HOLLY BEACH, LOUISIANA WAS never much to look at, but it sure had soul. The Gulf's seething, muddy waters teemed with shrimp and crab. The town was home to maybe 100 permanent residents, mostly Cajuns in rubber fishing boots. The food was cheap and superb: dirty rice, sausage, oysters, and pepper sauce by the quart.
Then Rita thundered ashore and demolished everything mankind had built upon the sand.
It's been a year since the hurricane, time enough to fret about the next set of storms. No one's worrying in Holly Beach, though, because hardly anyone lives there anymore. The town's remains were bulldozed into heaping mounds. Most of the people moved on.
At first glance, it would seem easy to rebuild a cheery, ramshackle beach burg, even in deepest southwest Louisiana. Indeed, a ton of federal relief money has already been allocated for new roads, power lines, and phone cables. Plus, there's oil just off the coast, and the intrepid drillers have returned in gleaming supply boats and chuttering helicopters. But the oil industry, being offshore, doesn't need many locals. So the place has the makings of an economy but no humanity.
Being nearly empty, Holly Beach offers a tabula rasa for ideas about how to rebuild the coastline. It's an experiment waiting to be conducted, with the potential to move this benighted region forward – or to repeat the same old mistakes.
If you want to build on sand, there are two logical approaches: shacks and forts. The shack's advantage is low cost. Why spend a lot of money on a doomed structure? High-end shacks could be mobile – the classic poverty trailer, but with GPS and wireless broadband to help with emergency evacuation and communications. This gypsy fleet would exacerbate traffic in a mass exodus, but proper planning could mitigate the crush. The next best thing would be structures made of inexpensive, biodegradable stuff – your basic hippie hay-bale-and-palm-frond eco-yurt, with large eaves and a vapor barrier to keep out the Louisiana humidity. Straw encased in an earthen shell makes for a cozy insulator, and studies show that it's more fire-resistant than timber. A community ethos surrounds the building of these things: With scrounged materials and everyone pitching in, they can be constructed on the cheap.
Whether you opt for an escape-mobile or a Woodstock special, though, the next storm surge would clear the beach of human habitation.
A bolder scheme is to erect forts, indestructible dwellings that defy high winds, flying debris, and invading seawater. One building method, known as ICF for "insulating concrete forms," involves pouring concrete into interlocking polystyrene molds with steel rebar reinforcement. ICF structures have been shown to withstand the impact of two-by-fours driven by winds over 100 miles per hour, and they smolder but don't burn. To serve in a storm, they'd need deep pilings, mighty breakwaters, natural lighting for power outages, and plenty of freshwater storage. Their roofs would be solid concrete domes, which distribute stress efficiently like an egg, pinned to the walls with rebar.
Such construction is neither pretty nor particularly cheap. Still, it goes up easily and stays put. In 1995, an ICF shopping mall on the island of St. John was one of the few structures in its area to survive Hurricane Marilyn.
The technology to rebuild Holly Beach is here now. What's missing is the social and financial underpinning. If I had to guess what the place will look like in 20 years, I'd say it will consist of both shacks and forts – reflecting the lopsided distribution of wealth and power that has always plagued this part of the US. The poor folks will live in the shacks, without insurance (what sane carrier would cover them?) or any other safety net. Snowbirds, wealthy retirees, and oil execs will live in the forts, blast-hardened gated communities that will have as much to do with the local Cajuns as the Hilton Hawaiian Village has to do with village Hawaiians.
In the long run, the key to the region's future lies not in architecture or technology but in the intimate relationship between oil, weather, and coastline. The more Louisiana's oil is burned, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere, the warmer the Gulf's surface temperature will become and the more violently storms will attack the coast. The oceanic fury will drive away even more people, leaving only thriving fields of marsh grass.
And therein lies one possible way to help end this threatening cycle. Louisiana's wetlands are among the most fertile areas in North America, and the marsh grass grows at an amazing rate. If we can find a cost-effective way to turn the grass into fuel – cellulosic ethanol – we might be able to reverse the cycle. The abundant flora would yield renewable, substantially cleaner energy. In the process, it would suck storm-feeding carbon dioxide from the sky, protect the coastline against storm-borne erosion, and spin cash from the endless boondocks.
Rebuilding Holly Beach as an architecturally, economically, and ecologically sustainable community will take some very bright, energetic, and determined people. For now, though, the shore is empty.
Email bruces@well.com.
- Bruce Sterling
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