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Restoring The Atchafalaya River's Flow

Jesse Hardman
Maps of the Atchafalaya River Basin

Most of the environmental restoration focus in Louisiana has centered around saving the disappearing wetlands around the Gulf Coast. But there’s another attempted restoration in the works, a little higher up. Local scientists affiliated with the Nature Conservancy are planning to repair water flow along the Atchafalaya River Basin.

In the 1840s a German immigrant named Anton Wilbert arrived in South Louisiana to work on the railroad. Working around Morgan City, Wilbert started to see possibilities in the acres of freshwater swamp that surrounded him. “He saw the Atchafalaya Basin and saw these just beautiful Cypress trees...beautiful forest. And he said wow...this could be a great opportunity for me here.”

 

That’s Jim Bergan of the Louisiana chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He says Anton Wilbert saw potential in timber, he was a woodsman and a coffin maker. "They cut down a lot of timber there, at the time, they were looking at ways of making a living for themselves, and create a supply of cypress which fed the growing, gulf coast market."

 

Credit Jesse Hardman
Bayou Sorrel, a distributary of the Atchafalaya River

Five generations of Wilbert’s family accumulated more than 100,000 acres of land around the region. They harvested timber, and later drilled for oil. Bergan says the family recently saw new potential in the land they’d owned for a century and a half. With environmental concerns growing about the health of the Atchafalaya River Basin, they realized the best use for some of their land was to dedicate it to scientific research. "They recognize that we have some hydrologic issues that definitely need to be addressed. They have responsibility to shareholders. Hydrological restoration isn’t a profitable enterprise."

The family's company, A. Wilbert's Sons, sold 5,300 acres on the Eastern side of the Atchafalaya River Basin to the Nature Conservancy, Bergan’s employer. Now it’s up to him, and partners at LSU and the state’s department of natural resources, to figure out why this fresh water swamp isn’t working the way it’s supposed to.

Bergan and his colleague Bryan Piazza have spent years researching the Wilbert's swampland. Piazza’s a freshwater and coastal specialist too. He navigates his boat to Bayou Sorrel, where some of the newly acquired land is. "The water comes up, the water in the river rises, these distributaries deliver water into the forest where it slows down, the nutrients are deposited, it fertilizes the trees, it helps everything grow. It helps the fish, it helps the crawfish. Then that water is supposed to flow down eventually to the Gulf of Mexico."

 

But Piazza says the plumbing is broken in this swamp. Water gets stuck, instead of freely flowing in and out of the forest. “So what’s happened in here, it takes higher and higher floods to get the swamp flooded, there’s places where the water can’t get out.”

 

That’s a problem for the some 250,000 acres of Cypress trees that line the basin. They need some dry periods to go along with the wet ones. So what broke the plumbing in the Atchafalaya Basin? It used to work like a pipe with a lot of holes in it. The river was the pipe, and the 30 distributaries, offshoots of the river, spread out, feeding the swampland with nutrients. Jim Bergan says the Federal Flood Control Act forced the Army Corps of Engineers to plug the holes. “The Corps been very successful in turning this basin into a floodway.”

 

 

They needed the Atchafalaya to push water faster out into the gulf, and make sure Baton Rouge, New Orleans and other population centers didn’t get flooded. One of the few surviving distributaries of the Atchafalaya is called Bayou Sorrel. It’s where Bergan and Piazza spend a lot of their time researching how to restore this river delta. Piazza says the aim of this restoration is to bring water through the forest in a slow way, "where it can deposit the nutrients to fertilize the trees and drive that biological productivity and then to get the water off."

 

Now that Bergan and Piazza’s employer, the Nature Conservancy, owns the land, they are excited to establish a research center deep in the swamp, and get to work. And while they are relative newcomers to an area that is steeped in local knowledge, they feel like they’ve got a mandate to repair the Atchafalaya’s plumbing says Bergan.

 

"A lot of people we talk to, that are out here, guy on the boat just coming through, they’re out here every 

Credit Jesse Hardman

day, we’re not, and, even though they don’t have a degree in hydrology, or some other discipline, the first person a lot of these folks with the hunting clubs, and the fishermen, they ask about, what are we going to do with the water."

The Nature Conservancy plans to invest 10 million dollars as part of their Atchafalaya River Basin Initiative in the next 10 years. That money will go towards the land acquisition, establishing a research center in the river basin, working with the state on restoration projects, and helping to fund academic research on river delta systems.

Support for WWNO's Coastal Desk comes from the Walton Family Foundation, Kabacoff Family Foundation and Greater New Orleans Foundation.

 

As the new Coastal Reporter, Jesse Hardman will draw on 15 years of worldwide experience in radio, video and print journalism. As a radio reporter he has reported for NPR, BBC, and CBC, and for such familiar programs as Marketplace, This American Life, Latino USA, and Living on Earth. He served as a daily news reporter and news magazine producer for WBEZ in Chicago.

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