ML161613
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Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Jimmy Johnston. Timecode In: 00:01:44. Timecode out: 00:31:34. Notes: Hurricane Katrina; USGS. Equipment Notes: Two-Channel Mono. Show: Louisiana - Katrina Date: 09-14-05 JJ = Jimmy Johnston CJ = Chris Joyce JG = Jessica Goldstein 1:44 JJ: Kind of give you a perspective being a victim of this. I live in Slidell, Louisiana on the lake I'm only about 300 yards off the lake, and it's right in this area here. And my house suffered considerable damage but it's it'll take some repairs but I really feel that the track of the storm came this way and that this CJ: we don't have a camera JJ: If you look, it's headed north, kind of northeast, right along the border of Louisiana and Mississippi. And my house was just to the west of the eye of the storm. And I strongly believe that the land bridge, what we call the New Orleans land bridge here which separates lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borne provided a buffer to reduce the amount of damage to my home. And it was built on foam pilings[?] so you can see the track in here. There were 26 ft storm surges along the lake in this area here, many of my friends had their houses completely destroyed and in fact Senator Mary Andrews' camp was destroyed, leveled in this area here. 2:45 There was water under my home, probably about 12 feet of water came under. Now you've got to remember I'm up on big pilings so it blew out everything on the bottom, but basically the top part of it is fine. 2:57 So we talk about wetlands, and this is just my theory, but this provided a buffer to protect me. 3:03 CJ: Cause that land bridge is covered with wetlands? 3:05 JJ: Yes, yes, right here it's kind of degraded, but its still there. 3:09 CJ: Describe a wetland. 3:16 JJ: a wetland is something that periodically has water on it. It has hydric soils which are wet soils. it has certain types of vegetation different types of vegetation depending on the salinity regime. CJ: What kind- JJ: Like salt marsh, brackish marsh, or fresh marsh. CJ: Start that again 3:37 JJ: Well we call it smooth cord grass, is primarily what's there. Most of the wetlands in Louisiana were fresh marshes at one time because of the Mississippi river and the way that the water overflowed the banks and created these deltas and these deltas shifted and we had a fairly large freshmarsh system. But as we've been studying since 1956, using 56 imagery, we've found that's been shifting into a brackish or intermediate salt marsh environment because as you can see the fresh water of that river is basically channelized down here. 4:10 Also the wetlands provide habitat for fish and wildlife resources, storm buffers, which in this case like I said in my particular case helped me, and so the wetland provide that storm buffer. Aesthetically they are amazing where I live I have a marsh on the side of my home and I can just look at it and watch the critters, I call 'em, in there. And so forth, so that's basically what wetlands are, and unfortunately, I firmly believe that in the case of what happened to the coast of Mississippi is that these wetlands to the east of Louisiana which is over in this area of Breton Sound, Buloxi marsh, and this area here. When Camille came in, it came in almost more towards the east and caused massive destruction and but that was in 1969. we're here in 2005 and these wetlands have been degraded. You can see the red here and the yellow that's losses that have occurred at one time probably would have reduced some of the storm surge from this hurricane, had those wetlands been in tact, and unfortunately they're not. 5:20 CJ: can you summarize conclusions from overflights? 5:28 JJ: Yeah. We looked at an area. We looked at wetland loss in an area to the that was really more to the west of the eye of the storm in an area called Breton Soun... (Notes truncated)
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- Cataloged
- 19 Apr 2010 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 19 Apr 2010 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 19 Apr 2010 - Ben Brotman