C: We're a non-profit organization based out of New Orleans. We've been around for about fifteen years now. We work in all five Gulf States and we're made up of diverse groups, community groups, environmental organizations, as well as individual members.
M: What specifically are you doing here today at the Festival?
C: Well today, we're down here - this is our second year here - working with the Voice of the Wetlands and we're focusing on our Natural Defenses Campaign, which is partly public education to raise awareness about losing a football field worth of wetlands every 45 minutes due to coastal erosion and what we can do to mitigate this impact, which also involves putting pressure on congressional and state legislatures to make coastal restoration a priority issue.
M: How much is the loss of the wetlands a man-made problem?
C: Well, a lot of it is attributed to men. Some of the actions of the Army Corps of Engineers, with the diversion of the Mississippi from its original floodplain, the (indiscernible) river diversions, and they have a couple of (indiscernible) projects going on right now, so we need it (wetlands awareness) on a large scale, especially down here in the Terrebonne Parish area.
M: By the way, how badly was Terrebonne (Parish) hit by Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Gustav?
C: Well, from what I've heard from the Voice of the Wetlands website, Gustav pretty much came right up their alley and did a lot of flooding, and even Ike, even though it just passed by down there, did a tremendous amount of flooding from just the rains and there's a lot of wind damage. And wetlands are tremendously important in mitigating these attacks, because for every three to four miles they have, it scoops up to an entire foot of storm surge.
M: I heard Tab Benoit say last night that there was a ten foot surge, and that's happened in the past, but never with the consequences with Ike.
C: Perhaps, I'm not actually sure about what he said - my first day here - but I'm sure, he lives in the area and he's familiar with the issues.
M: OK, I also heard that several levees gave way, not Federal levees, but local levees.
C: That very well could be the case. I haven't heard anything about that specifically, but I know there was damage caused by the storm.
M: What part do the oil companies play in this problem?
C: Well, right now there's a lot of canals they're not using, that they use for exploration and for piping resources that they've already taken and that they leave open, and that allows the saltwater to intrude into those wetlands and kill a lot of the marsh flora that exist there.
M: Once the saltwater gets into the marshes and bayous, it's an all-downhill sort of thing?
C: Pretty much. There's a short period of time where you can mitigate the impact, but it's very, very limited and also, when they dredge these canals, they have what they call "spill banks" which are the leftover sediment that they try to make sort of temporary levees. What happens is when these storm surges come in, they're funneled and channeled into these canals. They spill over, and then they get into the wetlands that are behind these spill banks and that causes further erosion. Our estimates for the oil and gas companies (responsibility) would be about 40 to 60% of the wetlands losses suffered since the 1960s or so.
M: Wow. Are you working with universities?
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