"Mid-Barataria project could create 27 square miles of wetlands by 2050, at cost of $2 billion"
"Picture an hourglass lying on its side, the top resting in the Mississippi River to capture the sands of time floating downstream from the Midwest. The sand flows through the neck of the hourglass and empties into Barataria Basin, where scientists predict it will create and nourish freshwater marshes and saltwater wetlands to stave off an expected dramatic loss of Louisiana’s coast over the next 50 years.
That’s the concept behind the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion project, a $2 billion proposal to rebuild a basin that has been eroding for more than a century because of natural subsidence, erosion by hurricanes and storms, construction of hundreds of miles of oil and gas canals and navigation channels and, more recently, increasing rates of human-accelerated sea level rise.
It’s enormously expensive, one of the costliest projects in Louisiana’s coastal Master Plan, the state's 50-year, $50 billion bid to keep the Gulf of Mexico from swallowing 20 parishes and to protect them from hurricane storm surge. It’s controversial, and it’s risky, too, for while scientists are confident in their work and their predictions, hardly anything has ever been attempted on this scale."
Mark Schleifstein reports for the New Orleans Times-Picayune June 1, 2021.
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