Approved Louisiana sand berms for repelling oil spills, and land lost since the 1930s. The Times-Picayune

By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune
Monday, September 20, 2010, 11:15 PM Despite serious questions raised by federal regulators about the project’s environmental impacts, Louisiana coastal officials will continue to build six barrier berms to capture oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, a building effort that will result in about 25 miles of 6-foot-high sand and sediment hills. The Army Corps of Engineers on Thursday asked Louisiana to submit new justifications for the project, citing unanswered questions about the environmental effects of continued dredging. The request could affect both the temporary approval of the six-berm project granted by the corps on May 27 and by National Incident Commander Thad Allen on June 6, and a state request for a permanent permit that would expand the project to 101 miles of berms. “I don’t think we’ll have any problems justifying the temporary permit. I really don’t,” said Garret Graves, chairman of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and coastal adviser to Gov. Bobby Jindal. “With all the oiling that has occurred on the berms to date, and with the fact that according to federal estimates — that some university scientists have questioned and even the feds have backed away from a bit — you have millions of barrels of oil in the Gulf, multiple times the Valdez,” Graves said, referring to the 1989 spill of about 11 million gallons of oil in Alaska. In his letter to the state, corps regulatory branch chief Pete Serio warned that the danger faced by Louisiana’s wetlands from oiling has dramatically changed from when the original permit was granted. The purpose of the berms “was/is to stop oil, from the Deepwater Horizon spill, before reaching the barrier islands and landward tidal wetlands,” Serio said. The corps’ initial decision to issue the temporary permit “was based on the extenuating circumstances, which were substantially more dire and critical on that date,” he said. “All efforts to stop the leaking well had failed and the amount of oil measured gushing into the Gulf daily was substantially more than originally thought. “Examining the current circumstances, the oil leak has been stopped and the so-called permanent ‘killing’ of the well may be completed by the time this letter is issued. Additionally, there has not been any significant amount of oil recovered (from the spill) in over a month.” … While 33.5 miles of berm were proposed for construction, only 4.9 miles, or 14.5 percent, were complete as of Saturday. …

Barrier berm advocates not deterred by environmental regulators’ misgivings