Loss of protective buffer of marshland muck-eaten away by the dredging of waterways and cutting of canals-leaves parishes vulnerable to devastation

POINT CELESTE, La. - About 40 miles farther inland from here, around the periphery of one of America's most vulnerable major cities, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is engaged in a furious $15 billion construction effort to rebuild the ring of concrete levees and steel floodgates that are supposed to protect New Orleans from catastrophic flooding when the next big hurricane blows ashore.

But the front line in the epic and unending battle to keep the Gulf of Mexico from pouring into the below-sea-level bathtub in which New Orleans lies is really right here, along a 6-foot-high earthen berm originally built by a farmer to keep his cattle pasture dry.

The embankment is all that stands between the yawning ocean and the thin finger of sinking land known as Plaquemines Parish, yet it is so fragile no one dares drive a pickup truck on top of it. The soil from which it was made crumbles like soft meatloaf in your hands.

And last week, Hurricane Gustav-a relatively puny Category 2 storm-punched a hole in that levee the length of two old Chevy sedans, flooding hundreds of acres of land and threatening a giant oil refinery nearby. Workers struggled for days to patch the breach with sandbags dropped from Army helicopters. "This parish has 34 holes and weak spots in levees just like this, from Gustav and previous hurricanes," Billy Nungesser, the president of Plaquemines Parish, said last week as he directed the repair effort. "You will never be able to build levees high enough and wide enough in New Orleans if we keep losing ground down here." From marsh to open water To understand why New Orleans remains so vulnerable to huge ocean surges kicked up by storms like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it helps to stand atop this narrow levee and gaze across the Gulf of Mexico.

The open water didn't used to be there. As recently as a generation ago, lush wetlands filled with grasses and plants and loamy muck spread out for dozens of miles. That provided a spongelike buffer zone that absorbed and dispersed the fierce pounding waves churned up by hurricanes long before they pushed giant walls of water farther north toward New Orleans.

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