Can engineering save Louisiana?s coastline" Down at the southern tip of Louisiana, on a barrier island called Grand Isle, the stilts holding up the houses are getting taller. There are about 20 feet of air between the ground and the top of the pilings holding up a new two-story house on the island?s main drag, running parallel to the Gulf of Mexico. Its neighbors, a few hundred single-family homes and weekend getaways with house names on wooden signs, are almost all raised up off the ground. C?est La Vie is propped about 8 feet up. The Salty Oyster: 12 feet. Riptide: about 15. A nameless rectangular bunker made entirely of cast concrete is 10 feet up on top of a grid of concrete columns and a cinderblock ground floor. Down the road, another set of 10-foot pilings is all that?s left.
Building at any height on Grand Isle is a bold proposition. Seven miles long, a mile across at its widest point and just a few feet above sea level, it?s a tall wave away from disappearing into the Gulf. With a steady onslaught of hurricanes, sea-level rise, and land subsidence, the island?s very existence is improbable. And yet remarkable efforts have been made to preserve this small strip of land, including the dredging and piping of sediment from the Mississippi River to build back its southern shore and replanting the disappearing marsh to its north.
Saving the island is partly about saving the homes of roughly 1,100 full-time residents and the estimated 20,000 who come to Grand...