Project Katrina

New satellite imaging from the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center reveals that hurricane Katrina caused the largest single forestry disaster in US history. This little reported ecological catastrophe killed or severely damaged about 320 million trees in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The die-off, caused initially by wind and later by weeks of stagnant water was so massive that researchers say "it will add significantly to the global greenhouse gas buildup, ultimately putting as much carbon from dying vegetation into the air as the rest of the nation’s forest takes out.

To make matter worse, the downing of so many trees has opened vast and sometimes fragile tracts to multiple aggressive and fast-growing exotic species that are squeezing out far more environmentally productive native species.

Efforts to limit, or at least slow the damage have been handicapped by the total ineffectiveness of a $504 million federal program to help Gulf Coast landowners replant and fight the invasive species. Congress appropriated the money in 2005 and added to it in 2007. But government officials acknowledge that the program got off to a slow start and only about $70 million has been promised or dispensed thus far.

"This is the worst environmental disaster in the United States since the Exxon Valdez accident and the greatest forest destruction in modern times," said James Cummins, executive director of the conservation group Wildlife Mississippi and a board member of the Mississippi Forestry Commission. "It needs a really broad and aggressive response, and so far that just hasn’t happened."