This Louisiana town is disappearing. The Super Bowl is drawing attention to its story.

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As Phyllis Melancon drives down La. 1 toward the Gulf of Mexico, her husband Timmy points to where lost landmarks used to be: a bait shop, a chapel, their family home.

For the couple in their late 60s, married when they were 14 and 15, each site evokes stories of family members and old friends in the town of Leeville, which has lost nearly all its land and people over recent decades.

“Since the last storm, there’s no more gas stations, no more restaurants,” Phyllis Melancon said of 2021’s Hurricane Ida.

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Leeville is at the forefront of Louisiana’s coastal land loss crisis, which has robbed the state of land the size of Delaware over the last century — among the highest rates in the world. In 2021, Ida destroyed what was left of the small fishing village. Today, around three people live in Leeville.

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The problem has long been a priority for the state, and now the NFL is lending a hand ahead of next weekend’s Super Bowl. On Monday, a group of special operations veterans left the bustling pre-Super Bowl streets of New Orleans for the quieter landscape of Leeville, where water laps against the highway.

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The first part of the project began in December, when dozens of volunteers gathered to divide 59 tons of oyster shells from restaurants into mesh bags — the smaller units that compose the reef.

"I'm kind of speechless," Megan Champagne, the coastal zone management administrator for Lafourche Parish, said. "We've never had such a big agency collaboration."

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The new "living shoreline” will not bring back Leeville. No one is under any illusions about that.

But the faded community near Grand Isle is still a popular fishing spot, and its remaining land helps provide protection for locations farther inland. The reef will assist on both of those matters.

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The onslaught of storms led to the dwindling population of Leeville, which sits beyond the levee system eight miles from the Gulf. But Leeville itself is disappearing, too. Land that once held citrus groves and cotton fields is not much more than a narrow street.

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Leeville is one of the last stops on the way to Port Fourchon, which accounts for around 15% of the country’s oil supply and helped provide the local fishing industry with reliable business.

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I started heading down to Grand Isle with my pops around the age of 8 or 9. 35 years later, the landscape has changed drastically. I used to be able to spot from up on the bridge fishing holes in the marsh that we would hit up in the fall and winter months. Now…I couldn’t tell you where those spots were. Can’t really recognize them.

RIP Bobby Lynn’s Marina. That was a Leeville staple.