Turning the Tide

Kemp and Snider were sympathetic when I asked them for a response to Curole’s pique about how the enviros came in late with a new levee scheme that threatens the Great Wall. “The Morganza alignment follows hydrologic barriers and would have destroyed fewer wetlands,” Snider said. “We had to learn that this wasn’t the bottom line, that to save the most wetlands and provide the most flood protection we had to look at the whole system. Just because bad decisions were made a long time ago doesn’t mean we have to continue making them.”

Because Isle St. Jean Charles is just outside the Great Wall alignment, the Corps offered to buy out and move the residents. They declined. Kemp drove us to the island over a causeway bisecting a lake that had been productive marsh during the lifetimes of middle-aged island residents. The road, a maintenance nightmare, floods on moderate south winds, and it acts as a levee, cutting off the tidal ebb and flow. Junked cars and boats littered the landscape. Windrows of rubbish curled around and between rusted trailers and sagging, semi-roofless shacks. Never, even in third world nations, had I seen such hopeless poverty. “This used to be a vibrant fishing village,” commented Snider. “We’re trying to keep Pointe Aux Chenes and other communities from winding up like this.”

But without major river diversions, Isle St. Jean Charles will be the model for southern Louisiana’s future. State and federal officials and even parish officials like Claudet and Curole understand this. They’re pushing hard for diversions, but they haven’t been able to generate the political will to get them funded.

In 2006 I had encountered jubilation about an ambitious project called the Third Delta, by which the Corps would divert water into an earthen ditch near Donaldsonville, letting the Mississippi excavate a 95-mile distributary that would split around Bayou Lafourche, spread, slow, and deposit its silt north of Terrebonne and Barataria bays. The flow would intensify tenfold over the next half-century until it carried a third of the Mississippi’s volume. Unlike all completed and proposed diversions combined, the Third Delta would eventually halt, then reverse, the state’s wetlands loss. The price tag would be about $5 billion, less than half the projected cost of the Great Wall. But since my last visit, the Third Delta proposal had gone belly up.

Consider also the $26 million Caernarvon diversion, operational since 1991. It is restoring freshwater, natural sediment flow, and traditional fish and wildlife habitat to the coastal bays and marshes of Breton Sound. But it also inconveniences people who like catching brown shrimp, speckled trout, redfish, and other ocean species that move inland with marsh-destroying saltwater. Accordingly, in May 2008 residents of St. Bernard Parish passed a resolution calling for the state to close the Caernarvon diversion.

Nowhere is a diversion more desperately needed than at Bayou Lafourche. I was unable to see an inch into the chocolate water. If there were any fish, I couldn’t detect them and they couldn’t detect me. A scum-encrusted softshell turtle floated in the lethargic current, surveying me with half-closed eyes, not bothering to duck.

The proposed Donaldsonville diversion (unrelated to and far smaller than the deceased Third Delta) would send Mississippi River water into Bayou Lafourche, augmenting and cleansing its grossly polluted flow, restoring decent drinking water to Houma and Thibodeaux, recovering fish and wildlife, and building new marsh. Because the bayou is a natural conduit to the Gulf it provides an exceptional opportunity for diversion. But upstream locals resist it because it would flood their barbecue pits and drown some of their grass.

“We’re 45 miles from Gulf, and we can’t guarantee that the water will be fresh,” lamented Curole, who likes to call the Davis Pond diversion “one small leak for a river, one giant leak for mankind.” He went on to blame federal and state inertia on lack of political leadership. “If we can’t do these little things, how are we going to do the big ones?” he inquired. With that, Curole made this eloquent, if inadvertent, case for the multiple lines of defense levee: “Our problem is that we’re a society of spoiled people where everything has to be win–win. We have to learn to do what’s best for the public, then take care of the people who get the negative effects.”

WHAT YOU CAN DO

To participate in the restoration of Louisiana wetlands, visit the Coalition to Restore Louisiana. For more information on the multiple lines of defense strategy, including the full report, click here. To learn about Audubon’s efforts on the Mississippi River Delta, click here.