Hurricane on the Bayou 2006 (Hurricane on the Bayou)

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".