McEwen, white-haired and 72 years old, has hunted and fished in the brackish waters of Pontchartrain and its nearby bayous and marshland nearly all his life. He used to charter boats to sport fishermen and sell bait back in the days when, as he puts it, “There were people fishing here all the time-night and day.”
The despoliation of the shallow, 40-mile long lake-at one time Louisiana’s premier fishery-is a sobering reminder that not all of the vast delta region built by the mighty Mississippi is a sportsmen’s paradise. The per-acre yield for fishing and trapping in the delta’s fertile bays and bayous has fallen in recent years, and this decline is nowhere more evident that at Pontchartrain.
McEwen took his boat out the other day to do some fishing at Salt Bayou off the north end of the lake and told how the Corps of Engineers built levees along the lakefront, enabling marshes to be drained and filled for real estate development. He said the loss of marshland wiped out spawning grounds for shrimp, crab, largemouth bass, and many other fish.
“The lake is only as productive as the feeding and spawning grounds around it,” he said. “More than half of the wetlands-the grasses, sedges, and rushes-have been destroyed and most of the rest have been damaged.”
McEwen pointed to a partially drained marsh fronting on Salt Bayou that had been a prime hunting and fishing area until only a few years ago.
“It produced everything in abundance-birds, coots, shrimp, and crabs. The ducks were so thick you couldn’t see through them. But now it’s all dried out and just useless.”
Under a permit issued by the Corps of Engineers, the marsh is being dredged for an upper-income housing development called Eden Isles. One of 15 communities either planned or is being developed along the lakefront. Eden Isles would accommodate some 20,000 people living mostly in single-family homes set along dredged finger canals where boats can ride up to the houses’ front doors. The development includes condominium apartments, marinas, shopping centers, churches and golf courses built on land reclaimed from 5,300 acres of marshland and resulting in the loss of 9 percent of the wetlands adjoining Lake Pontchartrain.
Housing construction is under way on 2,300 acres, despite warnings from a marine biologist that water in the dead-end canals leading to homes will become anaerobic for lack of oxygen, causing algae blooms, fish kills, bad odor, and the possibility of serious health hazards including hepatitis.
The marine biologist, Paul Wagner, who investigated the Eden Isles development at the Louisiana attorney general’s request, said that similar waterfront developments had been built on wetlands in Florida and that “without exception, every one has water quality problems.”
A New Orleans-based environmental called Save Our Wetlands (SOWL) has filed suit in federal court to stop Eden Isles developers from dredging the remaining 3,000 acres of estuarine marsh. The group contended that the Corps of Engineers improperly granted the dredging permit without conducting an environmental impact study, but SOWL lost both in the US District Court and later in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Corps officials said the permit was issued before July, 1975, the month when the corps formally began weighing the environmental effects of wetland destruction in reviewing permit applications. Last year, in a decision hailed by environmental groups, the corps rejected an application for a residential canal development that would have caused the loss of 2,000 acres of Florida mangrove swamps on Marco Island off the Gulf Coast.