Eight years ago, you couldn’t have stood on the spot where Saturday’s grand opening of the Wetland Watchers Park will take place.

The area, which now features picnic pavilions, a grand pavilion and a playground, was nothing but open water. That was before a lot of effort — and a lot of concrete — went into the spot on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain in Norco.

“We brought in concrete busted up by local companies that were going to get rid of it, so we’re standing on only 2, 2 1/2 feet of dirt,” said Barry Guillot, the Harry Hurst Middle School teacher who founded the Wetland Watchers. “It’s protecting the marsh and the towns behind it.”

Restoration and education are the themes at the new park at the end of the Bonnet Carre Spillway’s East Guide Levee Road. In addition to the pavilions and playground, visitors to Saturday’s event can also take in a 900-foot-long nature trail that winds through the marsh, an outdoor classroom and a row of benches perched to catch the breeze blowing in off Lake Pontchartrain.

The grand opening of the 28-acre park will take place from noon to 3 p.m. following the parish’s Trash Bash, which takes place from 8 to 11:30 a.m. Activities will include face painting, hermit crab races, baby alligators and entertainment by Amanda Shaw. The Hornets Honeybees will be available for pictures and visitors can register to win a pair of club seat tickets to a Hornets game.

Jambalaya, pastalaya, white beans and crawfish Monica will be on sale for $3 a bowl, with proceeds going to the Audubon Institute and Clearwater Wildlife Sanctuary to aid in pelican and sea turtle rescue from the BP oil spill.

The park will be open daily from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. and will be owned and maintained by St. Charles Parish.

The Wetland Watchers Park is named for Guillot’s service-learning project, which teaches middle school students about the challenges facing Louisiana’s wetlands. About six days a year, students go out to the park to learn from experts about soil, water monitoring, tree planting and more. The Wetland Watchers then pass on the knowledge at festivals, science nights and during field trips to other schools, Guillot said, reaching at least 65,000 people a year.

On Thursday, about 115 Harry Hurst students traveled among six stations, learning about soil testing, mapping and GPS technology. In the new outdoor classroom, students read log books kept by explorers who traveled through the area 300 years ago and imagined them sitting in the very same palmetto forest.

Guillot began bringing students to the area about 14 years ago. Over time, he said, he started noticing that more of the public was using the area as well.

“This is one of the best crab spots in the greater New Orleans area,” he said. “And it’s the farthest you can come out into the LaBranche Wetlands without a boat.”

The marriage of education and recreation through a park seemed obvious, he said.

Future phases of the park will include 2,000 more feet of nature trails, another outdoor classroom, a marsh overlook, fishing piers, a canoe/kayak launch and five “learning pads,” decks with signs explaining certain activities to be done at that spot. The gravel road leading to the park is also set to be paved as part of the Corps of Engineers’ master plan for the spillway, which will be available for viewing during the grand opening.

The restoration component of the park is also set to continue. Rocks placed along the shoreline in the 1980s have built up about 3 feet of land, said Norco resident Milton Cambre, who’s been fighting to restore the area for more than 40 years. Work to put in another 2,000 feet of rocks off the unprotected coast, with a future project to build up land between the rocks and the existing coast, is expected to begin next summer. Plans call for a bridge to link the park with that area and to put in an observation platform.

For Cambre, who began fighting to protect the area when it was planned for development years ago, the park and the reclaimed land on which it sits are “amazing.”

“It’s coming back to where it was 50 years ago,” said Cambre, who can point to the spot out in the lake where the land used to extend.

“They had to cut through a cypress swamp in the ’70s to build that (Interstate 10) bridge. Now the water is back behind the railroad tracks,” he said. “That’s how much land has been lost.”

But for Cambre, who at 75 and just weeks out of a bypass surgery says he only has “another 10 years in me,” the park is a training ground for another generation to fight for wetlands restoration.

“This is what’s happening in their backyard,” he said of the students. “It’s not coming from a textbook. This is reality.”

(TP)

About half the households in Plaquemines Parish are using form letters, some provided by Parish Council members on official parish letterhead, to ask oil spill claims czar Kenneth Feinberg to cover their personal food costs — and none include any documentation, Feinberg said.

‘Four thousand claims where the claim form is exactly the same, including the misspelling. Outrageous! I can’t pay those claims,’ said Kenneth Feinberg, manager of the Gulf oil spill relief fund.

Feinberg said his staff has received about 4,000 new claims from Plaquemines Parish residents using two photocopied forms. The first form letter requests compensation because “seafood production costs have increased and have caused undue hardships.” The second form letter says the spill has prevented claimants from feeding their families with seafood they used to catch or get from relatives and neighbors.

The second set of claims contains “exactly the same Xeroxed paragraph, which says, ‘Mr. Feinberg, I live off the sea. I eat fish every night for dinner. Now, there are no fish, so I have to go to the grocery store. Please give me …’ fill in the blank, $1,800, $1,300, $1,900,” he said.

“No grocery receipts, no documentation, just an allegation of subsistence loss,” Feinberg said. “Four thousand claims where the claim form is exactly the same, including the misspelling. Outrageous! I can’t pay those claims.”

Read one of the form letters

Plaquemines Parish Council Chairman Don Beshel said he came up with the form letter about seafood production costs — and typed it on parish letterhead — as a way to help his constituents. He then sent copies of the letter to other Parish Council members to send to their constituents, he said.

Beshel’s 1st District office in Davant is in the same building as one of Feinberg’s 35 claims centers. He said he checked with claims workers at the office to make sure his letter was appropriate. Shortly after he distributed the letter, he watched as the office was inundated with claims.

Beshel bristled at Feinberg’s request for better documentation, even if it’s just grocery receipts to show how much a family now must spend on store-bought food.

“If I give fish to my mother-in-law, how can she document that? Do you keep your grocery receipts? No one keeps grocery receipts,” Beshel said.

The claims blitz comes just days before the council and parish president face elections, on Saturday. Parish President Billy Nungesser, who has tangled with Beshel on occasion, said Tuesday he was “embarrassed” by the form letters.

(TP)

Bayou Bienvenue in New Orleans is an example of south Louisiana’s wetland loss. Fifty years ago, this was a productive freshwater marsh with cypress and tupelo trees. Today, stumps are all that remain, as saltwater has encroached inland. Debbie Elliot/NPR

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus is set to present the Obama administration’s coastal restoration plan in New Orleans. Perhaps no state is more anxious to see what’s in the plan than Louisiana, which loses the equivalent of a football field of land every 50 minutes.

In New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, Bayou Bienvenue laps at the rocky base of the levee that’s intended to protect the neighborhood.

“This area and coastal Louisiana has been devastated,” says Garret Graves, state director of coastal activities. He points to a few patches of lonely marsh grass dotting the choppy water and describes what it looked like 50 years ago.

“This area was a much [healthier], productive marsh area,” he says. “Portions of this area at one point were actually laid out to be a neighborhood. And now this is all open water and dead cypress and tupelo trees.”

The freshwater swamp that was once a buffer against hurricanes was dissected by a navigation channel linking the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico — a channel that turned out to be the speedway for Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters.

Graves says the federal government’s control of the Mississippi has starved the delta of the sediment that nourishes it. The land sank, and saltwater crept farther inland. Making matters worse, the state allowed industry to cut up the marshes with shipping channels and oil and gas pipelines.

This summer, something new encroached.

“With Katrina and then BP … it was like a one-two punch,” says Anne Milling, founder of Women of the Storm, a group of women motivated by Hurricane Katrina to get Congress to do something about Louisiana’s land crisis.

With oil fouling what’s left of the state’s marshes, Milling says now is the time for the state to make its case.

“I think people have looked at us in the past maybe with crooked politics. And you know, whether it’s [the political family] the Longs, [former Louisiana governor] Edwin Edwards goes to jail, we’ve had a lot of blemishes,” she says. “I don’t think maybe we have touted the positive in Louisiana like we should have.”

Her husband, former Whitney Bank President R. King Milling, is chairman of America’s Wetland Foundation, a coalition of energy, business and conservation groups. He says there is no excuse for not saving Louisiana’s disappearing coast.

“If New York state had lost an area the size of Delaware, you don’t think we’d have fixed it? I mean, it’s just ridiculous,” R. King Milling says. “When you think about it in that context, it absolutely falls within the area of ridiculousness. We should find a way as a country to fix something of this magnitude.”

A New Sense Of Urgency

The spill has the White House looking at the Gulf Coast with a new sense of urgency. And Louisiana’s elected officials, like Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), want to be sure the state gets a lion’s share of the federal fines BP will have to pay, which could amount to tens of billion of dollars.

“Before the money just ends up in Washington in a big grab bag,” Scalise says, “we want to make it clear that that money ought to stay here along the Gulf Coast states that have been impacted by the disaster.”

Still, despite the situation, Oliver Houck, an environmental law professor at Tulane University, says that Louisiana cannot claim to be a helpless victim.

“The Louisiana spin on it is: ‘Look what oil and gas has done to us. You’ve got to come down here and help us’ — when of course, Louisiana was totally complicit in what oil and gas did here,” Houck says. “We invited them in. We rolled over. We gave them the minimum royalties, and we criticized and ripped to shreds anyone who complained about it. It’s been aiding and abetting your own rape.”

Houck says the state should have been making the oil and gas industry pay all along. Now, Louisiana is pushing legislation that would speed offshore revenue sharing with state governments — money intended for the federal budget until 2017.

In The National Interest

Getting scarce dollars from Congress will not be easy, says Mark Schleifstein, the environmental reporter for New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper. He says it’s a challenge explaining why it’s in the national interest to save Louisiana’s wetlands.

“It’s not a pristine area like the Everglades. It’s a working coast, cut up by navigation channels that are used by ships, with these oil rigs and platforms. And it doesn’t look like something that most of the nation [understands at all],” Schleifstein says.

Yet Louisiana’s wetlands provide a significant portion of the nation’s oil, gas, shipping and seafood.

The state has set up a trust fund, assuring that any federal dollars or BP fine money will only be used for projects like rebuilding barrier islands and making cuts in the levee to restore Mississippi floodwaters to the Delta.

In all, Louisiana officials say it will take $80 billion to $100 billion to prevent losing the lower third of the state by 2050.

(NPR)