Katrina-Damaged Islands Overlooked

(CBS)  For 13 years park ranger Ben Moore has lived and worked on Horn Island, a slip of sand 12 miles off Biloxi, Miss.

"The islands have been decimated," Moore tells CBS News Correspondent Bill Whitaker.

Not only did Katrina destroy his house, but it chewed off a few miles of the island and ate half of the one to the west. "They protect the coastline," Moore says.

He says the chain of the barrier islands from Florida to Louisiana can't take many more beatings like this.

"It's not so much an isolated hurricane, but the chain of hurricanes we've had over the past dozen years," Moore explains.

The problem is not just the devastation of these barrier islands, but the weakening of our first line of defense against future Katrinas. These islands act as hurricane speed bumps.

And they are washing away. Katrina laid waste to the islands off New Orleans.

"The coastal wetlands and barrier islands that provide such an important buffer are beginning to erode and disappear at a very serious rate," Peter Frumhoff, a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says.

Made worse, Frumhoff says, by global warming, as ice caps melt and oceans rise. Now President Bush's pledge to rebuild the region has other scientists waving red flags. Restoring cities without restoring barrier islands, they say, is setting the table for another disaster.

"It would be criminally negligent for us as a nation to fix a single broken window in New Orleans, fix a single levee in this city without simultaneously committing to this national program to rebuild the barrier islands," Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network opines.

If these islands weren't here," Moore says, "I'm sure we would have seen much more significant impact ashore as hard as that may be to believe."

Rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a national priority. So far, rebuilding these islands is not.