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Creating Land at the Edge of Louisiana

Nick Janzen

  In Bayou Grand Liard, down by the toe of Louisiana’s boot, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is creating marsh. Chuck Perrodin, a spokesman for CPRA, sums up what’s going on: “We’re taking what used to be land and marsh, went back into open water, and now we have made it back into land.”

Creating land where there’s open water seems like an impossible task, but the basic idea is remarkably simple—fill in the water with lots of sand. Finding that sand, and transporting it, is the hard part.

One mile off Louisiana’s coast in the Gulf of Mexico, the dredge boat CR McCaskill sits in about 35 feet of water. The ocean floor beneath it is a virtual treasure trove of sand perfect for dredging. “In front of us, and reaching down to the bottom of the Gulf shore,” Perrodin explains, “is what we call a cutter head. It’s kind of a big pine cone, a big, strong, metal pine cone, that turns and churns up the sand and sediment that’s at the bottom of the Gulf.”

That dredged sediment is then sucked into a pipeline and transported 9 miles back onshore to Bayou Grand Liard.

Driving in a boat down the bayou, Perrodin points to four large pens of water. “Where we’re travelling along right now, you can see the brown earthen containment dikes,” he says. Those dikes will be filled in with the Gulf sediment, then CPRA will plant trees on the new marsh. Establishing vegetation is one of the easiest parts of a marsh creation project. “One of the nice things we have found,” Perrodin says, “is that life just takes off.

Louisiana loses, on average, a football field of land every 45 minutes. But Perrodin says CPRA is doing everything they can to combat that. Over the past 7 years, he says, the agency has created more than 34,000 football fields of land.

This project at Bayou Grand Liard will create another 660.