Tech

The Marine Lab in the Path of Climate Change’s Fury?


This story was originally Appears on Hakai Magazine and is part of Climate table cooperation.

When the storm first gathered strength in the Gulf of Mexico, its future path was indecipherable. However, its damage potential was obvious. Warm water and dense, humid air – the recipe for a likely historic storm. On Thursday, August 26, 2021, just hours after the system was classified as a tropical depression, the governor of Louisiana declared a state of emergency: All residents along the state’s coastline need to prepare. responding to a major storm.

Louisiana is protected by a series of zigzag dikes along the coast—walls of earth that block storm surges from reaching the state’s larger towns and villages. The floodgates are closed so that local tributaries do not overflow due to high tides. However, out of necessity, the DeFelice Maritime Center stayed out of this defense.

The building—a 7,000-square-foot concrete fortress rising in the middle of Louisiana’s marshlands—is one of the state’s premier marine laboratories: a laboratory and classroom complex containing $7 million in equipment. equipment and other assets. Sixty staff members support the center’s eight faculty scientists, who conduct research into the biology, ecology, chemistry, and geology of the state’s coastal environment. The building is located just north of Cocodrie, a village of shrimp, crab and weekend catchers near the mouth of Bayou Petit Caillou, on a strip of land that dangles like a loose thread into Terrebonne Bay.

Even before the governor declared a state of emergency, the storm threat had set off a constant string of preparations at the maritime hub. Staff relocated boats, forklifts and tractors to Houma, a city on slightly higher ground less than 50 kilometers to the north. Workers dropped sandbags on the foot of the door on the ground floor of the marine center, hoping to prevent the force of the incoming waves from ripping the door off its hinges. They forced 50,000-litre tanks, filled with seawater for research purposes, to be kept underneath the building. As the building’s new storm shutters were yet to be completed, the contractors placed wooden panels covering the unprotected windows. Scientists bring their most expensive equipment—mobile analyzers used to measure marsh gas flows, flowmeters, laboratory computers—to the center of the building, away from the Windows. Then they covered everything with thick plastic sheets for extra protection in case the roof leaked.

By early Friday afternoon—two days before the storm, now named Ida, was predicted to make landfall—the few remaining employees had returned to their homes. Some crouched, not wanting to leave the shore; others packed up and joined the line of cars on Louisiana’s highways, searching for motel rooms and guest bedrooms further away from the storm.

Normally, wherever scientists take refuge, they can measure conditions in Cocodrie by manipulating the marine center’s weather cameras. But by 2 p.m. Sunday, August 29, just as the storm made landfall, the maritime center lost power. The cameras were dark. An anxious day passed before anyone could head south to assess the damage. Everyone knew it would be grim: Ida made landfall in a Category 4 hurricane that, by official definition, is capable of causing catastrophic damage. (If winds were only a few kilometers faster, the storm would become “Cat 5,” the highest possible classification.)

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