Costly and Complicated, Restoring Louisiana's Wetlands Is Increasingly Important

July 10, 2006 — -- Louisiana's vital wetlands are disappearing at an alarming rate.

About 25 square miles disappear every year -- a football field every half-hour. Last year, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita exacerbated the loss by a decade, and activists say the time for action is overdue.

"During Rita and Katrina, the coast of Louisiana lost right at about 200 square miles," said Sydney Coffee, chairman of Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Recovery Authority. "It was an urgent situation before the storms. Now you can imagine."

New Orleans relies on the intricate series of marshes, bayous and rivers to act as a buffer during hurricanes and tropical storms. The impact of these losses stretches farther than Crescent City, Calif., affecting all Americans, from what they eat to what they pay for gas.

"A third of all the natural gas or oil consumed in this country today comes through Louisiana's wetlands by tanker, barge or pipeline," Coffee said. "It's all a balance. Everything that happens on this coast affects the rest of the United States because of its location."

A Vital Pipeline

Eighty percent of the nation's offshore oil comes from Louisiana.

The oil, as well as natural gas, winds through a spaghettilike maze of pipelines buried throughout the massive coastal wetlands.

As these areas shrink in size, the pipelines are no longer protected from the elements, and the consequences are costly and ripple out across the country.

Louisiana and Gov. Kathleen Blanco are hoping to fund the restoration of the wetlands by creating a revenue-sharing agreement with the oil companies and the federal government.

Currently, all the money made from offshore oil leases goes to the Minerals Management Service, a division of the Department of the Interior. Blanco is trying to block future oil leases off Louisiana's coast until the state and the Coastal Habitat Restoration Project receive a percentage of billions of dollars in profits.

Coffee, who works with the governor's office, supports her approach to funding this massive restoration effort.

"To sustain the kind of 20-year effort we need to restore this coast, it's going to take money in a steady stream," Coffee said. "We can't be at the whim of Congress to either appropriate funds or not."

The Mississippi River's delta is made up of several ecosystems as saltwater marshes along the Gulf Coast mix with freshwater from the river to form brackish bayous.

Freshwater swamps, which support a separate habitat altogether, are in other areas.

These diverse sections are the breeding ground for an enormous amount of aquatic life, and this makes seafood one of Louisiana's largest exports.

"All of [the wetlands] serve as the nursery ground for the Gulf of Mexico," Coffee said. "Ninety percent of the marine species in the Gulf of Mexico spends part or all of its life cycle there. It's a hugely prolific ecosystem. That's why we're No. 1 in fisheries, besides Alaska, for the entire United States."

The Quest to Reverse Katrina Damage

In New Orleans, the wetlands, like the levees, are on everyone's mind.

Scientists and engineers agree that the levees will only protect New Orleans so much from a storm surge such as the one that inundated New Orleans with water during Katrina.

The swamps and bayous that surround the city must be maintained to absorb water from the lakes and rivers that rise during storms.

Volunteers are working in the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge, a vast 23,000-acre area in Eastern New Orleans, trying to reverse some of the destruction caused by Katrina.

About 60 volunteers are planting smooth cord grass, a type of marsh grass that is beneficial to the habitat.

Shelley Stiaes of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes that the grass will help the habitat grow and reduce large pools of water in the marsh in a phenomenon called "ponding."

"We're working partly to reverse the ponding effect that is going on in the [Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife] Refuge from the storm," she said. "If you have less of a ponding effect, you have less water. Less water means less things that can flood and overflow. In a way, it is protecting New Orleans."

While these volunteers may only be a small part of the solution, Coffee believes that they are on the right track.

"It's all about awareness," Coffee said. "The way we are going to fix this coast is so complicated. Anytime people can get out into the wetlands and understand the vital benefits that they give, the stark beauty of it all, it's very important."