Friday, September 09, 2005

My Dear Friends,

I am writing this as a reply to the hundreds of emails that I have received from our wonderful friends from, literally, all over the world. I am so sorry that I can not respond to each of you individually and that it has taken me this long to answer your inquires as to our safety. We have only now gotten our email service back up.

My staff and I are all safe. We all have family members that were severely impacted by Katrina as you might expect, but all of our family members are now safe. Many of us have friends that have still not been located and tragically, I have heard of at least one friend that may have lost her life during the hurricane in my hometown of Port Sulphur in Plaquemines Parish. However, there is so much misinformation that I cannot be sure of the validity of that news.

I will try to explain what is going on here as best as I can. There are so many details flooding into our office and we are dealing with a lot of media inquiries. I am welcoming all media contacts because I want our message to be broadcast to as many people as possible. We are setting up a hurricane Katrina site on our web site that we will be updating as much as we can. You can help us by publicizing our web address (www.btnep.org) and inviting your network of colleagues to visit it. Anyone can contact us for credible information. We will, I assure you, continue to honor our reputation for disseminating factual information.

As you all know, the BTNEP system is comprised of 2 basins, the Terrebonne basin is our western half and the Barataria basin is our eastern half. It was the Barataria half of our system that was most impacted. The Terrebonne side certainly received severe damage, but the Barataria side, particularly along the entire eastern border was catastrophically impacted.

Grand Isle, our only populated barrier island was heavily damaged. Richard DeMay, BTNEP Senior Scientist, and I were able to use our new 4-wheeler to get to the island shortly after the passage of Katrina. We were able to get across the bridge to the island to deliver water and food to the responders and we were able to transport people back and forth across the severely damaged bridge to the island. Just this one use for the 4-wheeler justified its purchase in my mind.

As bad as the condition of Grand Isle is, the condition in Plaquemines Parish, the parish where I grew up, is worse. It was devastated. I have studied the aerial imagery taken after Katrina and I believe, at this point, that the incredible storm surge associated with Katrina was pushed from the EASTERN side of the river, then over the west Mississippi River levee into Plaquemines parish. This devastated Plaquemines, washing houses off their foundations and piling them up into heaps of ruble. I can see my neighborhood in the NOAA imagery. I missed it several times because I could not recognize any of it. That house and neighborhood survived Hurricane Betsy and Camille.

These are the images that are very hard for me to see. It is hard to see the place that I love, the place that the BTNEP was designed to preserve and restore, in this condition. It is not supposed to be like this near the end of an entire career and life spent trying to save this wonderful place. This has been a heartbreaking experience for me and for our people. But we are not going to give up. The Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program will re-focus and re-energize. We were designed to coordinate these cultural, habitat, and economic restorations activities…and we will. We are uniquely designed to handle this. We are connected to every entity here and we will utilize these special relationships for the good of our system and our people. We hope that EPA, NOAA, and other federal agencies use us and come to depend on us to connect them into the complex issues here.

I wake up at night with an image in my head that I saw in the newspaper following Katrina. The Times Picayune, a New Orleans paper had a full page picture of St. Patrick Catholic Church in Port Sulphur. The church was inundated with the storm surge. People from Port Sulphur that stayed in their homes near the church actually swam to the church to seek refuge in the choir loft. The choir loft is at least 20 feet above the ground floor. The Times Picayune photo was taken from the loft after the water went down. It is gutted. One of the church confessional boxes (admittedly, a place that was quite familiar to me…let’s just say I spent some time in there) was washed out of the church through the front doors and is now on the side of Hwy 23.

People not from here love this region because we are so different. And we are different largely because our culture has remained intact. Our people don’t leave this place. We have been here for generations. My own ancestor, Pierre Antoine St. Pe, came here in about 1780. Our connection to our wetlands is too strong for us to be content elsewhere. Our way of life was born out of these wetlands, and we have maintained that connection. These wetlands are the clothing around our communities. They protect our homes and they are symbols as well as the source of who we are.

We will get over this. One family of shrimpers that we hauled out of Grand Isle on our 4-wheeler was an inspiration to me. These people lost everything but eh clothes they were wearing and their boat. I noticed that he children (they were of adult age) began to sob as we passes the destruction of camps and homes on the side of the road. The shrimper’s wife had her arm around her niece, consoling her. And the Patriarch?, the shrimper, a man that knew nothing else but the adventurous life of a commercial shrimper was just beaming…a big old smile. And he said to me, “Hey, we’re going to get over this. We’ve been through worse times than this. <I doubted that part> We’re going to do what we always do….we’re going to help each other until we get back onto our feet. That’s what we do down here. It don’t matter who you are, we’re going to help each other until things are right again.”

Your compassion for us is evident and I deeply appreciate the good wisher you are sending our way.

If we, as a unique people, are to survive this hardship, we must restore our wetlands, our natural live oak covered ridges and our barrier islands at the same time we rebuild hurricane protection systems, roads, and homes. We can not have one with out the other. We are co-dependent. And the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program was built to be the advocate for this region. That is our message.

We will now become absolutely uncompromising advocates for the restoration strategy that we have been focused on for the last 3 years. We must begin building and using a pipeline delivery system to transport sediments from the bottom of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers to restore a foundation on which to rebuild the wetlands and ridges that we have lost. Then we can sustain these newly built habitats with water diversion from the rivers. There is really no other way to get sediments to the places we need them.

Please keep us in your prayers.

With Warm Regards and great Love to all of you,

Kerry