Louisiana fishing industry officials who fear the loss of their livelihoods are vowing to sue the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority over its planned $2 billion wetlands restoration project south of New Orleans.
Officials working on the restoration efforts, as well as the Louisiana Oyster Task Force and the nonprofit Save Louisiana Coalition, now view litigation as inevitable. The coalition does not see the planned diversion of sediment and fresh water from the Mississippi River into the Barataria and Breton Sound basins as a solution to the state’s loss of wetlands in recent decades.
“If there was proof that large-scale diversions would build back the land we love, we would be having a different conversation,” the coalition said in a website post. “Unfortunately, not only will large-scale diversions be devastating to our seafood industry, (but) every day we are seeing more and more science saying that they just won’t work.”
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers acknowledges that the project will change the salinity of the affected coastal waters, leading to adverse effects for the oysters and brown shrimp populations in the bays as well as the populations of speckled trout and flounder.
But those working on the project point out that between the 1930s and 2016, Louisiana lost more than 2,000 square miles of land due to an array of factors, including the levee protections along the river, rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion.
“Most people recognize that the single biggest threat to Louisiana’s coastal fisheries is the loss of coastal habitat,” Bren Haase, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s executive director, told the Louisiana Record. “... Fisheries in this basin are not sustainable in the long term even if we don’t do this project.”
Stewardship and good-citizen measures to the tune of tens of millions of dollars will be provided to help the fishing industry adjust to the shifts in coastal marine habitat once the five-year construction project is complete, Haase said.
Brian Lezina, the authority’s chief of planning, said the agency is now conducting more dredging than ever before in an effort to improve the health of local wetlands using a multi-pronged approach.
“We understand what these projects – or not doing them – means to the communities,” Lezina told the Record. “We're seeing changes and challenges to fisheries today that we are trying to address.”
Efforts to mitigate the loss of some fisheries as a result of the diversion include the funding of better equipment for shrimpers, alternative oyster-growing projects and new breeding reefs.