In 2018, Ehab Meselhe and a team at the Water Institute of the Gulf, a Louisiana nonprofit research group, sat for hours with residents of St. Bernard and other coastal parishes in Louisiana, modeling their potential solutions to coastal land loss.
A project with the name “5th and Union” blends in with the 89 other shoring and drilling jobs on John Matyasovszky’s chronological list of work since 2005—when the Malcolm Drilling Co. senior superintendent began as a laborer.