Experts promote land use planning

• By AMY WOLD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 7, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Land use planning is the best way for communities in Louisiana’s coastal zone to prevent storm-related floods, rather than relying solely on levee improvements that take time and might not occur.

That’s one of the conclusions made by the authors of the new Sea Grant publication, “Louisiana Coastal Hazard Mitigation Guidebook.”

Residents, local governments and planners need to take responsibility for how and where people develop property safely in the coastal zone, two of the guidebook’s  authors said.

“This is more of an encouragement to local governments to use land use planning to protect communities,” said Jim Wilkins, associate professor and the director of the Louisiana Sea Grant College Program’s Law and Policy Program at LSU. “It demonstrates how you can go from a voluntary basis to a more regulatory basis.”

Recommendations for minimizing flood risks in coastal Louisiana include increasing the elevation of houses, factoring subsidence and sea level rise when calculating that elevation, and “advancing inland,” said Wilkins, one of several co-authors of the guidebook. 

“The purpose of the book is to look at the realities. We’re probably not going to have the levee systems we’d like to have,” he said. “I think people are avoiding reality when they think they can depend on those structures alone.”

People in the coastal parishes ask for money for levees, he said, but those levees might not be there by the time the next storm hits and if they are, they’ll eventually break.

It’s also important to consider the amount of time, possibly decades, that it would take to get a large-scale levee protection system designed and built, Wilkins said. 

And even if the state gets those levee systems built, coastal erosion, sea level rise and other factors mean that depending on those levees entirely for protection will  not be enough,  he  said.

“We’re seeing it up in the Midwest. This same type of thing,” Wilkins said. 

Another recommendation in the guidebook is for residents and government officials to listen to scientists when it comes to evaluating flood risk. 

Sometimes people pay attention only to information they want to hear, scientists said. 

“We know how much land has been lost and how much will be lost,” Wilkins said. “(But) that gets looked at skeptically.”