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Already portions of La. Highway 1 are significantly lower than they were 20 years ago, and some areas of the state are sinking at as much as 1½ inches a year, increasing the risk of flooding and throwing off the timing of evacuation plans in the case of a major storm. In fact, a recent survey of La. Highway 1 between Raceland and Grand Isle prompted Charles Challstrom, director of the National Geodetic Survey, to state in a letter to Col. Mike Brown, assistant director of the Louisiana Office of Emergency Preparedness, that "vertical control" -- the elevation of surveyors' markers in the state -- was "inaccurate and inadequate." "We can't run from the fact that the coast is sinking, so we have to figure out how to deal with its effects," said Dokka, who is in charge of the Louisiana Spatial Reference Center at LSU and is also a professor of civil and environmental engineering there. "Louisiana will have to develop plans to mitigate this subsidence and technologies to handle what's happening here long before it has to be done anywhere else. Then we can export those technologies and their spinoffs to other states and other places around the world." Some of the technology for monitoring statewide elevation change is already in place. Using computers, global positioning system satellites and fixed monitoring stations throughout the state, the LSRC is capable of measuring land movement as small as a few millimeters a year. It's on the cutting edge of geoinformatics technology, Dokka said. Besides monitoring land subsidence, the LSRC is working under the auspices of the National Geodetic Survey to reestablish the accuracy o surveyors' benchmarks in the state. Both of these undertakings go hand-in-hand with the major effort facing Louisiana right now -- arresting the loss of the state's wetlands. The marshes of coastal Louisiana, which comprise the seventh largest delta in the world, are disappearing at a rate equivalent to a 20-mile-wide corridor stretching the approximately 60 miles from Baton Rouge to Lafayette every year. With the loss of these buffer zones, flooding and storm surge from hurricanes and other large storms will increasingly put life and property at risk. On top of that, the economic and environmental importance of these wetlands extends beyond Louisiana to the country as a whole, which is why the Governor's Office has initiated the "America's Wetlands" campaign to raise awareness of the problem throughout the United States. "Knowing where and how fast the land is sinking is key to doing anything about it," Dokka said. "Using the tools available with LSRC, we'll know where to focus our efforts. You can't do anything without a place to start. Remember that it's not just the marshes that are sinking, it's also the surrounding land where people live." # # # |
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