In N. Lousiana, Biggest Levee-Busting Effort Ever Aims To Restore Ouachita River Habitat - NYT

[hatrack]

In the 1960s, a group of businessmen bought 16,000 acres of swampy bottomland along the Ouachita River in northern Louisiana and built miles of levee around it. They bulldozed its oak and cypress trees and, when the land dried out, turned it into a soybean farm. Now two brothers who grew up nearby are undoing all that work. In what experts are calling the biggest levee-busting operation ever in North America, the brothers plan to return the muddy river to its ancient floodplain, coaxing back plants and animals that flourished there when President Thomas Jefferson first had the land surveyed in 1804.

“I really did not know if I would ever see it,” said Kelby Ouchley, who retired last year as manager of the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge, which owns the land. He pursues the project as a volunteer consultant in coordination with his brother Keith, who heads Louisiana operations for the Nature Conservancy, which helped organize and finance the levee-busting effort.

EDIT

The Nature Conservancy has already taken part in levee-busting projects on Klamath Lake in Oregon and the Emiquon Preserve on the Illinois River in Illinois to help restore wetlands. But the Ouachita project is far larger, people involved say, both in its size — roughly 25 square miles — and the effort required to remove each levee, roughly 30 feet high and 120 feet wide at the base. The plan, designed by hydrology experts whose work was financed in part by $250,000 from the Nature Conservancy, was originally to use bulldozers to chew away at the levees in five places and then wait for spring floods to level them gradually, said George Chandler, the project leader for Fish and Wildlife Service projects in North Louisiana.

The effort was to have begun last fall, he said, but heavy rains forced a delay until May, when unusual rains delayed it again. On May 23, the swollen Ouachita seized the initiative, breaking the levee and flooding the Mollicy acreage. At first, Mr. Chandler said, people involved in the project feared that the flood would smother the newly planted trees with sediment from the river and dirt from the levee itself. But they emerged unscathed. The plan now, he said, is to start bulldozing in late July or early August.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/science/earth/20levee.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

[Gogi]

1. We used to have minor flooding here, on the Missouri River, like clockwork...

then the Army Corps started letting floodwater run over their ground upriver, end result, no flooding unless it's a 1993 type event.

[pscot]

2. K&R

for small triumphs wherever they happen.