Features > September 5, 2007

Scorned on the Bayou (cont’d)

“You have to remember, when we started drilling the wetlands back in the ’30s or ’40s, no one thought they had any value; it was just swamp land,” says Larry Wall, spokesman for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. “And people wanted the oil and gas removed. So using the best technology we had then, we dug canals to get drilling rigs to the site, to get people in and out of the site. We built canals, we built border roads—we did a lot of things we wouldn’t do today. Did we do it on purpose? No. Who knew? It just wasn’t a big issue then and no one recognized the full impact. Now, from about the 1980s, we changed things. We quit using pits, we started mitigating canals by filling in one if we built another, we tried to lessen the footprint of drilling activities.”

Advocates of restoration say the state and federal government have let a politically powerful industry off the hook.

Sport fishermen (some Louisiana license plates still proclaim the state a “Sportsmen’s Paradise”) add to the problem as well, by motoring through the canals and bayous at speeds that cause wave damage along the shore, contributing to erosion. Signs posted by local authorities in Bayou La Fourche calling for a slow speed limit or “no wake” are routinely ignored.

The cost of the war in Iraq juxtaposed to the lack of investment in coastal Louisiana is a sore point with those wanting to preserve the estuary—especially U.S. tax dollars spent to restore the marshes in Shiite-dominated southern Iraq that were drained by Saddam Hussein after the Shiites’ failed uprising in the early ’90s.

“We restored their wetland,” says Ford. “We could do ours for $30 billion.” A $30 billion investment is the equivalent of 109 days of the war.

BTNEP’s Kerry St. Pé sounded discouraged in an e-mail message about the current state of affairs. “The new state master plan simply has restoration measures in it that deviate from and contradict the restoration agreement that the National Estuary Program was invented to create,” he wrote, noting that hundreds of people, including representatives from the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the governor’s office worked for five years to create the agreement.

He concluded that many of today’s players at the state and federal levels were not around while the BTNEP plan evolved over the past 15 years. “So we are considered to be just another voice among many, and not the congressionally mandated, watershed-level planning network that we are,” he wrote. “The Estuary Program blended the hundreds of opinions into one consolidated plan. That is of particular and noteworthy value when it is necessary to restore such a complex place. It just needs to be used.”

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