ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. — Monday crews cut a hole in a levee in the Delacroix area to let out water that the storm pushed over the levee as Cristobal hit the Louisiana coast on Sunday.
It is expected to take a few more days for the flooding to subside in lower St. Bernard.
Parish President Guy McGinnis said he has never seen water flow in this high and this fast during a tropical storm.
“It seems like it’s getting quicker and quicker as that water come in because of the degradation of our marsh and our wetlands,” McGinnis said. “It brought so much water to the lower end of our parish. It is definitely concerning.”
Louisiana depends on coastal wetlands and barrier islands to help knock down the intensity of storm surge.
Brad Robin and his son Brad Junior are the 5th and 6th generation to work in their family seafood business, one of the largest in St. Bernard.
They say looking at the 4-to-6 foot storm surge from Cristobal doesn’t bode well for the future of their industry or the fishing communities in the lower end of the parish.
“We’re sinking,” Brad Robin Sr. said. “The marsh is sinking. We have no protection out there. No levees or hills or mounds out there to slow it down.”
“The change from when I was a kid to now is unbelievable,” Brad Robin Jr. said. “It would take at least a category 1 or 2 storm to do what we have right now.”
McGinnis says as the coastline goes, so goes south Louisiana.
“You don’t want to be launching a boat out of Baton Rouge here in about 50 years,” McGinnis said. “Once it’s starts deteriorating let’s say in Lake Maurepas it’s going continue to go north and the gulf is going to continue to encroach inland. That’s going to happen all over the coast if we don’t take care of it.”
People in lower St. Bernard are realists and many of them fear that one day we may very well lose battle to save the Louisiana coastline. But they say it doesn’t have to be tomorrow.
“If we don’t do something now, what you see today, maybe 10-15 years won’t be here,” Brad Robin Sr. said. “It will be eaten up. It will be gone.”
“I have two little girls,” Brad Robin Jr. Said. “I’m kind of glad I have two girls and no boys because I would hate to see them try and follow me into something that really has no future if something isn’t addressed with it.”
St. Bernard leaders are now pushing for a dedicated source of revenue to help build back the Louisiana’s vanishing coastline.
“We have 9 miles of open water between the barrier islands and the Biloxi Marsh. What the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and the scientists have figured out is that we need to start inland before we work on our barrier islands.”
McGinnis is a CPRA board member.
He said the reality is we should have started the process of building back coastal wetlands 30 years ago.
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