Trees hold back erosive tides in Golden Meadow

It was supposed to be an early Christmas gift to stop erosion at a small section of the South Lafourche Levee System.

But Mother Nature would not cooperate and rained out the Golden Meadow Hurricane Protection Levee Christmas Tree Project.

The event sponsored by Les Reflections du Bayou, America’s Wetlands Conservation Corps and the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program was called off March 14 before the trees could placed in the cribs.

“That’s part of the problem we have with this. You can’t schedule it too far ahead of time,” said Deanna McKneely, Les Reflections executive director.

“We had a lot of trouble with the weather last year at Golden Meadow,” she added. “That’s why we were trying to get an early start. Every time we had volunteers, the weather wouldn’t cooperate. When the weather was good, we didn’t have any volunteers.”

This is the 12th year Les Reflections du Bayou has done a Christmas tree recycling project. Les Reflections has bigger crib on a barrier island at Port Fourchon.

The project is funded by a grant from the state Department of Natural Resources. The grant is given to the Lafourche Parish Coastal Zone Management. The agency partners with Les Reflections and pays the group to do the work.

The Christmas trees were collected in large SWeeDee dumpster bins at Lafourche public high schools – one each at Thibodaux and South Lafourche and two at Central Lafourche. Six SWeeDee dumpster trucks of trees were collected and brought to the Catfish Lake Public Boat Launch.

The Christmas trees were to fill in a 75-yard crib located five miles north of the boat launch that would trap and replenish sediments at the foot of the levee that had been washing away.

The hurricane system has not failed in any of the recent hurricanes to recently strike the Tri-parishes. However, it did get close to overtopping during Hurricane Rita in 2005 and Hurricane Ike last September.

“There’s not too much marsh between this levee and Catfish Lake,” said David Bourgeois, LSU AgCenter Associate Agent for Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes. “So if a hurricane blows through here, this levee is in trouble.”

During hurricanes Gustav and Ike, the tree cribs were destroyed at both locations.

“The wave action was just too violent and it tore them all loose,” Bourgeois said. “Those America’s Wetlands guys (one was his son Jacob) actually helped repair the cribs because those top boards were down.”

Bourgeois said America’s Wetlands volunteers have been working on this as a project for a little over a year.

Central Lafourche High School students in the Future Farmers of America club take part in the Christmas tree recycling project at Port Fourchon yearly. They are scheduled to fill that crib on April 22.

The non-profit organization, Shreveport Green, donated three trailer loads of trees for the Port Fourchon crib at no cost to Les Reflections.

The trees have to be brought by boat from the mainland to the barrier island.

Because of the locations and the water action, McNeely and Bourgeois admitted that the Christmas tree recycling project has not been effective at rebuilding sediment.

But they say the cribs have prevented further erosion from occurring where they are located. They claim that is just as important.

“The hope when we started these cribs was enough sediment would build up so we could plant marsh grass,” McKneely said. “When the hurricanes come through, it pulls out the sediments. So, we start all over again.”

“If the hurricanes would stay away, we might get enough land to plant in,” she added.

What was more distressing to McKneely than not getting the tress in the crib was only getting one volunteer from the general public to participate in the project.

“All the people who were there were contacts of people who do this all the time,” she said. “It’s a shame that the public cries and hollers about having the wetlands saved, but they don’t want to do it. They want someone else to do it. To get the general public to come out and give just a couple hours of their time, that just doesn’t happen, and that’s sad.”

Jacob Bourgeois, of America’s Wetlands Conservation Corps, helps load Christmas trees to be placed in a sediment trapping crib at the South Lafourche Levee System in Golden Meadow. * Photo by KEYON K. JEFF