Spoil-ing The Basin

A battle rages on in the Atchafalaya Basin, not between an angler and his trophy catch, but between big oil and those making a living off the swamps.

Mike Bienvenu of Catahoula is president of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West and has spent the last 30 years catching crawfish in the Basin. He said fishermen here have gone from fishing full time and earning a decent living to fishing part time, necessitating taking on other small jobs to make ends meet.

Bienvenu said he believes oil and gas companies’ exploration and production operations have damaged the overflow swamp’s habitat forever.

“They laid all these pipelines, east to west,” he said. “The natural flow of the water is north to south. At the time the fisherman didn’t know any better. It was easier for them (oil and gas companies) because nobody was watching.”

Bienvenu said these companies, based on permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were supposed to return any spoil that accumulated from dredging to its original location, but they didn’t. Instead, he said, the work resulted in unnatural damming of water flow creating what he called “rotten water.”

The group filed a class action lawsuit in recent years against several major oil and gas companies, surveyors and dredgers.

Joseph Joy III, a lawyer in Lafayette, has represented the group in the litigation.

Joy said there were settlements in recent months from the surveyors and dredging companies, but the fight against big oil continues. He said he has seen the spoil banks that resulted from the dredging so high that they block the flow of water and navigation of boats.

“These companies have created a honeycomb of banks that are acting as dams,” he said. “It makes it much more difficult to get to traditional fishing grounds. Once you get there, if you can, the dams have killed all the aquatic life out there.”

Joy contends work done by these companies in the Basin “spoiled one of the jewels in North America.”

He calls the water quality in much of the 100,000-acre Atchafalaya Basin “hypoxic.”

Joy said the exploration and production work, and its effects, continues.

“They (oil and gas companies) are still doing it as we speak,” he said.

“They are still stacking up the spoil in violation of the Corps permits. They just don’t care.”

Overfished

Randy Sparks, a land manager for Williams Inc. in Patterson, has been intimately involved in the issue for his entire professional career. He said he has a different take on what is happening in the Basin.

Sparks said problems began in the area when the Corps implemented a channel training program, creating the Atchafalaya Basin Floodway. The project allowed for small ridges on either side of the Atchafalaya River to keep more flow in the main channel, accelerating the development of it and protecting the surrounding people and properties from devastating floods.

The oil and gas exploration and development in the area is a different set of issues, he said. He attributed the decrease in water quality and the aquaculture to a natural deterioration of water quality and an “absolute lack of resource management.”

“There isn’t as much drainage out there as there was historically,” he said. “That can deteriorate water quality and has negatively impacted the fisheries and forests. That has been going on for the last 30 years.”

He also said crawfish is the only species in the state that does not have a management plan associated with it by the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. No season parameters, no limits, no size minimums, he said, adding it was basically overfished for too long.

He said the settlements with Basin fisherman, rather than an admission of guilt of some kind, were a business decision for companies involved in the litigation.

“These companies got out of this thing because their insurance companies were telling them it was easier and cheaper to settle,” he said. “The lawsuit, in my opinion, is baseless. The settlements has nothing to do with the court systems deciding construction of these pipelines have deteriorated water quality. The settlements set a terrible precedent. Where does it stop? Who are we going to go after next?”

Not stopping

Joy said though his clients are happy to have settled with several parties affiliated with the lawsuit, they will not stop until oil and gas companies do something to make amends.

“There is nothing being done to remediate the problem,” Joy said. “They haven’t even shown any interest in doing anything about it. It has upset these fisherman’s way of life. Not only their living, but a lot of them were born out there and can’t even use it anymore.”

Numbers do not lie, Bienvenue said.

“Fifteen, 20 years ago, we used to catch up to 2,000 pounds of crawfish a day, 60-70 days in a row. That was a good season,” he said. “Now, you are lucky if you can get two weeks and catch 1,000 pounds. We weren’t getting rich back then, but we were making a good living. Our livelihood as fishermen is basically over.”