Earned Media
Community conversation on the Mid-Barataria project - Dredging Today
Promotes MRD-hosted Community Conversations:
"There’s no alternative": Louisiana’s ambitious plan to stay above water
Features Steve Cochran, MRD/EDF:
Corps Releases Draft EIS For Mississippi River Sediment Diversion, Seeks Comments - The Waterways Journal
Supporters, though, see the project as the linchpin to the state’s coastal restoration efforts.
“Unless we act now, we risk losing it all,” said Steve Cochran, director of Restore The Mississippi River Delta. “The future of our entire region is at stake. The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion will build more wetlands than any other individual restoration project in the world, in an area experiencing some of the highest land loss rates on the planet. If our region is to have a fighting chance against land loss, hurricanes and sea level rise, we must put the muddy Mississippi back to work to rebuild our coast.”
To build wetlands, Louisiana’s largest sediment diversion would shock seafood communities
The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion aims to deliver replenishing mud to the Barataria Basin’s weakened wetlands and maintain a critical hurricane buffer between the Gulf of Mexico and the New Orleans area. In the process, however, it’s almost bound to cause the swift and immediate decline of seafood fisheries that are the lifeblood of residents in lower Plaquemines, according to the Army Corps of Engineers draft environmental impact statement on the project.
CPRA moves on plans for massive new dredging and sediment-diversion projects
But efforts to halt the erosion are entering a promising new phase over the next four years—one in which the state expects, for the first time since the losses began in the 1930s, to see more land created than it loses. That will come as the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) shifts from planning massive new dredging and sediment-diversion projects to executing them.
“This is the moment in time in the coastal program that we have been waiting on,” said Chip Kline, CPRA’s chairman. “We actually have the political will and the funding necessary to implement these projects that we’ve envisioned for years.”
The biggest is the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, which will help re-create marshes that will provide storm protection to Plaquemines, Jefferson, Orleans and Lafourche Parishes.
ADAPTATION: This La. expert dared criticize his state's $2B wetland plan
Gary Brown, a technical reviewer with the Army Corps' Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss., said he is aware of the scientific disagreement over the Barataria Bay project. A 2019 modeling effort by Brown and colleagues showed "a lot of inundation impacts associated with the [water] diversions on vegetation."
But, Brown said, wetlands loss and recovery depended on various factors, including the timing, amount and location of water releases. He said he believes the "effort and rigorousness" behind the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's Barataria Bay models are high. "The flip side is that the problem they're addressing is intrinsically complex," he added.
Harry Roberts, an LSU emeritus professor, geologist and former director of the university's Coastal Studies Institute, said that even with uncertain outcomes, "these large-scale diversions are the only way that we're going to slow down the loss of our coastal plain."
To Turner's contention that the river diversions will permanently destroy wetlands rather than build them, Roberts responded, "You build the delta, the plants will come," even if some wetlands and adjacent uplands are initially flooded.
"I think Turner is right in that it's going to have some damaging effects — local effects and short-term effects — but if you look at the overall picture it's one that's very positive," he added.
Planting 2,400 trees could be just the start of restoring a cypress forest
Features Pontchartrain Conservancy:
Along the Tchefuncte River in Madisonville, scientists from the Pontchartrain Conservancy give young bald cypress trees a check up, measuring their height and diameter.
The 2,400 trees, two-year-old-saplings, were planted last month.
Cypress trees “knock down the height of storm surge,” said, Eva Hillmann, Ph.D., a scientist with the Pontchartrain Conservancy.