It's morbidly painful to see ecological disaster strike at southern Louisiana-again. At risk now are the wetlands-the bayous.
The bayou is French for slow-moving waterway. In Louisiana it is an offshoot of the Mississippi River that forms a delta at the river's mouth.
It took a thousand years of annual spring flooding for the silt and sediments to develop this region. But it's taken only the past 60 years to endanger it and the oil and gas industry is at the center of this destruction.
But the threat to the bayous didn't happen last month with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig.
Oil rigs began to appear in the brackish coastal areas of the Gulf in the early 1930s when the Texas Company (Texaco) developed the first mobile steel barges for drilling. After World War II, other companies began to build fixed off-shore platforms near southern Louisiana. Today the Gulf hosts about 4,000 platforms.
Since 1950, an 8,000-mile system of canals has been constructed in the bayous- with channels 15 to 25-feet wide and six to seven-feet deep-to accommodate the transport of oil-related equipment.
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