Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy C
Agree, but how you going to get sediment or organic matter in them with all the leaves and dams. To get organic matter something has to die and then rebuild.
I am not pro or con wiers, but do believe man kind has over engineered flood plans, and leaves and dams.
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Thats just it, you are not getting any new material into the system, we have screwed that all up with the levees. You can look at an aerial of the MS River and see sediment going straight out the channel into the Gulf. Some of that used to get distributed out. The heavy sediments on the bottom would build the land and the lighter silts on top and freshwater would replenish the marsh. All goes straight out to sea now
After the 1927? flood, the Corps put the levees went up and that was considered to be a good thing (they never wanted a flood like that to happen again). I have never heard that anyone was against this at the time, no one knew the ecological damage this would do, and it took many decades of cutting off the marshes before we started seeing the effects. Now we know (or at least I hope most of us know) that was a bad thing ecologically.
In the east you can point to the MS River levee as the 'culprit', around Big Lake you can point to the construction of the Ship Chanel. The MS River levee has probably saved thousands of lives from flooding but its also causing flooding to be worse so its Catch-22. And shipping in the Ship Channel is what makes the Lake Charles area, but it also allows saltwater in, which is good for trout but bad for brackish marsh, so which one is more important? Trout or marsh? The marsh is way more important to me as it is the basis of the food chain for not only fish but everything from birds, shrimp, crabs, etc.