trees with mangrove trees, which are far more resistant to salt water.

But she adds, "There are a lot of hurdles -- legal hurdles, infrastructure hurdles and political hurdles as well."

Still, "just meeting these people and hearing their stories prohibits you from just writing off the restoration of this place. Or to say, 'Oh, they're below sea level, it's hopeless,' " she says.

In the end, it could be that the Lower Ninth Ward's fate -- and that of New Orleans -- will depend to a great extent on the national media, Hunt suggests.

"The media can't just forget New Orleans, because it's still in need of help. I mean, it's easy for the rest of the country to lose sight of that and assume that everything is fine now," she says. "Well, everything is not fine."

Katrina may be old news, Hunt says, but New Orleans' future is very much in doubt.

rzaleski@madison.com

Rob Zaleski  —  2/01/2008 4:13 pm