April 20 marks the first anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—not an occasion for celebration, certainly, but an event that will live in many memories for a good few anniversaries yet.
A news conference will be held at Myrtle Grove Marina, Sulphur, Louisiana at 10.30am Central time in which speakers will urge Congress to dedicate fines collected under the Clean Water Act to restore degraded coastal wetlands.
Guided boat tours will depart the Marina to show guests some habitats damaged by the oil spill, and there will be limited aerial tours of the development of Wax Lake Delta departing from Southern Seaplane Airport.
The oil spill caused major damage to wildlife and the fishing and tourism industries in coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Florida, which could cost the Gulf tourism industry as much as $22.7 billion in lost revenues, according to a study by Oxford Economics.
A bipartisan group of Louisiana delegation members have introduced bills in both the Senate and House that would dedicate 80 percent of CWA fines to restoring the Gulf Coast, instead of being deposited in the Federal Treasury.
Environmental experts argue that damage from the BP oil disaster would have been reduced if Louisiana's coastal ecosystem had not been weakened badly by decades of digging canals through the wetlands for thousands of miles of oil pipelines, dredging of the Mississippi River to facilitate shipping, and levee construction to prevent flooding.
As a result, they say, coastal Louisiana has lost nearly 1.5 million acres of wetlands since 1930, an area larger than the state of Delaware.
A solution would be to restore the Mississippi River delta wetlands by using the river's energy, water and sediment to rebuild them—which is what is already happening at the Wax Lake Outlet, at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River.
In 1941, the Army Corps of Engineers dug a canal from the Atchafalaya River to Atchafalaya Bay, the unexpected result of which was that the river sediment built 25 square miles of new land now known as the Wax Lake Delta.
Speakers at the news conference include:
Larry Schweiger, President and CEO, National Wildlife Federation.
Anne Milling, founder, Women of the Storm.
Chris Canfield, VP, Gulf of Mexico Conservation and Restoration, National Audubon Society.
Paul Harrison, Sr. Dir., Mississippi River Delta Restoration Project, Environmental Defense Fund.
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Click on the link below to watch a video about the Wax Lake Delta.
