It’s time to start paying attention to Louisiana’s coastal land loss and restoration efforts, writes Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her new opinion piece.Â
People know they should care, but losing a football field of coastline every 30 minutes just doesn’t seem as significant as it should when you’re 150 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Louisiana’s neighbors in Mississippi, as well as many of this state’s own commercial fishermen, are sounding alarms over the large-scale sediment diversion projects intended to help restore coastal marshland. They’re upset about the $1.4 billion Mid-Breton Basin sediment diversion, which promises to rebuild marshland by diverting fresh, though polluted, Mississippi River water into coastal wetlands, where it will deposit sediment that will naturally build up.
The Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has made sediment diversions the centerpiece of its multipronged coastal master plan, but from the perspective of fishermen and Mississippi coastal communities, these projects are nothing but multibillion-dollar science experiments that may well do more harm than good.
Their fears are based on what happened to coastal fisheries when the Bonnet Carre Spillway was opened this past summer for the third time in two years, decimating oyster beds, killing shrimp, dolphins and sea turtles, and causing the oxygen-starved Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico to balloon to the size of Connecticut.Â
How long can they be ignored? Will their complaints delay or derail the diversion projects? If so, would that be a bad thing?
On one hand, science suggests diversions are the best way to restore at least some coastal marshland. On the other hand, we don’t really know how
effective they will be long term and what kind of collateral damage they will cause in the process. Are they worth the billions they will cost? Read Riegel’s full opinion piece from the Nov. 5 edition of Business Report. Send comments to editor@businessreport.com
