Posted on March 6, 2024
Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry’s administration is signaling it wants to shift some priorities in the state’s effort to restore and protect shoreline.
“My priority is segmented, breakwater rocks on our barrier islands — our coastline from Texas to Mississippi,” said Gordon Dove, chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
Dove cites as an example Raccoon Island, in his home parish of Terrebonne.
The island was rapidly eroding a couple decades ago, until a project spaced rocks along the island’s Gulf side.
Today, the island remains largely intact, home each spring to several thousand brown pelicans that nest there.
“Raccoon Island is very, very successful,” Dove said at last month’s CPRA meeting. “It went through two Cat 1s, Ida, Hurricane Barry, three non-named storms, and it looks like the day that it started.”
Not all efforts to deploy rocks have been successful. Two decades ago, contractors encircled Wine Island, south of Houma, in rocks. Over time, the tiny shoal that remained migrated outside the rock barrier. Today, the island is gone.
Dove said he believes segmented rocks, spaced apart, can play a greater role in providing shoreline protection in the future.
He cites another example at the Rockefeller State Refuge in Southwestern Louisiana.
Brown pelicans crowd onto Raccoon Island in Terrebonne Parish
A 2015 Google Earth image shows wine island migrate outside rock barriers.
There, a $34 million project encased an aggregate material below segmented rocks to protect a rapidly-eroding shoreline.
