Posted on February 20, 2018
By Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com
The federal-state Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act task force announced Thursday (Feb. 15) that it has approved spending $62 million to begin engineering and design work on four projects and to move two projects into construction.
The task force’s Jan. 25 meeting to consider approval of the projects was cancelled by a government shutdown forced by a failure to Congress to vote in time on a supplementary budget spending law. Instead, it held an electronic vote on Feb. 9 to approve the projects.
The new projects are:
– $3.7 million for first-phase planning of the Mid-Breton Land Bridge Marsh Creation and Terracing in Plaquemines Parish, just west of Delacroix along Bayou Gentilly. At a total cost of $40.9 million, this project would use sediment dredged from Lake Lery and pumped to the project site to create or nourish 451 acres of marsh and to create 22,960 linear feet of terraces.
– $3.2 million for initial costs on the Bayou Cane Marsh Creation on the big Branch National Wildlife Refuge in St. Tammany Parish. The project will create or nourish about 499 acres of marsh, using material mined from Lake Pontchartrain, at a full project cost of about $34 million.
– $4 million for initial work on the Northeast Turtle Bay Marsh Creation and Critical Area Shoreline Protection, located east of the Harvey Canal in Jefferson Parish. This project would create about 377 acres of marsh and nourish another 300 acres, using sediment dredged from Turtle Bay. The project also will protect about a half-mile long segment of the shoreline of the bay. The full project cost is $44.1 million.
– $3.8 million for initial work on the Sabine Marsh Creation, cycles 6 and 7. The project would restore marsh habitat in open water and in deteriorated marsh area west of the Calcasieu Ship Channel in the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge, in Cameron Parish. The project would use material dredged from the ship channel during two scheduled corps maintenance dredging projects to create about 900 acres of marsh and nourish another 29 acres, at a total cost of $27.9 million.
The task force also moved two projects to final design and construction:
– Caminada Headlands Back Barrier Marsh Creation will receive $28.7 million to create or nourish 395 acres of back barrier marsh by pumping sediment from an offshore borrow site and create a platform on which the beach and dune area along the southern shoreline can migrate northward. That would reduce the likelihood that this shoreline would be breached by storms. The project is in an area south of Louisiana 1 between Belle Pass and Caminada Pass in Lafourche Parish.
– The Cameron-Creole Freshwater Introduction project will receive $18.6 million to redirect freshwater into a large area of wetlands east of Calcasieu Lake in Cameron Parish. The project also includes creating marsh terraces and replanting wetland grasses in some areas that were seriously damaged by saltwater intrusion during hurricanes dating back to Katrina and Rita in 2005.
Created by Congress in 1990, CWPPRA task force members include representatives of the Army Corps of Engineers, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and the National Marine Service from the federal government, and a representative of the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
The task force has authorized 214 projects since it began, with 154 projects that are still active. The projects receive 85 percent of their money from the federal government and 15 percent from the state. Its annual budget has grown from about $30 million to about $80 million a year.
Source: nola
