Louisiana’s coast is disappearing, and nobody can agree on how to stop it

NEW ORLEANS (InvestigateTV) - The Mississippi River Delta stretches over roughly 2.7 million acres, including the largest area of brackish marsh on the North American continent.

The delta supports vast wetlands and fisheries, wildlife habitat, and is a key flyway for migrating birds.

“There’s more life in wetlands and marsh and swamps than almost anywhere else on the planet,” said Foster Creppel, an outdoorsman and coastal activist in Plaquemines Parish.

The Louisiana coast is also one of the most rapidly sinking and disappearing landscapes on the planet.

Since 1932, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of wetlands.

A variety of factors play into that land loss, including subsidence, sea-level rise, oil field canals which interrupted natural tidal flows, and the Mississippi River levee system installed following the 1927 flood.

A University of California study recently found South Louisiana is sinking more quickly than any other river delta on earth.

The river, once a land-building powerhouse, is now mostly cut off from the delta it nourished through annual floods.

Over the centuries, experts say the river had delivered mountains of sediment.

“If you took the Himalayas and shaved them off at sea level, flipped them upside down, they’d be five miles deep,” said Chris McLindon, a geologist who has been active in coastal issues. “That volume is comparable to the amount of sediment the Mississippi River has delivered to the Gulf Coast.”

A number of studies have suggested that the modern river delivers significantly less sediment, much of which is trapped behind locks and dams far upriver from New Orleans.

For areas at risk of hurricane storm surge, it means the loss of natural hurricane defenses and a buffer against storm surge.

“If I’m sitting in Miami, I don’t have a coast I can try to keep between me and hurricane landfalls,” said Mark Davis, Research Professor and Director, Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy at Tulane University. “If I’m in Norfolk, Virginia, I don’t have the same capacity to create a sea-level rise storm buffer between me and Chesapeake Bay.”

Louisiana has fought back to restore some of this ecosystem, building projects which restored or nurtured 55,000 acres and more than 70 miles of barrier islands.

However, the state recently changed course, abandoning plans for large-scale sediment diversion projects which had been the linchpins of its coastal program.

The administration of Governor Jeff Landry sided with critics, including many commercial fishermen, who worried large amounts of river water would have damaged marine life and commercial fisheries.

Creppel, a vocal diversion supporter, remains optimistic Louisiana can overcome the infighting and find a way to save its delta.

“If we want to save this estuary and this coast, we have to come together,” Creppel said. “If we continue fighting over it, we really don’t have a chance.”