BATON ROUGE, La. (CN) — Environmental groups sued the Corps of Engineers in federal court Wednesday over the approval of a coastal project in the Atchafalaya Basin they say will destroy wetlands, decimate wildlife including crawfish, and result in diminished flood protection for New Orleans and Baton Rouge over the next 50 years — an era during which the cities’ primary hope for survival rests upon flood mitigation.
What’s more, the plaintiffs says, the U.S. Corps of Engineers appears to have approved the project, the East Grand Lake (EGL) project, without conducting any research of its own and without first performing an Environmental Impact Statement, which is required under the Clean Water Act.
"With the goal of increasing flow, the EGL Project will simultaneously introduce sediment- and fertilizer-laden Mississippi River water into the interior swamp of the Atchafalaya Basin, in a 5000+ acre area within East Grand Lake," the plaintiffs say in the lawsuit.
Had the Corps performed the required EIS, it would have known that sedimentation and loss of flood mitigation in the basin would be a likely result of the project, plaintiffs say in their lawsuit.
“If the Atchafalaya Basin floodway cannot capture and pass the projected floods due to sedimentation and loss of capacity, there will be cascading effects through south Louisiana, including for major cities, the port of South Louisiana, and the Mississippi River industrial corridor, that will be subjected to greater and more regular flooding,” the plaintiffs say.
The lawsuit was filed by Lisa Jordan of the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University. It says the Corps violated the Clean Water Act in permitting the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s permit to allow the dredging and filling of impacted wetlands.
Plaintiffs are Atchafalaya Basinkeeper Inc., Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West, Waterkeeper Alliance, Healthy Gulf, and Sierra Club, Delta Chapter.
“The Corps’ determination that impacts of the Project would not be significant was based on checkboxes with little to no discussion,” plaintiffs say.
“Where the Corps included discussion of impacts below the checkboxes and stated those impacts would be minor, the Corps provided no explanation of why it found the impacts would be minor," they add in their lawsuit.
Although the project is called a “swamp enhancement project,” plaintiffs said in a press release Wednesday that “experience and sound science demonstrate that the project will lead to increased sedimentation in the East Grand Lake area. This will ultimately convert productive and vital swamp habitat into bottomland hardwood forest by introducing sediment-laden river water and physically dispersing dredged sediment in the area. Sedimentation severely harms the basin because it decreases flood storage capacity, and the basin is a vital part of Mississippi River flood control management.”
According to the plaintiffs, over the past two decades, the U.S. Corps of Engineers, acting at the request of the state’s Coastal Restoration Authority, has approved at least three other projects against local opposition and without scientific backing in the Atchafalaya Basin, including “Buffalo Cove," “Coon Trap,” and “Beau Bayou.” Each has had dire consequences for the Atchafalaya Basin, resulting in too much sedimentation.
The basin is a network of swamps that together are some of the most productive in the world. Grand Lake specifically is considered the most important estuary for fish in the eastern portion of the basin.
Deep water habitat within the basin is being lost at an alarming rate, due in large part to excessive sediment and contorted distribution of sediment. Without deep water, fish cannot survive low water seasons.
The Corps’ project that is at the center of the plaintiff's claims would allow sediment and Mississippi River Water, which is notorious for collecting fertilizer as it travels across the U.S., to stagnate in the Atchafalaya Basin, in Grand Bay Lake, causing the lake to fill with sediment and the heavily fertilized water to create dead zones — areas so devoid of oxygen no life can survive, plaintiffs' say.
Calling the Corps' permit “crazy,” Dean Wilson, executive director of Atchafalaya Basinkeeper said in the press release that this project, like the three aforementioned projects, would be the beginning of the end for one of the most important remaining waterways in the world.
“Every year the basin is losing critically important flood capacity, putting cities like Lafayette, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and our entire Mississippi River industrial corridor at a terrible risk from Mississippi River floods,” Wilson said. “Against the wishes of fishermen and communities alike, our state is destroying some of the most amazing wetlands in the world, the last bastion of the Cajun culture, the most important wetlands for migratory birds in the western hemisphere and the future of our state.”
The press release additionally noted that a significant portion of projects such as this one “receive backing from oil and gas firms and large land corporations. These entities profit from alterations that disrupt commercial fishing and public access while facilitation the increased privatization of wetland forests for activities such as private logging and other purposes.”
Neither the U.S. Corps of Engineers nor the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority immediately responded to requests for comment.
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