re: Planned freshwater diversions will doom LA salt fishing

What the scientific community is saying is that diversions can build vast sub deltas that last for 150 or so years or more. Will there have to be adaptive management and new diversions/channels/dredging once the planned diversions build land? Absolutely!! We argue that a 200 million dollar diversion building or maintaining an entire sub delta for 150+ yrs is far more cost effective than dredging to creat land at 45-65 thousand dollars an acre (actual current pricing). Do the math. We only have limited dollars so we must build the most land for the least amount of dollars, and dredging by itself does not get the most bang for your buck.

Simple as that. I still have yet to hear the dredging=magic bullet crowd explian how they plan to overcome the dollars and cents facts that we don't have enough money to dredge it all. Nungesser and pj Hahn will spout off about electric dredge development and economies of scale if we had a lot more dredges that were US flagged, the jones act, blah blah blah...it simply isn't living in the current reality, and neither are any of the rod n reel folk.

Jason79, I think it is pretty cool your family owns a lot of the land and cattle down in the balize delta. What do y'all do with the cattle when storms come?

Do y'all also own the land the camps just north and south of Pass a Loutre near Chenier Pass are on? I've been supremely jealous of those places forever.

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What do y'all do with the cattle when storms come

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Pretty sure they just let them ride it out, then round up what they can after the storm. Cows can inflate their stomaches and float pretty effortlessly.

I think they found some of Mr Earls cows like 20 miles out in the gulf after Katrina...

Jason can correct me if i am wrong...

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Cool. I know him from running field trips down in the delta. He operates an airboat for us or runs us down south pass... whatever we need. Really great guy.

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Yep that's him. He knows his stuff about down there.

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He told me that he has never left the delta for a storm! Ties his skiff up in the willows and rides it out! He may not do that anymore... but damn, that is amazing

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He's right. He has never left down there. He drives his cattle barge (like 70+ ft big barge with engine on it for hauling his cattle up and down the river) into a canal in grand pass near Venice.

Haha, 70-30 at the moment in favor of the plan

Hope and Change?

The Master Plan more like Change and Hope.

so Mike/Ricks/Deege,

you come in here trying to falsely represent yourself as a neutral, questioning citizen, but in the end, we see what you are. you ask slanted questions, refuse to do any reading on topics or consider answers provided by those who know and care, even manage to get on wwl only to have the opinion poll be in favor 3 to 1 for diversions, and have now resorted to garbage name calling of the master plan when you have been exposed. your amateur hour is up.

Fox 8 in New Orleans just did a 4 minute piece on West Bay and how the dredging is working just as planned. Might try to look it up on the internet if you want to see it

I am not trying to ridicule you, I want you to read and investigate it as much as possible.

The first two paragraphs of the linked article says it all, better job at building land, nothing about the potential of it through diversions.

Average depth at or near Achtafalaya River delta is what a -1 or 2, it's flooding onto a shallow bay that's like 15 feet deep.

The Mississippi is channeled with rocks and levees pushing majority of the sediment off the continental shelf where it does not form land.

The entire goal of the sediment diversions is to capture the sediment before it exits the system (river and marsh/estuaries/bays are a system in my mind). Then nature can take its course and distribute the sediment which is a much more cost effective idea than dredging alone.

There is no accumulation between the 2 deltas because there is almost no water/sediment flow between the two. I am not counting lafourche freshwater pumps and Davis pond. They are saltwater intrusion devices not sediment transport devices.

Try reading the USACE coastal engineering manual, there are some chapters in there that help explain some history and different processes. Skip through it, use the index, it's like 5k pages.