What

We want to map the St Charles Parish West LaBranche Shoreline Protection Project

Map here

This will provide an educational resource, as well as help evaluate the success of the project.

Rock breakwaters are used across the Louisiana coast to prevent horizontal erosion. There is a need to dredge access channels to place the heavy rocks (unless the rocks are light-loaded, which increases construction costs). Rocks also sink, which decreases the effectiveness of hte engineered breakwater over time, necessitating "lifts" (putting more rock on top of sinking rock).

However, the need to stop erosion is urgent, and agencies are used to this technique. The shoreline of Lake Pontchartrain is eroding at 5-10 ft a year in this location, and this breakwater and created wetland would slow that loss of land, while building new land.

My attempt and results

Grace, Miriam, Diana, Stevie, and Scott arrived on site for 0930

Weather was near perfect for mapping. Low wind, low tide, low waves, bright light. There were so many people out, four groups of whom thanked us for our work. Nice.

We have had several failures at this site, including loss of kite and 2 cameras, dunking of a camera, and one day when we just couldn't boat over the center of the site, so filmed the park instead. This time, we got the restoration on RGB (Canon 1400is in a foam faucet cover enclosure), an infragram of the restoration, and an RGB of the park and spillway site.

Dec 2014 Park capture (no restoration project)

weather

link to photos

Map of shoreline protection

Map of Park

incl Map of Spillway to compare with 2012 "laplace" map

Infragram Map

Questions and next steps

Why I'm interested

This was the first site that I mapped in 2012. this is also useful for Dinah and Barry for Educational purposes, to show the grade schoolers the success of the project.

The baseline data will help evaluate the effectiveness of using heavy rocks as breakwaters.