Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and, five years later, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill made it clear to everyone that unless something monumental was done about the coast, we would all lose.
In the aftermath of those tragedies, a consensus on how to create a safer, stronger future emerged. After the hurricanes, the Louisiana Legislature created the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, which then drafted the science-based Coastal Master Plan.
Following the oil spill, the state planned to use the one-time money generated by a $20.8 billion settlement to implement the largest restoration projects included in the plan, the ones that would rebuild the most land, protect the most communities and restore the most wildlife habitat.
The Deepwater Horizon disaster began with the loss of 11 lives. The well allowed 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf, producing an oil slick the size of the state of Virginia. Approximately 1,300 miles of shoreline were covered in oil, killing and harming wildlife from the sea floor to the ocean surface, and into our coastal marshes.
For an entire summer, the Gulf Coast was paralyzed, and the marshes were still — strangely quiet without the hum of boats or the presence of wildlife.
For years following, Louisiana state officials fought armies of lawyers from BP and Transocean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon, on different fronts: the cleanup, the scope of the impacts of the spill and securing funding for restoration.
When all was said and done, Louisiana was allocated $5 billion for damage to the environment, $1.27 billion from the criminal fines, $812 million from portions of the Clean Water Act fines and the chance to compete for hundreds of millions more in additional coastal restoration dollars.
For more than a decade, CPRA used these oil spill funds to build barrier islands, marshes, oyster reefs and recreational projects, all while engineering and design work progressed on the largest and most important projects of all — sediment diversions.
Then, Gov. Jeff Landry took office in 2024, and that progress was not only halted but reversed.
Rather than continuing to greenlight long sought-after and thoroughly studied projects, his administration began killing projects. First, a project to rebuild marshes in Terrebonne Parish using sediment from the Atchafalaya River was cancelled.
Then the governor killed the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, which would have built up to 26,000 acres of land on the west side of the MIssissippi River, even though the project was already under construction. At the end of the year, Landry cancelled Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, which would have built up to 16,000 acres of land on the east side of the river.
All of these projects were canceled without meaningful public notice or a CPRA vote, despite a decade or more of transparency prior.
Altogether, the governor has wasted $746.6 million in oil spill fines and penalties, which will now not result in any restoration whatsoever. Almost making it worse, these are not public dollars — these were hard-fought monies secured as a result of a terrible tragedy to mitigate the extensive damage.
The three major coastal disasters created consensus, established new priorities and presented an opportunity to build projects that would have allowed us to come back stronger. But because of one election, nearly 20 years of public trust and rigorous planning have been thrown out.
Louisiana has gone from doing its best to not waste this opportunity to just plain waste.
About the author: Charles Sutcliffe is the senior adviser for resilience with the National Wildlife Federation. He wrote this for the Louisiana Illuminator, lailluminator.com.
