It’s in their backyards
Do CWPPRA Projects Matter?

On the map, green dots representing new land are tiny while red ones, indicating land lost to water, spread like a rash across Louisiana’s wetlands. The big picture might suggest that restoration projects on the scale of CWPPRA’s are insignificant, but on the ground, in daily life along the coast, they can make the difference between flooding and drainage, protection and exposure, hope and despair. In the following four stories, Louisianans discuss why CWPPRA projects are important to their communities.

Too Big a Problem for One Family to Solve

Marietta Greene manages wetland acres that have been in the Webb branch of her family for generations. “Thirty years ago, my father and I watched in despair as shorelines eroded and acre after acre of marsh converted to open water. We knew that without help, all of coastal Louisiana could disappear.”

The threats to the Webb family property were much larger than a single landowner could tackle. They were system-wide responses to decades-long manipulations of the natural environment. Singly, each action — such as controlling Mississippi River floodwaters or dredging shipping channels — could be considered beneficial, justifiable, or simply inconsequential, but cumulatively they interrupted processes that have sustained the wetlands for eons. Now hundreds of square miles of Louisiana’s coastal region are at risk of vanishing. The scale and complexity of the crisis require the coordination and the resources of both state and national government. Since 1990, the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) has funded projects sponsored by state and federal agency partnerships that address local land loss and develop scientific and engineering techniques to restore Louisiana’s wetlands.

The Webb property includes the last remaining ridge on a strip of land extending across the Barataria Basin south of Lake Salvador and north of Little Lake. Erosion threatens to wash away this narrow land bridge and precipitate the two lakes merging. To protect the land bridge and prevent the expansion of open water, CWPPRA is sponsoring an ambitious project, Barataria Landbridge (BA-27), to shield 107,500 feet of shoreline from erosion caused by wind, wave action and tidal exchange.

In the first phase of BA- 27, the project’s federal lead agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), evaluated several techniques for protecting the shoreline. The NRCS chose panel walls of pre-stressed concrete to use in areas where foundation soils are extremely poor. In areas with better soils, less costly rock dikes are the preferred option.

To date approximately 50,000 feet of protection have been put into place, with the remainder either under construction or awaiting funding. Tested by the 2008 hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the project proved effective in shielding marshes from storm damage. “There was no damage behind the rock structures,” says Quin Kinler, project manager for the NRCS, “but where the project is not completed, we saw significant losses to the marsh.”

How important is the project to residents nearby in Lafitte and Barataria? “This project is at their doorstep,” says Kinler, “protecting a land mass that surely would erode over years. Without it, open water would continue to engulf the marshes and advance toward these communities.”

Renewal and Retreat a Barrier Island’s Natural Cycle

When asked if the Chaland Headland segment of CWPPRA’s Barataria barrier island restoration project had helped her parish weather the hurricanes Gustav and Ike, Albertine Kimble declared, “Thank God it was done!”

A program manager in the department of coastal zone management in Plaquemines Parish, Kimble surveyed damage shortly after the second storm had passed in September 2008. “We lost some shoreline, but we expect that,” Kimble says. “However, the Chaland Headland project made a tremendous difference in protecting our marshes. Without the project, interior marsh loss would have been much more severe.”

Known as the first line of defense against storms, barrier islands blunt the force of waves and wind blowing in from the gulf. “They function as a natural speed bump,” says Rachel Sweeney, the Chaland Headland project manager and an ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-Fisheries. “Without the islands, the full brunt of a storm’s energy batters the interior marshes. And without a buffer of healthy marshes, the Gulf of Mexico laps at the door of our hurricane protection levees.”

Part of the Barataria Barrier Island Complex Project: Pelican Island and Pass La Mer to Chaland Pass Restoration (BA-38), work at Chaland Headland increased the island’s width and average height using materials dredged from a site in the Gulf of Mexico. Sand fencing and vegetative plantings further enhanced and protected the island’s dune, swale and intertidal marsh habitats. Work was completed in 2007.

No comprehensive assessment of 2008 storm damage has yet been made, but Sweeney says, “Bottom line, the project got hit hard. But we expect these projects to get hit hard. Our modeling and engineering analysis anticipate this kind of storm event.”

By nature’s design these islands morph and migrate, rolling over on themselves as storms push sand from dunes into an island’s back bay marshes. “At Chaland Headland, a six-foot vegetated dune was reduced to four feet from overwash,” says Sweeney, “but the project is designed to keep sand within the barrier island system. If there’s enough sediment in the system, these islands have a chance to recover on their own.”

Looking at a battered island with many of its restored features diminished, it may seem odd to declare it a success, but Kimble has no doubt that this CWPPRA project performed as desired, reducing damage to marshes in her parish. And Sweeney has confidence that the project will continue to perform well, re-formed by the storms but enduring. For the marine communities that flourish along its shores and for the human populations that live beyond it, the barrier island is more an essential function than a fixed feature in the coastal environment.

Sportsman Sees Marsh in Life-or-death Struggle

For Don Grissom, land loss in Louisiana isn’t an abstract swarm of colored dots on a map. A man who’s hunted and fished for decades in this sportsman’s paradise, he describes his home parish of Terrebonne as fighting for its very survival. “On a daily basis, the marshes are falling apart,” he says. “Twenty-five years ago I hunted on good, hard marshland. Today it’s submerged under open water. Back then we didn’t need to build elevated houses —the marshes knocked down storm surge and kept us from flooding. But now we’re getting wave action right up to our levees. Open water pushes at our infrastructure, menacing the businesses that service the oil and gas industry. And when the marshes are gone, estuarine nurseries will collapse, taking all our fishing jobs with them.”

A map depicting Lake Boudreaux and the nearby bayou community of Dulac illustrates the geography of the peril that Grissom describes. Erosion has shoved the lake’s shoreline westward, threatening to dissolve the marshes and engulf the lagoon lying between the town and the lake. The resulting large body of open water would be separated from Dulac only by an old, low, earthen drainage levee.

The goal of CWPPPRA project West Lake Boudreaux Shoreline Protection and Marsh Creation (TE-46) is to create a buffer of healthy marsh, rich in valuable estuarine habitat, between the lake and the levee. The project used two techniques to accomplish this: rock was placed along a stretch of the lake’s western shoreline to reduce the erosive force of waves, behind which marsh was built using sediment dredged from the lake’s bottom. The project was completed just before hurricanes Gustav and Ike struck the area. “Right now it just looks like a big pile of mud and dirt with a few plants,” says Robert Dubois, senior field biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and project manager. “This kind of intermediate to brackish marsh tends to vegetate on its own via the seedbank contained in lake bottom sediments, plus seeds blown in from surrounding marshes or carried in by birds. In five years the area should be fully vegetated.”

But rock and a pile of mud have already demonstrated their worth. Dubois says the project suffered essentially no damage from the storms, whereas marsh in an adjacent area was “chopped into little pieces. We’ll probably lose that marsh and within seven years waves will be lapping at the levees,” says Dubois. “Without the CWPPRA project, the same thing would be happening to Dulac and the West Lake Boudreaux area.”

Approaching Storm Tests a New Project’s Operations

In mid-September 2008, David Richard was monitoring the track of Hurricane Ike as the storm made its way toward his corner of Louisiana. Trained as a wetlands biologist, Richard knew the damage flooding can inflict on marshes, and as a land manager for Stream Properties he had seen the effects of prolonged inundation in the Mermentau Lakes sub-basin. But a new CWPPRA project on the sub-basin’s boundary promised to restore a historical drainage pattern that had been blocked for years, and Richard was eager to see how it would perform under the assault of a major storm.

Historically Black Bayou provided westerly drainage for wetlands lying between Grand Lake in Cameron Parish and Calcasieu Lake. The construction of Louisiana Highway 384, followed by the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, shut this hydrologic escape route. Floodwaters, trapped for as long as 60 days, degraded marsh vegetation and eroded shorelines in tens of thousands of wetland acres.

Black Bayou Culverts Hydrologic Restoration (CS-29) manages water levels in the region. The project consists of ten 10-foot by 10-foot culverts under Highway 384 that open when water levels to the east rise above the level of Calcasieu Lake. When waters recede, flap gates on the culverts prevent the more highly saline lake waters from passing eastward into the predominately freshwater marshes.

The gates may also be pinned shut during dry spells to retain needed water in the sub-basin. That was the situation when Ike approached. But Richard was not alone in watching forecasts of the storm’s path and intensity; expecting as much as 25 inches of rainfall, a team from the project’s federal lead agency, the NRCS, decided to open the gates and made certain they were ready to function before the storm hit.

“This team’s forethought and diligence ensured the project was operating optimally at the time of extreme need,” says Richard. “Not only did opening the culverts start drainage of the sub-basin immediately, it also assisted navigation by reducing the velocity of currents in nearby shipping channels.” Team member Ronnie Faulkner, the project’s manager and design engineer, says the culverts provide ecological functions closely equivalent to those of the original Black Bayou. “Typically restoration projects protect marshland and enhance fisheries and wildlife habitat — they conserve what we love so much down here. But restored wetlands also directly benefit our communities by providing resistance to hurricane wave action, preserving the quality of our water supplies and affording recreational opportunities. By speeding the drainage of floodwaters and improving the health of our marshes, this project absolutely makes a difference to the people in the area.”