This is Climate Expert
Dr. Heidi Cullen of The Weather Channel...
where we are dedicated to helping you
understand the facts about climate change.
Our Wetlands play a criticalrole in the health of Earth's ecosystem-
and they are indanger.
That's why The Weather Channel
is proud to present this important film.
For thousands of years, each spring
the Mississippi River overflowed its banks as it neared the sea.
Muddy water left layer upon layer of soil.
Plants took root.
Three hundred years ago,
French traders founded a city
on a site sheltered from deadly hurricanes
by a thousand square miles of protective wetlands.
New Orleans, "Queen of the River,"
rose to the challenge of its soggy location
to become a city whose character and soul is unique in the world.
With music as its beating heart,
New Orleans stood ready to shake your blues,
rock your soul, or jazz up your romance.
From a local orphanage,
Louis Armstrong trumpeted a brand new kind of music to the world:
jazz.
Time and again, New Orleans has been ravaged by flood and fire.
Each time the city danced back to the beat of its musicians.
Musicians like 14-year-old fiddle prodigy Amanda Shaw,
Here with her mom, and her mentor, accordionist Chubby Carrier.
When I was Four, I began playing the violin.
When I was Nine,
Chubby helped me record my first album.
I have a little brother, but...
Chubby's been like having a big brother, too.
At the piano is Allen Toussaint,
the famous New Orleans' music producer.
We're joining with othermusicians to get the word out
about one of America's biggest environmental problems
the vanishing of our wetlands.
All right, we are ready Amanda...
Tab Benoit is the blues man in our group.
Tab's a Cajun who actually lives in the wetlands.
He's already devoted several albums to saving them.
Have you ever loved a place so much
that you'd dedicate your life to saving it?
Ya know, I believe that my highest calling is to be the steward
of my environment.
My first job was as a pilot.
From up here, the awful truth hits you
these wetlands are disappearing right before our eyes.
That island there, used to be a sugar plantation a mile wide!
Erosion caused by wind and waves has reduced it to just a sliver.
Growing up here, I hardly noticed the erosion.
But over the years we had to keep moving our rope swings back
as the whole woods washed away.
The wetlands we've lost just since my parents were born
is bigger than the whole state of Delaware.
Ya see, coastal erosion in Louisiana picks everyone's pocket.
Each bite of seafood that seems overpriced,
that's because the wetland spawning grounds are gone.
Well, basically what went wrong is that in the nineteen-thirties
well-meaning engineers built levees walls, so to speak...
along the banks of the Mississippi rlver
to protect farms from the yearly floods.
Those annual floods deposited the soil that built the wetlands.
Now with those levees
that soil gets flushed straight down into the ocean.
All that brown in the ocean is soil,
soil that could be rebuilding the wetlands the way it used to,
before we interfered with Mother Nature.
And to make matter worse
we also built canals which became highways for sea water.
Salt water kills the fresh water marsh grass,
Kills the trees in the swamp.
This whole forest is dead.
This one has more land.
See how there's so much more land than this one.
And this was in 1945 and this one is now.
My grandpa is helping with my science project,
...that means our wetlands are disappearing.
but I wanted to know,
what impact hurricanes had had
before much of the wetlands had washed away.
So I visited Tab's friend Leslie Griffith
who went through a hurricane fifty years ago.
The story that I remember from Hurricane Audrey
was like a picture show in my mind.
Leslie, wake up!
My house just collapsed.
Somebody help me!
Mama! Leslie!
You know I can still picture that. Mother was holding onto that tree.
At that time I was kind of looking down and my grandfather
just kind of slumped over for a minute,
And all of a sudden,
he just 'let it go'...
he had a heart attack...
and let it go.
That was my first experience with death.
I can't even imagine losing my grandpa that way.
Hurricane Audrey and all hurricanes form out over the ocean
where warm sea water provides the fuel
that drives the storm's destructive fury.
When a hurricane moves over land,
it begins to die without its warm ocean-water fuel.
So, even the low-lying wetlands that surround New Orleans
act like a speed-bump.
Every three miles of wetlands
reduces the height of a hurricane's storm surge by one foot.
Hurricane Audrey was bad,
but it'd hit far stronger if it came today
because of the protection we've lost in the 50 years.
Got an old Gibson (guitar) from the '40s.
It's that porch sound.
Got to roll with it.
Cajuns are famous for good music, good food and good times.
We tell good stories too.
About hurricanes.
Just think if you'd be on a little shrimp boat,
three miles from the Gulf of Mexico.
The waves were high, the winds were high...-
Oh, look out!
Anybody with a pet alligator, you know he can spin a tale.
You know a man with a pet alligator can spin a tale.
I knew Tab would eventually tell me what I needed for my report,
so this kind of counted as... homework.
This is flotant... floating marsh.
A bull gator's mating call is so deep you feel it
even more than hear it.
A gator has a ton-and-a-half of force when he chomps down,
the strongest bite in the animal world.
See the alligator nest?
Oh, wow!
Look at her.
She's protecting 50 or 60 eggs by laying on her nest.
When I was young,
alligators were an endangered species.
I hardly ever saw one down here.
But laws and good stewardship of their habitat
turned that around.
Now they're plentiful.
I'm gonna sing this part here, and you're sing that right here. Okay?
Let's make alligators listen.
They'll be, be dancing behind us.
I understood what Tab wanted me to learn.
Just as we saved the gators, we can save these wetlands...
our natural "speed-bump" for hurricanes.
That's good... the alligator song.
But I couldn't help think,
what'll happen if the big one comes before we're ready?
In summer, hot winds whip across Africa's Sahara desert
into the Atlantic Ocean.
These winds ignite with ocean heat sending warm, moist air
up toward the colder atmosphere.
The Earth's rotation gives these winds a twist.
August, people prepared for a hurricane called Katrina
as she headed towards Florida.
And in New Orleans,
music producer Allen Toussaint continued writing songs.
Katrina is now moving across Florida,
weakening as it passes over the Everglades.
When it enters the Gulf of Mexico,
As Katrina moved back over open water,
the storm drew new strength from an abnormally warm stream of water
called the "loop current".
Now, this year the loop current is two degrees warmer than normal.
And with much of its wetlands buffer washed away,
New Orleans was considerably more vulnerable
than it had been earlier in its history.
Let's take a look now where Hurricane Katrina is at this very moment.
Katrina is two days away.
The storm is huge.
It's a deadly Category Five hurricane.
And it's heading right towards New Orleans.
Sunday morning, with 24 hours to go,
authorities called for the complete evacuation
of New Orleans... a first for the city.
At the city's Aquarium,
the staff delt with their own evacuation problems.
We watched the news, got scared, and evacuated.
All of us, including 2 dogs, 8 cats,
and my little brother.
We couldn't reach my grandparents.
And because of the traffic and road closures
we couldn't go look for them.
And the storm continues to strengthen.
We will not be sticking around here.
It's too dangerous.
By Sunday night,
Katrina had grown into probably the widest hurricane of its strength
ever recorded... 200 miles wide.
Sunday night found Tab Benoit on tour,
far away from home.
Ahh, if I seem a little emotional tonight, or a little distant,
that's because, you know,
my heart's back in Louisiana right now
where a hurricane's that's coming down on us as a Category 4,
and it's heading right for my house,
so I'm a little worried about that.
But I'd like to play a little music to get through it,
so ya all help me out here.
Communication went dead.
With no help on the way, people rescued each other.
Here, in downtown New Orleans
authorities are worried about the Superdome roof
where 10,000 people are huddled inside for shelter.
There's a lot of wind damage, a lot of storm surge, which potentially
could push Lake Ponchartrain over its levees
and then spill into New Orleans.
That's still the greatest fear of the authorities now...
My dad still couldn't get through to my Grandparents
on the phone.
We know there is going to be flooding,
we just don't know how much.
I stayed up all night,
worried about grandpa and grandma.
The eye of Hurricane Katrina missed New Orleans,
but without enough wetlands to absorb it,
the massive storm surge tore through the floodwalls.
The city began to fill with water.
Electricity went out,
communications broke down.
Most residents had evacuated,
but tens of thousands who remained
were trapped by rising water.
In the middle of the worst flood in American history...
...uncontrolled fires became a major problem.
As Katrina moved inland,
it left behind the costliest natural disaster in U.S. History.
Allen and Chubby were safe,
but Amanda Shaw returned from evacuation
to find her world turned upside down.
I'm going to figure out like where I'm going to go to school
because my school it was on the levee that broke.
It's gone. It completely flooded out.
My heart just fell.
I didn't realize that it was going to be as bad as it was.
Our house was wiped out by falling trees.
My grandparents did not evacuate,
and when the levee broke, they were trapped.
We don't know if they got saved or not.
This whole time it's been really, really tough
because I'm really close to my grandparents.
We all are. It's just...
Bit by bit, too late for some, a massive rescue was mobilized.
Thousands of people were airlifted to safety.
Most saved nothing but the clothes they were wearing.
The levee breaks were repaired
so that the city could be slowly pumped dry.
I was on the roof for three days, me and my children.
It was just horrible on the roof.
The snakes that came on the roof,
and one of my daughters just said...
...this... all we have and if this
is what we have to survive and they couldn't have our roof,
so she actually fought snakes off.
The flood victims suffered emotional devastation
that will take years to heal.
One of my daughters is an expert swimmer,
and right now, she won't even take a bath by herself.
It took two weeks before I could find out
what happened to my house in the bayou.
I'd always said
I wish something would come along to wake up the world
about the importance of our wetlands.
Careful what you wish for.
My grandparents house was flooded under 8 feet of water.
We had no water and food.
We had nothing.
They were stranded and terrified.
Had two ways, stay here, die here or get out from here.
Finally they got rescued off their roof by regular people,
good Samaritans with their own boat,
helping anybody they could.
Oh, my god.
This is like an angel coming to see us.
A month after his rescue,
we met my Grandpa at what was left of his house.
Hey, Amanda! How are you doing?
The one good part of this big awful disaster
is that it reminds me how precious my family is.
From the air, I can notice where Katrina washed away islands
and marsh land that I've know since I was a kid,
and scientists have told me that thousands of baby birds
and their rookeries have been totally wiped out.
Once, alligators were anendangered species,
and we turnedthat around.
We can do the same for these wetlands.
We already know how.
We'll have to plant thousands of acres of mangrove
and other soil retaining plants.
Some places, it'll take stone walls.
Other spots,rebuilding with sand...
sometimes again and again.
And, most importantly,
engineers can use flood gates like this one,
and special pipelines,
and other innovative solutions to allow the muddy Mississippi
to once more naturally replenish the wetlands.
And as the huge cost of Katrina shows us,
good stewardship of the environment
is good economics, too.
I asked Tab if we could go check on a friend.
Oh, there she is.
Oh, but I only see one baby.
Is that all there is?
Nature can be cruel.
We sure saw that.
But she can be generous too.
One baby left, and so renewal begins.
Rebuilding New Orleans will take hard work
and imagination, but it is possible.
It will demand sacrifices.
Some long-time residents must move to higher ground.
It's very, very hard to see your house go so fast.
I raised my two kids here.
I have grand kids, you know.
I have to make a new life and start over.
This is Marva Wright, queen of gospel.
What began months ago
as a musical effort to save the wetlands,
now has a new meaning to Chubby and me.
Now our message isn't just about saving,
it's about rebuilding.
We musicians are bound and determined to do our part.
With our melodies, our voices, and with our hearts.
We all must be stewards of the places we love so much.
Only then will our grandchildren and their grandchildren,
continue to cook the feasts,
tell the tales, and sing the songs...
...about magical places where land and water live as one.