The consensus is that the vast majority of Belle Chasse residents do not want another lift-bridge. They want the ease of a 100-foot fixed bridge: no waiting for passing marine traffic, no operator to pay, no mechanical equipment needing regular maintenance.

The online survey hosted by Senator David Heitmeier, O.D., showed more than 80 percent of respondents voted for the fixed bridge, while only 12 percent voted for
the 70-foot lift bridge, and 6 percent for the 60-foot lift bridge.

The survey echoes the sentiments expressed to Burk-Klienpeter representatives present at last week’s bridge/tunnel replacement meeting. With no formal presentation, residents went from table to table with maps and other informational material.
Burk-Klienpeter reps, at least one, but sometimes two, manned each table to answer resident questions. At the end of the meeting, the representatives noted that unless someone was directly affected by the fixed bridge’s footprint—mostly business owners and a few residents— people strongly wanted the fixed bridge.

“They should have did this [fixed] bridge when they did the first bridge and then we wouldn’t have this chaos,” said Jacklynn Lemoine referring to both the meeting
and the daily traffic delays, her friend Carol Cooper nodding in agreement.

The Impact
“There are pros and cons to all of [the replacement alternatives], especially for the
businesses,” said Fran Martinez, a school board member from District 5. Martinez and a group of home and business owners on L Street gathered around a map of the 100-foot bridge layout. Its footprint has the bridge’s south-of-the-canal start at L Street, where Delta Tires is located. The 100-foot bridge has no service road on the south side of the canal.

To get access to Barriere Road, (which as a completely separate project, is planned to be four-lanes), a road will be constructed taking land from the business owners on Hwy. 23 and L Street, and a few homes on L Street.
“I don’t think people are looking at the impact, because there is still going to be impact,” said Michele Greco, an L Street resident for 27 years, citing businesses and roads that would close, and residents forced to relocate.

Consider businesses, says Pam Galle, and what happens when businesses close.

“We’ll lose a lot of taxes coming into the parish,” she said, alluding to the sales- and
property-taxes that will be lost if the businesses just shut their door for good or relocate
outside Plaquemines.

There will be no access for businesses along Highway 23 from L Street to the canal. This area has both established businesses but also two new strip malls built about four years ago. Residents looking over the 100-foot bridge maps just shook their heads in frustration to see that the maps used were so old the two strip malls had
not yet been built.

“Under the 100-foot plan, it would hurt,” said Corey Arbourgh, General Manager
of Bayou Barriere Golf Club. “The plan sends all of my customers—conservatively
40,000 cars per year— through subdivisions.”

“Once this is serious, just have the affected businesses meet,” suggested Arbourgh.

Money and Tolls

The costs of the three options are relatively close:
• 100-foot fixed bridge: $201 million
• 70-foot lift bridge: $189.3 – $198 million
• 60-foot lift bridge: $170 – $179 million.

“It should eventually be cost affective to build the fixed bridge,” reasoned Stanley Gaudet of Jesuit Bend, meaning that with no lift equipment to maintain and replace, and no bridge tender to employ, the savings make the fixed bridge the most cost effective option.

“It would be stupid to spend $198 million on a lift bridge,” said Belle Chasse resident Irvin Juneau. “It would be twice as stupid to put a toll on it.”

Much of the conversations at the meeting focused on a potential toll. Parish President Billy Nungesser, in a Tuesday morning interview on WWL 870 radio with Tommy Tucker, said that getting a private company in to build a 60-foot bridge and toll it until it was paid off would be a quicker solution than waiting for state and federal dollars; the 60-foot lift bridge would not interrupt current traffic flow and would not force some businesses and residents to relocated.

It is not a popular solution, even among other elected officials.

“I’m not advocating a toll for the Highway 23 bridge,” said Heitmeier several times throughout the meeting to Belle Chasse residents. He said tolls were never a part of his plan for replacing the bridge and tunnel.

“We’re going to need local money, state money and federal money,” said Heitmeier.
But he said he is confident that funding will come through. “It’s an important artery with significant commerce— oil and gas.”

Projects like the bridge and tunnel replacement require more meetings and public hearings.

“I’m 70,” said Juneau. “I’m hoping it will be done when I’m 85.”

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New Orleanians have been feeling a bit smug since Hurricane Isaac. After all, the Corps of Engineers’ $14.6 billion levee system worked just fine.

Louisiana’s wetlands are disappearing at the rate of a football field per hour. Photo by John Hazlett

Not so fast, says wetlands journalist Bob Marshall, who leads groups for Lost Lands Environmental Tours, a company started in March by his wife, Marie Gould, and Lindsay Pick.

Those urban levees, he explains, do repel water from storm surges, but they are not meant to hold it permanently. They’re built with mud, and eventually water will seep through. And at the current rate of wetlands loss, water will be lapping against the levees 24/7 by the end of the century.

“Locals don’t understand the danger they’re in,” he says. “We live on a starving, sinking landscape that suffers both subsidence and global water rise. Every storm has greater impact.”

Here’s the backstory. Over the past 6,000 years, the Mississippi River picked up sediment from two-thirds of the continent and deposited it as it slowed near its end. That’s how deltas are built, as water spreads and overflows, then subsides and leaves sediment behind. When Bienville arrived in the early 18th century, the sediment was 400 feet deep at the river’s mouth.

But spring floods and river course changes, so vital to delta creation, aren’t too compatible with human habitation and cultivation. When the great flood of 1927 devastated most of the Mississippi River valley, Congress took action. Levees were built from Illinois to Venice, La., the largest, strongest levee system in the country.

“They built a straight jacket,” Marshall says. “With levees, the river sediment compresses and compacts and sinks.”

Still, levees alone wouldn’t have destroyed intact wetlands. Dredging upped the ante.

“When oil and gas was discovered in the coastal zone, we went after it in the fastest way possible,” Marshall explains. “We began dredging canals for pipelines and supply access.”

Some 10,000 miles of canals have been dredged in south Louisiana since the 1972 Clean Water Act, which required permits for it. Probably another 10,000 miles had been dug before permitting began.

Canals created two problems for wetlands: They brought in salt water from the Gulf, which killed plants. And the soil dug by the dredges was deposited canal-side, creating “spoil levees” that inhibited wetlands regeneration in the same way that river levees do.

“We have a tour called the Two Worlds of Plaquemines Parish that shows the striking difference made by spoil levees,” Marshall says. “On the east side, where there are no levees, it looks like the Amazon. On the west side, where they deposited the dredging soil, there’s practically no vegetation left.”

The final nail in the wetlands coffin arrived with global warming and concurrent sea level rise.

“This is not a computer model or speculation,” Marshall says. “This is being measured every day at tidal gauge stations. The sea level is rising 9.24 millimeters a year at Grand Isle, which is four times the rate of Key West. That’s because south Louisiana is sinking at the same time the water level rises.”

If nothing is done, Marshall warns, sometime between 2060 and 2090 everything outside the levee system will be gone. Waves lapping at the levees.

The ramifications are not merely local, but national – even global.

“Why shouldn’t we just pack up and leave?” Marshall asks. “Because, among other things, 70 percent of the country’s migratory waterfowl winter here, we have the top tonnage of seafood in the nation, we provide Americans with 40 percent of their oysters, and 90 percent of U.S. energy production comes through our coast.

“If we have to shut down any of this, it will affect you. Whether you’re a taxi driver in Detroit or a farmer in the Midwest.”

While all the world’s delta systems are facing similar issues, no place in the western hemisphere, says Marshall, is as imperiled as south Louisiana. But the situation isn’t hopeless.

“We need to get the sediment back into the land. We can build marsh, at the rate of 500 acres in two months. But it will sink unless river diversions are used to add water to the wetlands.”

National environmental groups have woken up to the problem, and since Hurricane Katrina have been actively involved in coastal restoration. Recently, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority released a $50 billion 2012 Master Plan. Now corporate and political types are beginning to realize the cost-benefit side of the equation – that there are not merely moral ramifications, but economical ones.

“This is not just a bumper sticker,” Marshall says. “We can’t build what we’ve lost. But we can maintain what we have left and still be here in 40 or 50 years.”

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