For more than 10 years, Baton Rouge landman Dan Collins has been fighting the state of Louisiana in a whistleblower lawsuit over environmental violations he uncovered while doing work in the Atchafalaya Basin for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources.
As Business Report details in its new cover story, Collins won his long-running suit in December 2015, when a jury awarded him $750,000—compensation for work he says the state denied him after he blew the whistle on a dredging project in an area of the basin known as Bayou Postillion.
The project was ostensibly about improving water quality in the bayou. Collins, however, uncovered evidence suggesting it was actually done to facilitate oil and gas drilling on water bottoms owned by politically connected families in the Acadiana area.
The jury in the case agreed. Nevertheless, Collins has yet to see a penny of his judgment. The state is appealing the verdict and was scheduled to go before the First Circuit Court of Appeal earlier this month. Whichever side loses at the appellate level will likely take the matter to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which could drag the litigation out still longer.
The case is remarkable in many ways, and Collins, a tall, soft-spoken man, has likened it to the plot of a John Grisham novel. His gentle, friendly demeanor belies a compulsive intensity that has driven him relentlessly over the past decade to amass file cabinets worth of evidence that point to blatant violations of environmental law and hint at political corruption.
Curiously, however, neither the state nor the federal government has ever investigated the claims at the heart of Collins’ lawsuit, despite a lot of badgering on his part for them to do so. Now 61, he has spent a considerable chunk of his career fighting a battle that no one outside the Atchafalaya Basin seems to even acknowledge, much less care about.
But the case has assumed almost legendary significance among a group of those who live and work in the basin. For them, Collins’ lawsuit tells the tale of the basin: A story about powerful interests that have exploited the largest river swamp in North America for their own benefit, whether it’s drilling for oil and gas, building pipelines or blocking off access to waterways that crawfishermen have used for centuries.
The tension is especially palpable now because—unlike the rest of Louisiana, which is eroding into the Gulf of Mexico—the Atchafalaya Basin is actually filling in, or accreting, with sediment from the Mississippi River. It’s happening fast, and it won’t be a swamp forever. Those who have built lives in the basin can see the changes that have taken place in mere years, and they feel threatened.
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