After the Spill

In the battered Gulf, the work of rebuilding and restoration begins

Posted: 25-Aug-2010; Updated: 31-Aug-2010

By Rod Griffin

The BP disaster offered a painful lesson on the importance of the Gulf’s wetlands to the nation’s economy and its wildlife. Now, with the well capped, the focus shifts to the challenge of restoring these long-abused ecosystems.

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig sank into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico on April 22, the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, no one foresaw the scale of the tragedy that was to follow. It took another 85 days to contain the gusher, but only after some 200 million gallons of oil had spewed into the Gulf of Mexico. That’s 19 times the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

Louisiana has borne the brunt of the disaster, and the state’s coastal wetlands—which provide one-third of the nation’s fish and shellfish harvest and act as buffers against hurricanes—were already in trouble long before the spill. Louisiana loses some 20 to 30 square miles of coastal land each year, roughly an acre every half hour.

The bayous of Lafourche and Terre-bonne Parish, near New Orleans, are ground zero. Literally. Their wetlands are receding so fast that navigation maps on fishing boats show land where there is now only water.

BP’s spill has only made this ecological crisis worse, jeopardizing wildlife, the livelihoods of fishermen and the future of coastal communities. The entire economy of southern Louisiana—and much of the Gulf region—has been hit by the disaster, from fishermen to oil rig workers to the tourist industry.

Driving south on Highway 56, past idled shrimp boats and shuttered juke joints, one hears the heartache. “I’ve owned this restaurant for 37 years,” says Connie Townsend, proprietor of Sportsman’s Paradise, a local hangout about two hours from New Orleans. “I’ve rebuilt 13 times after hurricanes,” she adds, fighting back tears. “If this spill closes me down, I’ll never walk through that door again.”

Yet many Gulf residents retain hope. Like the Gulf itself, they are resilient. “After the hurricanes, we’ve always been able to bounce back,” says shrimper Lance Nacio, who operates a 55-foot boat out of Larose, LA. “This will be a challenge, but I believe Mother Nature eventually will repair herself.”

A 35-year mission in the Gulf

Decades before the BP disaster or Hurricane Katrina, EDF was already in Louisiana, striving to restore the state’s vanishing wetlands. In recent years, we helped close the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which had destroyed tens of thousands of acres of wetlands on the east side of New Orleans and channeled Katrina’s storm surge into the heart of the city. Now our efforts have become even more urgent.

“This disaster didn’t begin with the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and it doesn’t end with the capping of the well,” says Elgie Holstein, EDF’s disaster response team coordinator, who testified on Capitol Hill in support of tighter regulations and additional safeguards for high-risk, deepwater drilling.

Our wetlands experts and marine scientists are working on immediate relief efforts and long-term plans to restore the Gulf Coast. We’re also doggedly pushing policymakers in Washington to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation that will finally end our nation’s oil addiction.

EDF president Fred Krupp met with Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, the administration’s point person on Gulf recovery efforts, to press for emergency funding to support wetlands restoration—and for beginning the work immediately. The funds would come from civil penalties and damages paid by BP (as much as $16 billion) and from future fees on oil.

“What’s important is what we do after we put away the rubber boots and the mop-up equipment,” Holstein says. “We must never let this happen again.”

The Mississippi River, once described by Mark Twain as too thick to drink and too thin to plow, is loaded with rich Midwestern soils. Over a period of 7,000 years, the river’s spring floods deposited sediments in what is now southern Louisiana, creating a huge delta sheltering the region around New Orleans from storms.

The Mississippi Delta is an economic as well as a natural marvel. These are the most productive wetlands in America. They nurture a $2.5 billion fishing industry and are a vital wintering or resting spot for 70% of America’s migratory waterfowl.

“If you ask why the Gulf of Mexico is so productive from a resource point of view, in terms of fish and wildlife, it’s because of this deltaic system,” says EDF coastal scientist Dr. Angelina Freeman.

Delta Blues

But the Delta has been steadily shrinking for nearly a century. Its soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh sediment offsets the subsidence. The Mississippi’s spring floods once maintained that balance, but after a devastating flood in 1927, levees were built along the river, funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf.

A second factor causing Delta erosion is the massive footprint of the oil, gas and shipping industries.  Engineers have cut thousands of miles of canals through the marshlands for petroleum exploration, pipelines and ship traffic. These ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.

The result? Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost a third of its coastal wetlands—2,300 square miles—an area larger than Delaware.

A way of life imperiled

Lance Nacio’s story illustrates what’s at stake. For more than a century, his family owned 1,500 acres of freshwater marshland, about 30 miles inland in Lafourche Parish. His grandparents were farmers. They raised cattle, grew crops for food and trapped mink and muskrat for their pelts. “My dad worked in the oil fields,” Nacio says, “but we lived off the land.”

Over the last 20 years, however, Nacio has lost 25% of his land to erosion or subsidence. To adapt, he bought a shrimp boat in 1998 and began selling wild-caught shrimp directly to local retailers and upscale markets like Whole Foods. Then came the oil spill, putting his livelihood in jeopardy.

“If anything good comes out of this,” Nacio says, “Louisiana will finally get some recognition. This should be a wake-up call for the rest of the country to see how important—and how vulnerable—these wetlands are.”

Destruction of the Mississippi Delta is “by far the largest and most tragic loss of ecological resources in the country,” says EDF senior counsel Jim Tripp, who began work to protect Louisiana wetlands in 1973 and is a member of the Louisiana Governor’s Advisory Commission on Coastal Protection, Restoration and Conservation. “It ranks with the oil spill disaster—only it has taken place over 80 years and is still ongoing.”

EDF has called on the Obama administration and Congress to accelerate the design and implementation of a long-term Mississippi Delta restoration plan on the scale of the project to restore the Florida Everglades. The price—more than $2 billion a year for decades—won’t be cheap. But the cost of inaction is even greater.

“If we fail to reverse the collapse of the Delta, the economic and environmental costs could mount into the trillions,” explains Paul Harrison, EDF’s senior director of rivers and deltas. “Finding the resources for Delta restoration will take huge political will, but it must be done.”

Congress already has authorized 17 near-term projects (to be completed within five years), with the principal goal of redirecting sediments to the wetlands. EDF helped the House approve $1.2 billion in July to jump-start immediate restoration projects. Now the onus is on the Senate to follow suit.

The Mississippi Delta may never return to the grandeur of Mark Twain’s day, but the region can be made whole again.  “For things to really work, the oil companies have to bring things back to where they were—or better,” says Nacio. “Give us some hope back, and we’ll have a future.”