PLAQUEMINES PARISH, Louisiana — Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the cancellation of a $3 billion wetland restoration project has upended a hard-won consensus about how to rebuild this state’s rapidly eroding coast and shield the New Orleans area from future storms.
Engineers and scientists for decades have studied the erosion of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, which are disappearing into open water at a faster pace than anywhere else in the nation. The devastation wrought by Katrina forced state leaders to get serious about the problem and craft a 50-year strategy featuring an ambitious plan to harness mud and sand carried by the Mississippi River to build new land.
The idea was simple: To help protect New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities, Louisiana must restore the natural protection offered by wetlands that slow down hurricanes and absorb storm surge.
But in July, almost two years after construction broke ground on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry canceled the project. He said it had gotten too expensive and threatened the seafood industry vital to south Louisiana’s culture.
Coastal scientists and conservationists are now unsure what comes next as land losses continue, climate change accelerates and questions remain about the $618 million already spent on the project. Critics of the move see this moment as a return to a pre-Katrina tradition of politics determining how the state spends coastal restoration money instead of being guided by scientific evidence.
“We worked very, very hard to get the politics out of coastal policy,” said Sidney Coffee, who chaired the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) after Katrina under former Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat. “I think we’re back to square one. The politics are absolutely back.”
Suggested by state officials during the Blanco administration, the Mid-Barataria project emerged as a key component of Louisiana’s coastal plan under Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and remained so when Democrat John Bel Edwards took office in 2016.
That record of support ended with Landry, a close ally of President Donald Trump who became governor in 2024.
Author John Barry, a Tulane University professor who wrote “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America,” said he saw the scrapping of the project as an existential decision.
“I think it’s a disaster for the future of Louisiana,” said Barry, who got involved in hurricane protection after Katrina as a member of both the state coastal authority and a levee board in the New Orleans area. “The length of time that went into that, getting the approval, starting the work, the number of governors who supported it of both parties, the virtual unanimity of the scientific and environmental community in support, and the fabricated reasons for canceling it, it all adds up to a serious blow to the future of the state.”
But Landry’s decision was celebrated by some in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, particularly commercial oyster farmers. The project would have destroyed prime oyster harvesting spots and crushed the parish’s seafood-dependent economy, according to opponents like former parish President Billy Nungesser.
Now the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Nungesser has questioned whether Mid-Barataria would have actually built new land.
“When you talk to all these organizations, they say it’s the best thing since sliced bread,” Nungesser said. “All these coastal projects we’ve built over the last 20 years, most of them have washed away.”
Landry’s office declined requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions. The governor has echoed some of Nungesser’s criticisms, saying that axing the project protects Louisiana fisheries and that long-term costs had escalated because of litigation.
While the state was using money from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement to pay for the diversion, any costs above $2.9 billion would not have been covered, Landry said last fall at a legislative hearing.
“CPRA is now moving forward with another coastal restoration plan — one that balances our environmental goals with the needs of all citizens, businesses and industries,” Landry’s office said in a statement.
‘Nothing experimental about this’
Louisiana’s wetlands began fading into the Gulf of Mexico nearly a century ago, a phenomenon driven by human activities like oil and gas drilling and infrastructure like levees built to control the Mississippi River. In recent years, sea-level rise and powerful storms have exacerbated the trend.
The sediment diversion project was projected to build up to 20 square miles of new land over 50 years to help slow down storms, absorb floodwaters and save some of Louisiana’s iconic swamps. It would’ve done so by diverting sediment-laden river water into the Barataria Basin, a wetland-rich area south and west of New Orleans that has seen severe land losses.
The project was designed to mimic the very processes that formed the river delta centuries ago, long before wetlands were cut off from the river by levees and canals.
The CPRA said it could not answer questions on the project’s cancellation. But Greg Grandy, the coastal resources administrator at the agency, said the state is moving forward with other wetlands restoration initiatives and has restored all 11 barrier islands in the Barataria Basin.
“When you’re looking at projects being done right now that provide protection for the hurricane, storm damage and risk reduction system in New Orleans, we’ll be completing in October of this year the largest marsh creation project that we’ve ever built, in St. Bernard Parish,” Grandy said.
The authority also plans to direct money approved for the diversion to new projects. Those include a plan to introduce a smaller amount of Mississippi River water into the Barataria Basin wetlands and to use dredged sediment to build marshland.
Mitch Jurisich, a Plaquemines Parish resident and third-generation oyster farmer, described the cancellation of the sediment diversion as vital for his industry. He and other commercial oystermen had sued to stop the project, along with the Earth Island Institute, a California-based nonprofit concerned about projected harms to bottlenose dolphins and oyster reefs.
After years of fighting with the state, Jurisich said he finally feels like someone is listening to him. Since Landry came into office and appointed Gordon Dove as the new chair of the coastal authority, they have been in conversation “almost on a daily basis,” Jurisich said.
“We’re finally at the table,” said Jurisich, who also sits on the Plaquemines Parish Council.
Mid-Barataria was projected to harm privately leased oyster harvesting grounds, and the state had committed $54 million to help affected fisheries. Overall, communities expected to see adverse effects would have gotten $378 million in mitigation benefits, an amount the state bumped up in 2022 in response to feedback.
Some scientists, environmental advocates and residents have questioned whether the potential alternatives would make the most of the state’s limited funding.
Mid-Barataria was critical for addressing the root causes of land loss, said Austin Feldbaum, the hazard mitigation administrator for the city of New Orleans.
“It’s really only these big projects, which attempt to harness natural forces and nature-based solutions, that have a potential impact at a scale proportional to the problem we have,” said Feldbaum, who previously worked as a scientist at the CPRA.
The chief concern is time — and land — that will be lost as the state determines a path forward.
One alternate project described by the Landry administration, the Myrtle Grove Medium Diversion, was authorized by Congress in 2007. But it’s been on the shelf for years and would need to undergo a full study by the Army Corps of Engineers before it could be approved. That process typically takes three years and costs $3 million, said Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the agency.
Meanwhile, the CPRA has said that $618 million of the state’s oil spill settlement money had already been spent on Mid-Barataria. It remains unclear whether the state will need to pay that back, said Jerome Zeringue, a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives who previously served as the state authority’s executive director.
Zeringue said he does not want to spend time “lamenting” Mid-Barataria’s demise but acknowledged its importance to the state’s coastal restoration strategy.
“The key feature is that to sustain and preserve the coast, we’re going to have to connect the river,” he said. “In the future, we have to look for similar projects.”
The bitter debate about the project is front and center as state leaders reflect on the 20th anniversary of Katrina.
At a recent public forum, former Republican Rep. Garret Graves, who also served as Jindal’s coastal adviser, lambasted those who’ve claimed the project wasn’t backed by science.
“There’s nothing experimental about this. You’re a complete, uninformed, third-time idiot if you think that’s the case,” Graves said during the forum, in an apparent jab at Dove, also in attendance.
Dove shot back, according to a video of the exchange posted by Louisiana Public Broadcasting. “For Garret to use the word idiot … Garret, I raised money for you. I supported you in the election,” said Dove. “Garret, I want to know one question: Can you come sit down with me and look at all the facts and figures?”
“I’d love to, anytime,” Graves replied.
A changing landscape
On a recent August morning, the stretch of river levee slated for Mid-Barataria remained stripped of trees and flanked by a construction truck.
The diversion would have been built on the west bank of the Mississippi, about 25 miles south of New Orleans near the Plaquemines Parish town of Ironton. With fewer than 200 residents, the historically Black community was expected to see increased storm surge due to the project, as would several other similarly sized communities nearby.
Still, by 2070, the predominant driver of storm surge increases would have been sea-level rise, not the diversion, according to an environmental impact statement. In 2017, the state estimated that Plaquemines Parish could lose 55 percent of its land area over 50 years without any action to restore the coast.
That long-term trend is part of why project supporters saw the cancellation as shortsighted.
Foster Creppel, who runs an inn at a former plantation in West Pointe à la Hache south of Ironton, said coastal management should be about balancing different economic interests. In addition to oyster farming and other kinds of seafood, the area benefits from tourism and is full of people who love exploring the bayous and wetlands — himself included.
“The oyster industry is not doing great down here,” Creppel said. “But our coast is not just an oyster reef. It’s not just a ridge of trees, and it’s not just fresh water. It’s the balance of all those things.”
The diversion location was chosen after extensive studies on the river’s configuration and sediment levels, said Denise Reed, an independent consultant and research scientist who has worked on coastal issues in Louisiana since the late 1980s.
“It would build land,” she said. “Not only is this something that scientists understand, through geological studies and field studies, but it’s something we have many, many analogues for across the Louisiana coast.”
The wetlands in the Barataria Basin, west of the Mississippi River, declined by an average of 5,700 acres per year between 1974 and 1990, according to state estimates. Signs of the die-off are visible while driving through parts of the basin, where the trees appeared charred, likely due to subsidence and the creep of salt water, according to coastal scientists.
Getting fresh water into the basin is critical not just for land-building but saving land that has not yet washed away, Reed said. That’s because saltier wetlands are more vulnerable to subsidence, or land sinking, she said. Although the rate of subsidence in southeastern Louisiana has generally slowed since the 1980s and 1990s, it remains among the highest in the world.
“If we don’t get fresh water in there, then basically, the Gulf of Mexico is coming,” Reed said.
That risk is a top concern for Albertine Kimble, whose home in the tiny community of Carlisle is elevated on stilts 23 feet in the air to fend off floods.
“We’re not going to be able to live here eventually. That’s the bottom line,” said Kimble, who once worked as the coastal manager for the Plaquemines Parish government.
Semi-retired, she spends her time duck hunting, planting cypress trees, driving airboats for companies like Entergy, and watching ships go up and down the Mississippi from the levee near her home.
Friendly with many diversion opponents in the area — including Nungesser, her former boss — Kimble said the cancellation of the project will eventually cause everyone to lose out. Southern Plaquemines Parish never really recovered from Katrina, and insurance costs have skyrocketed, she said.
“Everybody wants dredging, and I agree with them,” Kimble said. “But what’s causing [the land] to sink is cutting off the main artery of the river here: You gotta sustain what you build.”
Nungesser said he spoke to Landry about his concerns about the diversion in early 2023, around the time he decided not to get into the open governor’s race that Landry eventually won. In Louisiana, the lieutenant governor mostly oversees culture and tourism initiatives and is elected separately from the governor.
He did not ask him to cancel the project, Nungesser said, but implored Landry to “look at the facts of this diversion and not the people that make political donations.”
“He told me he would look at it and judge it based on the facts of whether it was the best thing to spend dollars on coastal restoration for,” Nungesser said. “I applaud him for standing up and doing the right thing.”
River passes and ‘dirty politics’
Farther south than the proposed diversion site, near the fishing town of Empire, the muddy Mississippi is working its magic through a process similar to the one envisioned for Mid-Barataria.
Since 2019, the river has been spilling into an old offshore oil well field called Quarantine Bay, east of the river. It began by accident, when the river burst through the levee at a spot known as Neptune Pass, said Alex Kolker, an associate professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
At first glance, the bay itself is an unremarkable stretch of water, dotted with a few docks used by the oil and gas industry. But since the pass expanded into a new distributary, mud flats, marshes and land have burst above the surface, Kolker said.
“This was everything I dreamed about right here,” Ryan Lambert, a fishing guide and longtime Plaquemines Parish resident, said on a recent visit by boat.
Lambert admired the willows and grasses, some of which had been planted by researchers and volunteers. He and Richie Blink, who runs a local ecotourism company, named the range of birds spotted nearby: laughing gulls, black terns, black-necked stilts, great egrets and plovers.
Cruising into the bay until the water became too shallow to pass through, Kolker stepped out of the boat and onto a mudflat. He then started walking on what he described as some of the youngest land in North America.
“This would’ve been four or five feet of water five years ago,” he said.
Here on the lower, eastern reaches of the Mississippi, the Army Corps of Engineers no longer regularly maintains the levee, Kolker said, which allows river passes to form.
Supporters of the diversion, like Lambert, see the passes as a real-life example of the river’s power to build land. He grew up catching redfish and speckled trout, as well as hunting ducks in wetlands and bayous that he said no longer exist.
These days, he only comes to the east side of the river, because wetlands on the west side — in the Barataria Basin — have been dying out since he was a teenager, he said.
Yet while the passes have nourished and built new wetlands, they also pose problems for navigation. The Army Corps is now working to prevent Neptune Pass from becoming the main distributary of the Mississippi River.
Sean Duffy, who runs a trade group focused on protecting river commerce, said he feared Mid-Barataria would have caused similar navigation problems farther up the Mississippi River.
“There’s just no way to divert that much water and not have a negative impact on the ship channel,” Duffy said.
And for commercial oystermen like Bernie Picone, who has been in the business for 25 years, the river passes represent the death of oyster harvesting grounds that once sustained families.
Until the mid-2000s, Picone would harvest oysters on the east side. Now, he only goes to the west side, where the river remains behind the levee.
“There’s just nothing left over there,” said Picone, who currently works for Jurisich.
The diversion project, he said, would have caused a die-off in the oyster bottoms that remain. Oysters have the best chance of survival in brackish water, with a salinity range of 5 to 15 parts per thousand, so too much river water could kill them.
Diversion supporters stressed that they understand the concerns of people in the oyster industry. But not everyone agrees that the diversion would have been its demise.
Robert Twilley, the vice president of research and economic development at Louisiana State University, said oyster beds have moved inland in the Barataria Basin over the years, as land losses accelerated and salinity increased.
The estuary today is “highly engineered,” due to the Army Corps of Engineers’ extensive system of flood control and navigation infrastructure, he said. If the Mid-Barataria diversion had been built, oyster harvest reefs could have been planted farther out as wetlands were rebuilt, said Twilley, who is also a coastal sciences professor.
With the project now dead, scientists and advocates hope the state settles on another way to quickly protect remaining wetlands.
One Tulane University river-coastal science and engineering professor, Ehab Meselhe, said he is researching a potential alternative project that could introduce sediment into the Barataria Basin, while causing a smaller change in salinity. The research is still in an early stage, Meselhe said.
Lambert, the fishing guide, said it will be critical to continue monitoring the few areas in the river delta where wetlands are forming, such as Quarantine Bay. He wasn’t hesitant, however, to express his displeasure with the state’s current direction on coastal restoration and spiking of Mid-Barataria.
“I’ve been a champion for this project for 20 years,” Lambert said. “All the science in the world don’t beat dirty politics.”
