To whom it may concern,
I was raised in Houma, Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana between Bayou Grand Calliou and Bayou Terrebonne in a neighborhood named after the plantation, as many in the area are, which once stood there. My roots in the area began with both the Acadian migration (mother's side) and European settlers (father's side) who settled both the upper and lower Bayou Terrebonne fastlands. My mom is from Daigleville, the area of Houma cut off from the community center by the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in 1946, and my dad is from Montegut where natural gas was famously first discovered in the nineteen-twenties, formerly the location of the area's sugar mill.
My personal journey with coastal and water issues spans over twenty-five years. In the summer between sixth and seventh grade, I took a course in oceanography at Nicholls State including an exercise in siting drilling projects to avoid ecological damage from accidents and spills. My seventh grade social studies project was a genealogy study. I learned how my family came to Terrebonne. My eighth grade social studies project was a barrier island erosion study. I learned how and why the coastline began its disturbing retreat in the early twentieth century. I left home in 1984 to pursue educational and professional opportunities at the age of fifteen. Some years after that, my family was forced out of our home by bad drainage projects, ill-conceived commercial developments and navigation canals ruining the natural sub-basin drainage near Bayou Sale in the nineteen-nineties. One might say that only since then did the burning pain of displacement focus my attention, elevate my energy, and enhance my understanding, such that an epiphany about how precious, delicate, endangered, neglected and exploited are our Terrebonne lands, our waters, our ecology, our people, and our culture.
Now, in the twenty-first century, I live only a couple miles from a protected wetland here in Mountain View, California deep in the heart of the Silicon Valley in the shadow of the titans of technology and Internet. Of course, its not a very well-known or publicized fact that over ninety-five percent of the wetlands in the southern San Francisco Bay have been levee'ed, pumped, and paved, originally for agriculture but now supporting the typical suburban landscapes of corporations, mixed-use retail and neighborhoods.
But, alas, in Terrebonne the wheels of a broad-based economy are not spinning. After one hundred and fifty years, the economy has de-volved, not e-volved, and the sins of the past are visited upon the current generation in folds. Today, my parents' generation's hard-earned retirement is under the grave threat of ruin due to the location of their home in the near proximity a travesty which was committed against the land in 1961-1963 the Houma Navigational Canal. Indeed, the physical and economic security of the whole of Terrebonne Parish is under the sword of a canal, the HNC, which never resulted in broad, lasting economic development, but thwarted any other potential activity and even today endangers traditional agriculture, fishing resources, community assets (library, civic center, hospitals, churches, retirement homes, AND HOMES) and drinking water supplies.
I am the very embodiment of the "lost generation" of Terrebonne: driven out by a protracted oil bust in the last twenty years of the twentieth century and a sore lack of broader economic development in the first eighty and since. I've lived this for 25 years and spent about six hundred hours alone the past year researching these issues. Indeed, I have thousands of relatives and loved-ones in Terrebonne who are directly affected by the outcomes of planning underway and decisions that are being made imminently, currently under the authority of US Congress, US Army Corps of Engineers, the President and White House at the federal level as well as Louisiana state and Terrebonne civic institutions.
As a senior executive and board member of an international technology firm I co-founded, headquartered in Amsterdam, I've been to the Netherlands dozens of times. The Dutch would recognize the Morganza plan as the precipitant of the same kind of inappropriate development that begat the rapid subsidence of New Orleans --- a landfill. Levees, even the "leaky" kind, will drastically alter the hydrology of the wetlands and change the habitat to its great detriment and precipitate Terrebonne's economic decline. Furthermore, the Morganza Plan will not restore even one square foot of wetlands. The water behind the levees will turn black and toxic like the canals of Amsterdam; nothing lives in those waters once teeming with life --- no insects, no fish, no amphibians, no reptiles.
I cannot support the Morganza project because it applies failed technology (levees) with untested variations (hydrology gates) which have never been shown to produce any other result than destruction of the estuarine ecology. In this case, especially, the stakes are too high.
A positive solution can only begin at the source of the problem. Efforts to control seasonal flooding in our basin overreached in the early twentieth century, following a pattern of western progress without regard to the unintended consequences of severely altering the hydrology of a complex ecosystem. Current and planned diversion efforts are woefully insufficient.
As such I implore the implementation of massive projects for the heads of Bayou Terrebonne and Bayou Lafourche to be opened to allow fresh sedimented water into our basin. It would be better to expend scarce resources on world-class engineering at the root of the devastating symptoms, than to invest in a repetition of failed policies based on failed technology, building levees on the edge of wetlands on peaty, alluvial soil.
I'm convinced that any coastal restoration program must begin with the decommissioning and closure of the Houma Navigational Canal. Several earthen dams strategically placed in the HNC could restore the natural hydrology and salinity profile as a basis for restoration in combination with the mega-diversions.
It makes more sense to assist small companies affected by the HNC closure adapt business, develop alternative locations and transportation systems in order to continue operations in Terrebonne Parish, than to spend wastefully on a canal lock which is already being called insufficient at a sill depth of 18 feet.
Closing the Houma Navigational Canal may seem like an extreme measure, but believe me, we are one bad storm away, and one minor flood away from a turn-in-the-tide regarding the Houma Navigational Canal. St. Bernard officials after forty years have finally been able to force the USACE to take action on the MRGO and implement the public's will --- to decommission, close it, and repair the damage --- too late for over a hundred people who died there during Katrina.
The story of Chalmette and St. Bernard Parish provides a cautionary tale to Houma-Terrebonne. The lessons are clear: deep canals amplify the most devastating effects of hurricane storm surge and wetlands are the only protection from those effects. As such I urge the immediate decommissioning of the Houma Navigational Canal, and an immediate moratorium on canal cutting, all types of dredging and wheel-washing in the lower Terrebonne wetlands in all jurisdictions.
Morganza must not be allowed to rush ahead of state and federal planning processes by the CPRA.
AS A DEEPLY INVESTED CONSTITUENT, I OFFER MY CONCLUSIONS ABOUT WRDA COMPONENT MORGANZA-TO-THE-GULF, and the HOUMA NAVIGATIONAL CANAL.
This brief is the foundation of the campaign I conducted against the grossly misguided regressive sales tax proposal to locally finance the Houma Navigational Canal Lock, which was defeated in November's election in Terrebonne:
The Morganza-to-the-Gulf project was conceived pre-Katrina and Rita, it obviously doesn't contemplate important findings, data, and other analysis from university, state and federal agency, other NGO's and independent sources which expose deep, inherent flaws in the hydrological and economic characterizations upon which the project is based.
The most important lessons which Morganza ignores:
The HNC is half-as-long as the MRGO, but just as destructive. The direct and indirect wetlands and habitat loss due to the HNC is well-documented and publicized - over 25,000 acres have been lost.
Even worse, the HNC cuts both ways. The Timbalier sub-basin, fed by Bayou Terrebonne, supplying the community's most culturally and ecologically sensitive assets (Point-Aux-Chenes and Isle de Jean Charles) and protected wildlife preserves, is the most hydrologically starved sub-basin in Terrebonne and severely pressured by the South Lafourche Levee District. Atchafalaya and Wax Lake Outlet fresh water never gets to Bayou Terrebonne due to the Houma Navigational Canal.
Worse yet, the HNC is a "triple-whammy" to the sensitive wetlands ecology: salt water intruding up the HNC north of Bayou Grand Calliou doesn't flow back out the HNC- its flows into Bayou Grand Calliou, very efficiently distributing salt-water into the adjacent wetlands.
A wholesale replacement of the basin's hydrology by a series of culvert structures is another indefensible aspect of the Morganza. All evidence and previous experience portends a wholesale degradation of the habitat in such scenarios 275,000 wetlands acres would be sacrificed in lower Terrebonne due to Morganza.
There is no other alternative to save Terrebonne from the destruction suffered by St. Bernard: the Houma Navigational Canal must be closed - to be clear, "dammed with earth" or controlled with multiple floodgates - for any plan for Terrebonne's coastal protection and restoration to be taken seriously.
Personally, I'm focused on the aspects of this movement against Morganza that involve public sentiment: raising money, electioneering, framing the political debate in the media, and organizing an insurmountable opposition to Morganza at all levels. There are others who have articulated these concerns much more eloquently, for audiences engaged directly in policy-making.
The source of the most recent, comprehensive, and thorough communications about these Morganza issues is Professor Oliver Houck's (Tulane University School of Law) stunning research article titled Can We Save New Orleans?, published in the Tulane Environmental Law Journal (http://www.law.tulane.edu/Houck_CanWeSaveNewOrleans.pdf), and his response to the CPRA plan submitted in the public review period. I urge policy makers at all levels to subscribe the policy leadership direction outlined by Professor Houck in his research and public response to the CPRA plan.
Kind Regards...