In the busy swirl of preparing for ENR’s Award of Excellence event on March 26, I am reminded that Senior Editor Tom Sawyer and New Orleans Correspondent Angelle Bergeron started writing about the world’s deltas when they covered Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath on the Mississippi River delta. That research led to writing ENR’s Award of Excellence story about Ed Link, who led the team that performed an intensive analysis of the Louisiana flood-protection system after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Much reporting for this week’s cover story comes from Sawyer’s recent trip to Aquaterra 2009, a biennial conference in Amsterdam on protecting the world’s delta environments. These deltas, with their concentrations of port cities and infrastructure, face environmental degradation, land subsidence, rising sea level and storm surges.