A shorter version of this interview was published in the first issue of the Grassroots Mapping Forum

Shannon Dosemagen had a chance in May 2011 to speak at length with Barbara Marcotte, a resident of Myrtle Grove, Louisiana, about the Wilkinson Bay area as well as the broader environmental threats to the region.

When we are talking specifically about the Wilkinson Bay area, when you think about the bay, what story comes to mind for you?

It’s the fishing that we are blessed and have the fortune to be exposed to and to utilize on a daily basis; out here we can fish, you can shrimp, you can crab, you can duck hunt. So you’re able to enjoy everything that is afforded to the residents of Louisiana, which is why we’re called the Sportsmans Paradise. It is a paradise for people who enjoy those types of activities outdoors.

You’ve been here for about 30 years and have been fishing in this area as well- do you have a particular story about when you’ve been out on the waters that you want to share?

My husband and I had our week vacation and we were out here fishing. We’re driving along in the boat and all of a sudden these porpoises showed up and they start swimming and going right onside the boat. You’re so close to them that you’re able to see their eyes. There’s not many places you can go to and experience that. They even come into our canals here. If you’re up and you’re out and about early enough in the morning, sometimes you’ll see them.

How has this bay been a part of your families history?

Well, I have to go back on my husbands life because he has fished and hunted down here since he was a child. The family of a friend of his had a hunting camp down on Wilkinson Canal -- a little fishing camp -- so he would come down with them on weekends and at other times of the year. They would go out and fish and they would trawl; catch their shrimp and crabs and do their boils. They’d go out and duck hunt in the morning and then fish in the afternoon. Its just a thing in your life that your able to go do, enjoy and have available to you. . . . And if all these wetlands aren’t protected, not only just restored, but protected the way that they are now, then in the end all these things you enjoyed and valued your whole life will go away -- not all, but a lot of it will go away.

Can you tell us about the kind of fishing people do here?

There are a lot of people -- mainly I guess commercial fishermen- that put their traps out along the Wilkinson Canal, out in Barataria Bay, and a lot of the other little bays and lakes around here. I can put little crab traps down off my dock and catch crabs right there from my dock. At different times throughout the year, I can fish off my dock, and catch all the trout I want. We catch redfish off our dock, and sometimes we can throw a cast net out and catch shrimp, I mean… not last year because of the oil spill, but the year before that we were catching 15-20 count shrimp (which is nice cookable-sized shrimp) right off the dock. That’s one of the things, you know, why we all bought land and built here.

What about catfish?

The saltwater catfish you don’t really eat, but the freshwater catfish we do get because of some of the freshwater intrusion down here- we’ll catch them in our crab traps. Sometimes I’ll throw out the cast net to catch live shrimp to go fishing the next day and I end up catching a nice freshwater catfish in my cast net. So its nice to just be able to pull it up, put it in the ice chest and cook it up the next day.

What is your take on the impact of the spill? Have you noticed or heard about changes to the area?

We did notice some oil coming into the area, and BP came and put the oil booms up on all the canals around here to stop oil from being brought in on the boats coming in and out. At one time this was a main hub for BP and the Disaster Recovery Center to combat the oil from coming in through Barataria Bay and the Wilkinson canal. So we had a lot of activity going on that we were exposed to, you know, not only from the workers coming in and out all the time, trying to fight the oil from coming in, but some oil did come in to the area -- into some of the individual canals.

We had that threat, but also we don’t know what it’s going to do to our health. You could stand on your porch some days and you could smell the oil. So who knows what effect that will have on your health, today, tomorrow, five years from now or in the future. That greatly effected our ability to crab and shrimp and fish because they closed -- basically at a certain point in time everything was closed off from fishing.

Interviewer Note: Wetlands loss is a major concern on both environ- mental and economic terms; while it has a variety of causes, chief amongst them are the lack of new silt deposit since the Mississippi River has been closed by seawalls -- much of the silt is now carried deep into the Gulf of Mexico. Another contributing factor is the vast human intervention in the land- scape, such as pollution, wake, and the cutting of canals in marshland, much of which occurs in connection with oil drilling and pipeline operations in the region.

What do you think about the way the cleanup was handled? Do you find yourself thinking or feeling differently about the Bay since the spill?

Everyone has doubts and concerns about the polluting that took place, and how the fish and shrimp and crabs may have been affected by it, and the lack of certainty that what we’re eating is safe. I think people down here still have some concerns about that. I mean, we check what we catch, and of course if there was any kind of stench from it we wouldn’t eat it, but still -- who knows how much of that is in the system, and in the area down here? Everybody had those concerns.

Has it stopped you from eating certain types of seafood?

Everybody pretty much, for a period of time, stopped eating the seafood because no one really knew. You know, even though you might get something that may not smell like oil, they used all those dispersants in the water out there and who knows how much the crabs and shrimp and the fish ingested, and what it did to them, and what it would do to us eating it. We were very careful with what we were eating and where we got seafood from. Really, for a while we didn’t eat anything; we didn’t even have our crab traps down to catch anything because there was just that uncertainty.

Are you planning on crabbing again this year?

Eventually, yeah I will be. I haven’t at this point, only because I have to do some work on my crab traps. I plan on trying to start. I think other people around here have.

What are your suggestions for restoration/recovery of this area?

I can say, through some of the meetings I’ve been to, I’ve heard a lot of concerns from people that live down here -- people that fish down here for a living -- about the freshwater intrusion if they bring water in from the river. There are people that have said there are other ways to bring in the sand to build up the marshes and that is a different process than what the Corps is proposing. I’ve heard a lot of negative comments about how the Corps wants to do it, versus what other people suggest who have fished, and lived, and hunted, and used the land their whole lives.

From what I’m understanding, if they start pumping in from the Mississippi River like they are proposing … it would bring a lot of freshwater into this marsh area … so it would basically be a freshwater area versus a brackish or saltwater area. Which when that happens, your not going to have the crabs, the shrimp, the fish down here.

You were saying before that dredging in this area has been a problem in terms of letting freshwater come in as well?

From what I’m understanding, if they start pumping in from the Mississippi River like they are proposing, it would bring a lot of freshwater into this marsh area and what’s going to happen, from what I understand, is that the freshwater will greatly reduce the salinity of the water we have now. When that happens, you’re not going to have the crabs, the shrimp, the fish down here. Can you talk about the flood gate issue that you all are working on here?

A couple of years ago, it came to the attention of landowners down here that the Corps of Engineers wants to build around this whole subdivision area and the marina. Currently we have a private four foot levee that is owned by citrus lands and what the Corps is looking to do is appropriate that land through the parish.

Right now the land is used for citrus growth as well as cow pastures. So you’ll notice if you drive up and down the highway coming in and going out, you’ll see a lot of cows. That’s what the use of the property has been. Right now, there is a four foot private levee that surrounds both the subdivion and the marina. When this land was approved through the local governments, it was approved for development for residential areas. At that time when all this was taking place and the approvals were being done by the various government agencies, it was mandated by the national flood insurance program, which now is an arm of FEMA, that in order for people to build a house down here, they had to build up on piling and it had to be eight feet above mean sea level, which is basically four foot. So we all had approvals to do this. You had to build up to a height of at least twelve feet for your first floor living space. In addition to that, they also had approved people being able to close in the bottom of their house if they chose, for storage, a garage, whatever they wanted to use it for.

Now, based on the flooding that took place after Hurricane Katrina, the Appropriations Committee of the United States Congress has approved the Corps to come in and build levees to give flood protection -- originally it was 100-year flood protection. We were [then] told by the Corps that this area would not be included in that flood protection basically because of them trying to use the existing levee structure that’s there now.

Which means that all the people that have bought all this property out here -- some have built homes, some have not yet -- about 300 home sites -- will be left outside of the levee protection. So what will happen is any storm that comes into the Gulf and pushes storm surges in through Barataria Bay -- that will come in through Wilkinson Canal which will increase the flooding of all this area down here.

The only time that we’ve had really major flooding in the last 5 or 6 years was with Hurricane Ike and we probably had about over four foot of water, because it went over the levees into all the cow pastures. So we had over a four foot storm surge come into this area. Most of the houses down here had flood waters in their downstairs living space. There were some people who were fortunate who were a little higher up. For instance, we built our lot up higher in anticipation of water. So we were fortunate that we didn’t get flooding ourselves.

So what will happen is that if these levees are built up to the 12 foot level that the Corps is proposing to do, it could potentially put anywhere from 4 feet to 10-12 feet of water up underneath our houses. With this several things are going to happen, number one is that all of our electrical service is five feet up off the ground and that is a requirement by Entergy in order for us to protect it against flood waters, but also so that your meters can be read. So we had to put our boxes up five foot, if they build those levees up and we get five feet or six feet of water in this area, then all our electrical service will be wiped out which means you can’t run your air conditioners to keep your living space dry in order to keep out the toxic mold that will accumulate from the flood water- it’ll just come right up into your house and that means that everyone’s going to have to totally rebuild their houses. So that’s a major health issue. In addition to that, every time we get flooding back here it effects the infrastructure. We already have streets where sinkage is happening.

The other thing is that we have lift stations that push the sewage out of the subdivision into the lines on the main highway. Every time that we have flooding back here all those systems have to be flushed out because of contamination. In the past, when there’s been flooding, its mainly been because the four foot levee has had a breach in it somewhere. That’ll be yet another issue. If there’s a breach that happens in the back, with twelve foot levees, water will flood not only all the area within the levee protection system, but its going to flood the only access in and out of the parish here which is Highway 23. When that water gets trapped between these twelve foots levees and the Mississippi River levees which are more than 12 feet high- where’s that water going to go? Its going to be trapped. So how are they going to get rid of it? At least with the four foot levees, the water can go out through all these canals and through the Wilkinson Canal, out into Barataria Bay and the Gulf. If they have these 12 foot levees its not going to automatically happen.

What they’ve had to do in the past is take hoses from the highway to where the canal is, right on the other side of the property where there is the first living canal and they’ve had to pump the water into the main canal and these other drainage ditches to be able to pump water out from the highway. That’s another issue that they’re going to run up against because they’re going to have such high levees. How are they going to pump the water out over a 12 foot levee?

So how does this make you feel -- that the federal government is trying to proceed with plans without taking into account the way that residents feel?

They say that they are doing this under the guidelines of protecting people. Well, you’re not protecting people if you intentionally leave them outside of a levee protection system and flood them. Now, we proposed to the Corps back in 2009 a plan to construct a flood gate across the Wilkinson Canal, which will protect all of us here as well as the marina. It not only protects all these homes, but it also gives a safe harbor to the fishermen that are south of us; down in Empire, down in Port Sulphur, and even further down in Buras. It gives them a safe haven to bring in their ships, their boats, to protect them from the hurricanes and from the devastation that they saw during Hurricane Katrina. Do you know why they planned to build a 12 foot levee as opposed to a flood gate?

We’ve formed a committee from this neighborhood that has been meeting with the Corps since 2009 through conference calls, in person meetings, and emails, to try and help them understand the devastation that their recommendation is going to cause to the people living here and to this whole area. They are now looking at the possibility of what the cost estimates would be and what the effects would be to install a floodgate like we have proposed. They are now entertaining that scenario and our recommendation on doing that. At this point, we don’t have an answer about what their final recommendation is going to be. They have been working with us, looking at different impacts of what a levee would be versus not having a levee and just leaving what we have now with the additional installation of a flood gate. We have been able to bring to them a lot of information that they were totally unaware of- how our infrastructure works down here between our lift stations, how our street drainage goes through the four foot private levee into drainage ditches that eventually come around to the pump stations and get pumped out into the marshland. They were totally unaware of that and they really did not understand how everything would be impacted.

It’s also their lack of knowledge of what the mandates were set at when we purchased this property. We had to sign covenants stating that we understood we had to build at a certain height. They apparently did not do all of their due diligence to have all this information beforehand.

They have told us that they feel we would have minimal sustained damage with the 12 foot levees. We’ve never been able to really get them to explain what their definition of “minimal sustained damage” is. Is that eight feet of water? Is it ten feet of water? Four feet of water? Nobody has come up with an exact amount that they would feel we would be inundated by. If you’re a home owner and you live in an area of town and someone tells you “we’re going to build this levee and you will have minimal sustained damage” and your house is on the ground and whether you get 4 inches of water or two feet of water, you still have to go through the same amount of home repairs as whether its four inches of water or two feet of water. When they build this 12 foot levee, say a hurricane comes in, all this water storm surge comes in, you have 50, 60, 70 mile an hour winds, you have at least four foot seas. You get four foot swells coming in, that’s 2-4 feet of water being forced into your house- you have 2-4 feet of contaminated water in your house. So you still have a total destruction from the water based on what the Corps is looking to do.

The logical solution is to put up a flood gate. It’s a win win for everybody. Another thing that the Corps did not realize or understand is… if they put up the floodgate like we are proposing, all of the levee that surrounds this area, won’t be necessary. If there would be a levee breach, it gives parish officials- 3 to 4 days before flood waters will hit Highway 23. So it gives them an opportunity to use sand bags to plug up the breaches before the water hits the highways. If that 12 foot levee is built and you get a breech, its only a matter of hours before the water gets to the highway and the road is totally flooded out. If that were to happen, there’s a town north of here called Ironton where the highway goes down- it’s a lower lying area than where we are here on Highway 23- that whole town and all the residents that live there would have total devastation in addition to what we would have.

When people ask why you live here, what’s your response?

When this land was approved for development, everyone that purchased a lot down here, whether they lived here full time or not, built down here knowing that we were building behind a four foot private levee. I can pretty much guarantee you that if these three hundred people and businesses that had purchased property here knew that there would be a 12 foot levee going up and what the impact would be, number one, no one would have bought the land, and second of all, they would definitely have built up higher.

And everyone that I’ve talked to in this subdivision, if they knew that this would happen, they say they wouldn’t have bought property or built these houses. No way anyone would have done it, we built behind a 4 foot private levee so we knew what the maximum water level potentially could be that we would get. So you were aware of the conditions that you were building under...

Yes, but now they are changing the game on us… what does that do for people that have places built? If I came in today and someone told me the Corps is going to build 12 foot levees, you know that’s the condition you’re building under. I would have had the option and the choice of deciding whether I wanted to take that risk or not.

Has this happened in other areas of Plaquemines?

Well, I know there are areas down south of here that have camps built up on pilings just like us that have no levee protection. They live on the water like we do. A lot of these camps- they have about a 4 foot levee like us. They know if the water comes up, at least its going to come up over the 4 foot levee and their places will be protected. If the levee there goes up to 12 feet, they are going to be in the same situation we are. It’s going to totally devastate what they have.

And the other thing is- when you get a storm surge coming from the Gulf, through Barataria Bay, as it comes up Wilkinson Canal, its going to be like a funnel effect- that water’s going to have such a strength and speed coming in, that its going to come all the way to where the Corps is proposing the levee to be. These houses have the potential of being knocked off the columns that they are on depending on how big the storm is and how big of a storm surge we get and the force of the waters as it comes in all the way up the canal. Especially the houses that are right here in the front. They are going to get it the worst because it’s all going to come rushing in and its going to go- well, think about if you fill up a bucket or a bathtub and you start pushing the water from the back of the tub to the front of the tub, once the water gets to the front of the tub its going to go up. That force is going to be greater on the area where its going up at until it settles and goes back down again, so the houses that are right here on the front- they have even a greater risk of damage than anyone else.

So this is like what has happened with the MRGO?

Exactly, and that’s what we are trying to stress in the communication we are developing -- they are creating a mini MRGO. Interviewers Note: MRGO, or the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal, is a canal linking New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. Designed for deep-draft shipping, it has been criticized for its environmental side-effects such as wetlands loss, as well as for amplifying the destruction suffered by New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina -- a "funnel" formed by the canal increased storm surge height and wave speed. Read more at http://mrgo.gov

The floodgate [counter-proposal] gives this area and even areas south of us a place where they could have a base of operations for emergencies, like with the BP oil spill. They had for a period of time a base of operations here, helicopters and boats were able to get in and out, medical people were able to get in and out. We are pretty much the middle of Plaquemines parish so they can easily set up a command post here and have access to south of us down where there’s Buras, Empire, Port Sulphur, Braithewaite, all the way down to the end of the parish at Venice. It gives them a base of operations that they can get to very easily whether its by air, land or water.

Can you talk about why the canal areas and these small bits of wetlands in Barataria and the Bay Wilkinson area are so important to the protection of this area?

That’s our first line of defense -- going down to the first line of barrier islands in the Gulf. Through the years of the oil companies being able to dredge for oil out in the Gulf, you know, just like the MRGO, they’ve had to make canals to get in and out to get various rigs set up, even out here in Barataria Bay. Just like the MRGO, it gives no protection to what’s already here, and all it does is it allows more intrusion of salt water into these areas that eat the marshlands. When you build the barriers out there and you have these lines of defense, it helps stop that storm surge from coming in. And every time that storm surge comes in, it deteriorates what we do have left -- washes it out. So by having those barrier islands, those lines of defense, it helps protect the marshlands that are closer in from eroding.

What happens if those protections erode further?

More devastation. On top of the fact that we’re losing our coastline, we’re losing valuable land. Building up those barrier islands will give us an opportunity to rebuild all this wetland through various projects. There are various ways to rebuild it and its looking at the smart way to do it and the least impactful to the shrimp, crabs and fish that are down here in these areas.

What hopes do you have for how this area could change for better in the future? Are there any positive outcomes that you can imagine in the wake of the oil spill?

I would hope that the Corps of Engineers and any of the other organizations, government or otherwise, that are involved in this, listen to the people that have been down here, lived here, fished here, and camped here their whole entire lives and even their parents lives, for generations. Because they know how these waters are, they know how the tides come and go, they know how the storms affect this area, they provide a lot of valuable information and a lot of valuable ways that they can accomplish what they want to do without destroying the things that we do -- the fishing, crabbing, shrimping.

There’s one gentleman -- I think the organization he’s with is from the Lafitte area -- and he talked about how the Corps did a diversion project in that area of the waters and how its changed everything down there from being brackish water to freshwater. So they have no more trout, they have no more redfish, croakers, flounder, they don’t have drum fish that they can catch, sheephead, and eat anymore. Its all the freshwater; the bass and I don’t know all the freshwater fish there are, but that’s what they’re stuck with now. So its totally changed everything that they grew up being able to do.

Knowing this area as you do, what would you like to tell somebody not from around here?

Get informed, talk to the organizations and the people down here. What I would hope is that people will hear all sides of it, and hopefully promote peoples interests enough that they want to come down here and help us fight for what we’ve all been able to enjoy, just like they would want in areas that they lived in. Anything else you’d like to add?

If people want to know more and help with our fight -- to help our community, they can contact me at barbsmar@bellsouth.net. Help us fight for the protection we deserve, just like the rest of Plaquemines parish, Louisiana or the entire United States. We’re looking for any and all help we can get.