[DantesPeak]

Working from the Land of the Lost and/or The New Atlantis - either way - Gulf energy recovery firms have a daunting task:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')efore Katrina, Venice, located about halfway down the peninsula as it juts into the Gulf, was full of boats, offices and sleeping quarters for offshore contractors. "Venice is no longer there," said Eric Johns, operations manager for Specialty Offshore Inc., a closely held diving-service firm that used Venice as an operational hub for docking boats and accommodating divers. He has been forced to line up temporary facilities further west.

The apparent erasure of much of Plaquemines Parish is a reminder of the erosion taking place in southern Louisiana over recent decades. If left unchecked, the delta's steady sinking could ultimately displace some two million people and the oil industry that works there, said Ms. Maloz.

The land loss has been largely caused by the construction of Mississippi River levees by the Army Corps of Engineers starting in the 1930s to prevent flooding. One unintended consequence is that the river no longer dumps sediment in the south of the state, leading already to a loss of 1,900 square miles of land, about the size of Delaware, experts say.

If the land continues to melt away, Port Fourchon, situated on the tip of a peninsula west of Venice, could one day be erased from maps. Normally, the port services some 1,000 trucks and 200 ships daily. But, according to projections, all the land surrounding the port will flood in the coming decades, leaving no road link for the oil companies to the port. "You can't re-create southern Louisiana the way it was 20 years ago, or even today," said Ted Falgout, director of the Port of Fourchon. "All you can do is sustain it."

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he land loss has been largely caused by the construction of Mississippi River levees by the Army Corps of Engineers starting in the 1930s to prevent flooding. One unintended consequence is that the river no longer dumps sediment in the south of the state, leading already to a loss of 1,900 square miles of land, about the size of Delaware, experts say.

[DantesPeak]

Worst than that, the Mississippi has changed forever:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'K')atrina also appears to have permanently washed away part of a crucial peninsula used by oil companies as a staging area for work in the Gulf of Mexico, slowing down repair work and raising questions about where to rebuild. Simone Theriot Maloz, executive director of Restore or Retreat, a local nonprofit group that studies the delta, believes the storm turned the course of the Mississippi River westward near Venice, Louisiana, and took part of the town with it.