Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995

Prologue

Prologue ABOur 20 MILES our OF BATON ROUGE on 1-10, past Grosse Tete and Ramah, and just past the sign "Atchafalaya Swamp Floodway," the road unexpectedly rises and the highway perches on stilts. For 17.5 miles this "Swamp Expressway" straddles swampland, the Whiskey Bay Channel, and the Atchafalaya River (uh-CHAFF-a-lie-uh: Choctaw for long river), and then descends close to the small community of Henderson. On either side of the road grow water oak, hackberry, sweet gum, honey locust, ash, elm, cottonwood, and some bald cypress and tupelo gum; the region contains the last cypress-tupelo swamp in the country. Through the trees or between the east- and westbound highways, pools of water glisten in the sun. Only at Lakes Pelba and Bigeaux, just before the Swamp Expressway ends, is there open space. The expressway cost about $6.5 million per mile and is recognized as one of the outstanding engineering achievements in the United States.1 It crosses the Atchafalaya Basin Floodway, the largest floodway in the world and an important feature of the plan to prevent catastrophic flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other population centers along the lower Mississippi River. West of Baton Rouge, the Swamp Expressway begins where it ascends over a ridge of earth that extends north and south. This is the manmade East Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee. Just before the highway gets off its stilts at Henderson it jumps across another manmade levee, the West Atchafalaya Basin Protection Levee (these are also called guide levees). A few miles farther on lies Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Acadiana. For over 200 years, a combination of natural forces and human intervention has shaped the Atchafalaya Basin. What and even where it is has been defined and redefined as residents, bureaucrats, experts, and outsiders have manipulated and exploited the basin's resources. The basin's water has drawn the most attention, for it defines the region's ecosystem. It has also inspired intense engineering, legal, and political disputes. The following chapters tell the history of efforts to reconcile conflicting, changing, and often overlapping objectives in using the basin's water. Occasionally, especially in recent years, surprising 4 Designing the Bayous cooperation marked these efforts. Historically, however, acrimony punctuated discussions of the basin's future. Since the nineteenth century, advocates of agriculture, flood control, navigation, recreation, commercial fisheries, and extractive industries have vied for domination of the basin's management. More recently, champions of environmental protection profoundly influenced plans for the basin's future development. Caught in the midst of these competing economic and political forces, the basin's residents often seem forgotten. Meanwhile, first state and then federal engineers developed new technologies and designs to mold the natural basin to human requirements. This was not an unmitigated blessing, as this book shows. The "Swamp Expressway,' 1-10 at Whiskey Bay, Atchafalaya Basin. Because the manipulation of water in the Atchafalaya Basin extends back a very long time, involves governmental agencies at all levels, and addresses so many different and competing purposes, its history illuminates the development of water resources in the United States. Evolving and differing notions of responsibility inform much of the story of the basin. Historically, federal resource agencies defined their obligations in terms of their ability to fulfill the will of Congress and the Executive Branch, not always paying much attention to the ultimate effects of their actions. Gradually, the public demanded greater bureaucratic responsibility for the consequences of agency activities. Local communities favored a more dynamic approach that required Prorogue 5 greater federal obligations and expenditures. Partly in consequence, the power of the national government grew, and in time federal legislation came to embrace an expanded notion of public good and governmental responsibility. While simplistically sketched here, this process generally describes the evolution of federal involvement in the Atchafalaya Basin, as indicated by the three parts into which this book is divided. It surely applies to many other water resource projects in the United States. The Atchafalaya Basin's recent history is dominated by the story of the floodway, really a system of floodways paralleling the Atchafalaya River from Simmesport to Morgan City and composed of three parts: the West Atchafalaya Floodway, the Morganza Floodway, and the Lower Floodway. Sometimes the entire basin is defined in terms of its flood control features, but this narrow definition depends entirely on human artifact. Using this definition, the...