A $3 billion project in Louisiana to add coastal wetlands for storm protection has been canceled by state officials, and there are few alternatives to halt the ongoing land loss.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Louisiana has a land-loss crisis. The state has lost nearly 2,000 square miles of coastal wetlands since the 1930s. This loss also means less protection from hurricanes and storm surges. Now a massive project that was meant to build back some of that land has been canceled. WWNO’s Eva Tesfaye reports it came after the governor decided the project was just too expensive.
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EVA TESFAYE, BYLINE: Black-bellied whistling ducks fly overhead as I stand on the west bank of the Mississippi, about 60 miles upriver from the Gulf in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. On this stretch of the bank, the trees have been cleared to make way for a huge project known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.
RICHIE BLINK: It’s hard to make old friends. You can’t just get back a-hundred-plus-year-old oak trees.
TESFAYE: Richie Blink laments that the trees have now been cut for no reason because that project is canceled. He’s a local resident and a boat captain.
BLINK: There’s a lot of regret there. The thing is, if the diversion would have been built, there would have been a sub delta that would have been created here.
TESFAYE: The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was supposed to do just what it says – make the river move silt and sand into the middle of Barataria Bay. It’s similar to how the Mississippi River used to form deltas, before it was engineered and levied. The diversion was estimated to build around 30 square miles of new wetlands over 50 years.
ROBERT TWILLEY: The connection between wetlands, storm protection and people and infrastructure became the focus of our restoration efforts after Hurricane Katrina.
TESFAYE: That’s Robert Twilley, a professor of coastal sciences at Louisiana State University. He says building these coastal wetlands would help protect the area from hurricanes and storm surges. But it took decades to get the project going, and construction started just two years ago.
TWILLEY: Here we are, 20 years from Hurricane Katrina, when we started thinking big and really started moving aggressively on building these big projects, and now we are back to ground zero.
TESFAYE: The $3 billion project was funded by money from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement. Six hundred million dollars had been spent so far. But in July, the state agency overseeing the project canceled it, saying it was getting too expensive and cumbersome. State officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Alisha Renfro is a scientist with the National Wildlife Federation, one of the environmental groups that advocated for the project. She says the cancellation was a massive setback for coastal restoration.
ALISHA RENFRO: It is kind of that long-term solution of getting sediment back into the basin in a – on a regular basis, that we just don’t have any other way.
TESFAYE: But the cancellation was welcomed by Louisiana oyster fishermen, who harvest in the bay. The extra freshwater from the diversion would have altered the conditions that allow oysters and shrimp to thrive there. Mitch Jurisich has been fighting the project for years. He’s a third-generation oysterman and heads the Louisiana Oyster Task Force.
MITCH JURISICH: The total oyster populations would have been wiped out – totally gone.
TESFAYE: There was $400 million in the project to help oyster fishermen and others who would have been impacted by the changes in and around the bay, but Jurisich says that wouldn’t have been enough. He wants faster, cheaper ways to fight coastal land loss, like dredging sediment and using it to build new land instantly.
JURISICH: What we don’t need in Louisiana is new deltas. What we need is land today to protect us tomorrow.
TESFAYE: The state says it’s now looking at a much smaller diversion project in the bay. But supporters of the Mid-Barataria Diversion point out that it may again take years to get funding and permits approved – time, they say, that Louisiana’s vanishing coast doesn’t have. For NPR News, I’m Eva Tesfaye in Plaquemines Parish.
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