His words resonate today like an accurate premonition.
“A lot of things happen to us. Every four or five years we suffer a disaster. When it happens they ask us why we don't leave. “This is our land and we will remain here until the Gulf of Mexico swallows us.”
This is what historian James Madere whispered, like a moan from the soul, in a conversation in November 2016.
In addition to being a local chronicler, Madere advised the Plaquemines City Council, a Louisiana entity to which Venice belongs, a town of about 200 residents and a large floating population, the last community south of the Mississippi. The end of the world, according to the nickname given to this place where such opposite businesses as fishing and the exploitation of oil wells and refineries coexist that darken the blue of the sky.
This time, seven years later, the threat is very serious. The Mississippi is the river that defines the idiosyncrasy of the United States, its backbone: between its bed and its tributaries it nourishes 31 states. It is the river of Mark Twain, of tourists, of adventurers, of slaves and slavers, of pirates, gamblers, criminals, fugitives – “you should never have crossed the Mississippi” –, of missionaries or painters. That and so much more. It is the river of ordinary people and extraordinary existences. It is the river of life for millions of Americans.
“It is impossible to imagine American history without the Mississippi,” writes Paul Schneider in Old man river, the Mississippi river in North America history. “The history of the river is our history,” he emphasizes.
But this is a new chapter that Scheider did not address in his work dated 1999. Today, the climate emergency begins to make Madere's prediction a reality, “until the Gulf of Mexico swallows us.”
For months, residents of several towns have had to drink bottled water due to the danger of resorting to the Mississippi supply. Even after the restriction was lifted on the 18th, the advice was to boil the water. The combination of extreme drought in the Midwest and rising sea levels has caused a wedge of salt water of unprecedented density to rise upstream.
Another factor is the dredging of the southern part of the river, which is often done by the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate the navigation of large freighters that serve vital ports in Louisiana, very important to the national economy.
Like a fish biting its tail, and they know a lot about this in Venice, the fight against the desalination of drinking water caused a high level of contamination due to the use of chemical disinfectants.
Earlier this month, the intakes of several cities en route north, such as Boothville, Port Sulfur and Pointe, were flooded by the salty liquid that advances its colonization. The authorities of Plaquemines, the municipality most affected by its proximity to the Gulf, had to adopt a series of measures to provide drinking water to its residents. In addition to providing bottles, another resource consisted of using ships with containers of fresh water to dilute it in salt water before it entered the network for human consumption.
The forecasts earlier this fall were alarming. Salt water was expected to reach New Orleans in late October. Neighbors collected bottles and urgent preparations were made, such as working on the construction of an emergency pipeline at a cost of 250 million dollars.
Those responsible for the service in the parish (equivalent to counties in other states) of Jefferson, near the jazz capital, began laying flexible pipes, similar to giant fire hoses, with the aim of channeling water extracted further north in the Mississippi and counteract the salt content.
The update of the forecasts reduced the threat or moved it a few months. The river's flow improved because of recent rains in Louisiana and because the Corps of Engineers built something similar to an underwater dam in Plaquemines to prevent the advance of salt water. This is the fifth time in recent decades that this patch has been resorted to. But it had never occurred in two consecutive years and with the current strength.
This is what experts described as bread for today, hunger for tomorrow. They insisted that this year's salty intrusion is a wake-up call, since it is something that is becoming more and more frequent and is expected to be repeated more and more and with greater expansion.
Twain confessed that he always wanted to be a sailor on a steamboat on the Mississippi. Now perhaps he would think it was better to go with the first circus that came to his town, Hannibal (Missouri).
