CWPPRA begins divvying funds for region’s coastal projects

With $100 million in funding approved for coastal restoration projects, and a $20 million dredging project getting under way in Donaldsonville, 2010 promises to be a busy year in rebuilding Louisiana’s wetlands. In spite of the fact that Gov. Bobby Jindal has promised a record $778 million in levee and coastal restoration spending, wetlands activists still wonder if current efforts are enough to save Louisiana’s coast.

Of the $100 million in Coastal Wetlands Planning Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) funding announced by the governor’s office, $55 million will be spent on projects near Port Fourchon and on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in Terrebonne Parish. The Donaldsonville dredging project will also help improve drinking water quality and stem saltwater intrusion all the way down Bayou Lafourche.

The two projects in the Tri-parish area approved this week will save roughly 370 acres of wetlands. The Port Fourchon project will restore vital barrier headlines that break up storm surges, and Terrebonne Parish’s project will protect the largest flotant marsh complex in the state.

Another $11 million was allocated to design CWPPRA projects in Louisiana, including a $22 million restoration project on Lost Lake in southern Terrebonne Parish. That project would save nearly 750 acres of wetlands. Funding to actually construct those projects, however, is expected “in future years.”

Jindal has drastically increased efforts and funding to restore wetlands and the rate of wetlands loss has decreased drastically.

“CWPPRA has done a remarkable job of putting projects on the ground relatively quickly, including two barrier island restorations and two of the largest marsh creation projects ever built in our state in 2009 alone,” said Coastal Protection and Restoration Chairman Garret Graves. “With the restoration projects under way today because of state investments, we’re projected to have the lowest rate of land loss since the 1930’s.”

Yet, Louisiana is still losing wetlands at an alarming rate. Areas like Leeville in south Lafourche Parish and the Isle De Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish have already been gravely threatened as the land morphs into water. Leeville was once famous for it’s oranges and cows used to wander from the island to Montegut. Today, little is left but ribbons of road lined with houses.

“The loss of wetlands is at such a scale now all we can do now is put Band-Aids on it and protect what we have left,” said Kerry St. Pe’, program director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program. “We’re losing this battle. We cannot restore enough marshlands with the funding we have right now.”

Wetlands loss boomed after the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Mississippi River in the 1930’s. In the wake of the Great Flood of 1927, people demanded the river be tamed. While penning in the Mighty Mississippi has saved the country from much flooding, nobody foresaw the consequences of tampering with one of nature’s greatest forces.

The Mississippi River used to filter through a complex network of bayous and deltas. By bringing nutrient-rich fresh water and sediment, land was continuously built along Louisiana’s coast.

Today, the Mississippi River roars through a series of dams and channels, and its land-sustaining fresh water is forced far into the gulf. Sediment no longer replenishes soil lost to normal costal erosion. Instead the land just disappears.

With freshwater cut off, salt water has forced its way into swamps and marshes. This kills plant life, whose roots hold together the land. These two problems exacerbated each other and started a vicious cycle of land loss.

Oil companies also dug about 10,000 miles worth of canals through marshes and swamps, which perforated coastal wetlands, making it easy for coastal forces to tear the land apart.

As a result, Louisiana lost up to 40 square miles of wetland a year for several decades. A 2003 United States Geological Survey study that included restoration efforts projected an additional 500 square miles of wetlands loss by 2050. The Gulf of Mexico would creep inland 33 miles in some areas, according to the study.

After years of taking away unused swamplands, coastal erosion has finally started taking away land that people live on. More importantly, where wetlands and barrier islands once absorbed tidal flooding during hurricanes, storm surges now rush into low-lying areas. In parts of southern Terrebonne Parish, road flooding has started to occur during strong southerly winds.

“We know pretty accurately what we’ll end up with. In 2050, it shows that all we’re going to end up with are the areas behind the levees jutting out into the Gulf,” said St. Pe’.

Although the current round of CWPPRA projects help to staunch the loss of wetlands in critical areas, they do little to correct the problems caused by cutting off the area off from the Mississippi River. Help from the federal government is essential, but has been slow and ineffective so far.

“Band-Aids are not going to work, and that’s what we’ve had. We’ve had sort of intermittent funding streams and BandAids, and what we need is a permanent robust stream of money, which we’ve now identified through sharing royalties, and now we need a new powerful mechanism to do multiple projects across 19 parishes simultaneously,” said Senator Mary Landrieu, who said is working with President Obama to bring about a new way to save the coast, and hopes to announce an alternative within six months.

The Donaldsonville dredge project, on the other hand, will help increase fresh water flow from the Mississippi River throughout Bayou Lafourche. Although the project is seen predominantly as a means of improving drinking water quality, it could be the first part in a much larger effort to reintroduce freshwater flow into the area, said Bayou Lafourche Freshwater District Director Arnie Chaisson Jr.

The larger freshwater diversion project was abandoned by CWPPRA when it came back with a $200 million price tag. The current project, which will dredge a 6.2-mile stretch of Bayou Lafourche will cost around $20 million to complete, and is entirely funded by the state. So far the freshwater district has only begun tearing out some 2,900 nuisance trees that have sprung up along the bayou. Although the project was postponed for six months due to projected cost over runs, work should be completed later this year.

“The 6.2 mile project, from what the engineers tell me, 90 percent in the sediment is in that first 6.2 miles,” said Chaisson. “It’s like doing an angioplasty on the bayou. It clears out the clogs so everything can flow better.”

The dredging in Donaldsonville will increase the bayou’s capacity to take on additional water from the Donaldsonville pump station, however the major expense of a larger freshwater diversion would be a new, higher-volume pump station.

“Basically, with the introduction of more freshwater, you’re pushing that salt water that’s in now back, and what you’re doing is your supplying more freshwater nutrients into the intermediate marshes,” said Chaisson. “The freshwater, when it reaches these intermediate marshes, tends to act like a Miracle-Gro.”

While freshwater diversions help stave off salt-water intrusion and promote plant growth, they do not carry enough sediment to rebuild wetlands, said St. Pe. Even massive fresh water diversions that would carry enough silt would not be able to rebuild wetlands in a timely fashion.

“In my opinion, you have to have sediment there to establish the root systems, and you have to have the freshwater there to keep salt water from coming in and killing off vegetation. It’s a combined approach,” said Chiasson.

The ultimate goal, according to multiple experts, is to try and recreate the flow of the Mississippi River through the region.

“What we have to do is find a way to get not only the water and the nutrients, but also sediment out of that river and back into the bayou region” said Chris Macaluso, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s public information officer. “The goal of the state’s master plan is to try to get the ecosystem to start working again, to try to make the Mississippi River start working again to rebuild coastal Louisiana. “

Tributaries of the Mississippi river are dammed off as far north as North Dakota. Simply restoring the flow of the Mississippi river to historical levels would not only cause flooding, it would also lack the level of sediment required to rebuild the coast.

The preferred method for restoring the flow of the Mississippi River is to combine a sediment pipeline with targeted freshwater diversion, but those projects could costs billions of dollars.

“We’ve been advocating for [a sediment pipeline] for 12 years now,” said St. Pe’. “But there are no projects on the books to deliver sediments from these rivers. There is only a study being done by Terrebonne Parish to see if they can deliver sediments through a pipeline.”

Projects on a large scale to solve the problem as a whole have been put aside for now because the billions of dollars needed simply aren’t available. Current CWPPRA projects will help to save wetlands inland, but will still be subject to wave erosion and saltwater intrusion. Without fixing the systemic issues in the wetlands, projects built today will eventually wear out in the future.

“It all boils down to the almighty dollar,” said Chaisson.

In the meantime, government officials and local advocates are doing what they can to keep things from getting too much worse, and hoping for the future.

“All we can do is restore some of the land that we’re losing in places that are really critical in hopes of getting the funding to do some real good and gain on the wetlands loss,” said St. Pe’. “You have to determine whether this place is worthy of being restored first, and I think it is. As long as people are living here, we need the coastal wetlands. So, the expense is cheaper to restore than it is to relocate everybody from southeast Louisiana.”