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Explore Louisiana's Coastal Land Loss

Bob Marshall, The Lens, Brian Jacobs, Al Shaw, and Propublica have a new interactive web site that the public can use to explore Louisiana's coastal land loss.
"The landscape on which all (of Louisiana) is built is washing away at a rate of a football field every hour, 16 square miles per year.

For years, most residents didn't notice because they live inside the levees and seldom travel into the wetlands. But even those who work or play in the marshes were misled for decades by the gradual changes in the landscape. A point of land eroding here, a bayou widening there, a spoil levee sinking a foot over 10 years. In an ecosystem covering thousands of square miles, those losses seemed insignificant. There always seemed to be so much left.

Now locals are trying to deal with the shock of losing places they had known all their lives - fishing camps, cypress swamps, beachfronts, even cattle pastures and backyards - with more disappearing every day."
To learn more, the public can visit http://projects.propublica.org/louisiana/ to see these changes over time.

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