Local leaders announced Thursday the beginning of a project to restore a key area of cypress swampland near the Lower 9th Ward, an effort they called essential to protecting the metro area in the event of another major hurricane.
Swinging shovels full of dirt, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro said the eventual restoration of the 30,000-acre triangle of the once-vibrant Central Wetlands will be part of the several lines of defense that will keep the area safe from storm surge.
The project, first proposed by the Sewerage & Water Board's environmental affairs division, is being built by the water board and St. Bernard Parish. The first phase, which will restore 2,300 acres, will cost $10 million and will be paid for by the federal Coastal Impact Assistance Program, which is financed by offshore oil revenue. Another $30 million will be made available to expand the effort in the next few years.
“This is one of those bright spots where governments join together, crossing parish lines in Louisiana, and do something good for the public, good for the future of all of our communities,” Taffaro said.
“It really sends a message to the rest of America that its critically important that we rebuild all of Louisiana, all of New Orleans, all of St. Bernard because we all have common threats,” Landrieu said.
In 1956, before the completion of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the Central Wetlands contained about 8,000 acres of swamp, 7,600 acres of freshwater marsh, 4,000 acres of brackish and salt marsh, and more than 1,000 acres of forest. The MR-GO cut through several natural ridges in St. Bernard Parish, funneling salt water into the area, where it killed cypress and freshwater marshes. By 1978, only 28 acres of forest remained.
The project’s first phase involves raising the soil level in two patches of the sunken triangle so that bald cypress trees and freshwater wetland plants can survive. The triangle is formed by the 40-Arpent Levee and the levee adjacent to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet and Gulf Intracoastal Waterway that follows the historic path of Bayou Bienvenue.
Material will be dredged from inside the triangle and mixed with 1,000 tons of incinerated ash and 5 tons of dried bio-solids from the city’s nearby East Bank Sewage Treatment Plant. Treated water rich in nutrients will be pumped from the plant into the triangle at about 100 cubic feet per minute to reduce the water’s salinity. Treated wastewater and solids from St. Bernard’s Riverbend and Munster sewage treatment facilities also will be funneled into the open water area.
The first two rectangles of restored wetlands will be strategically placed to block future hurricane storm surges from hitting the sewage plant, which was swamped by floodwaters when levees and floodwalls failed and were overtopped during Katrina.
New Orleans and St. Bernard officials traveled to Washington, D.C., last week to discuss the potential for the federal government to begin funding a separate $3 billion plan to combat erosion caused by the MR-GO. That project includes a diversion of Mississippi River water near Violet that would funnel freshwater into the triangle to assist in the cypress restoration program.
Taffaro said that while Obama administration officials were supportive of the preliminary plan, it’s doubtful such an expensive project would win immediate support from Congress in today’s economic climate.
Money for the CIAP-financed pieces of the plan already are guaranteed, though.
When completed, planners expect the growing cypress and marsh plant life to increase the growth of land in the triangle, as the plants deposit organic matter as they die.
Scientists also say the new marshland will help remove carbon from the air, thus assisting in the reduction of a pollutant linked to global warming. They estimate that 50 years of growth for the first 2,000 acres would remove carbon equivalent to removing more than 500,000 cars from the road.
Mark Schleifstein can be reached at email@example.com or 504.826.3327.