Environmental activists ask for help fighting Corps of Engineers

PHOTO: Brown Bayou in 2011. A decade earlier, this was an open steam used by commercial fishermen, sport fishermen, hunters and others to access navigable waters of the Atchafalaya Basin. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit required this obstruction to be removed, but it wasn’t. The Corps is being sued over its issuance of another permit to extend this road permanently. (File photo)

Local environmental activists are asking for reinforcements to pack a courtroom in New Orleans this month as a federal judge tries to decide if the government can allow private interests to close natural bayous in the Atchafalaya Basin.
The hearing in a suit over a permanent road essentially damming up Brown Bayou and the East Branch of Bayou De Glaises is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, June 17, before at the U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier.
The Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association West, whose membership includes many St. Martin commercial fishermen, and the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, are suing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over its issuance of permits for a limestone road serving a well location in Iberville Parish west of Ramah.
The plaintiffs claim the road, with its steel culverts, disrupts the natural hydrology in the Basin and prevents the traditional exercise of commerce enjoyed by generations of Acadians and others who made their living fishing and trapping. They are asking the court to declare illegal and invalid Corps authorization of the road – for Expert Oil & Gas LLC across property owned by A. Wilbert’s Sons – and to vacate and enjoin the use of a “general permit” for the project.
The plaintiffs allege that in 2000, using a Corps’ general permit authorizing “a temporary east-west access road using wooden boards,” the oil and gas operators instead built a limestone road with 30-inch culverts restricting access to Bayou Brown and the east fork of Bayou des Glaises.
Despite a requirement by the permit to restore the project site “to as near pre-project conditions as practicable,” the permanent road and culverts remain, the plaintiffs allege.
“They applied for a general permit and gave false information to get it,” says Dean Wilson, Atchafalaya Basinkeeper executive director. “Instead of ‘laying boards’ they elevated the new road and paved it with limestone.”
In 2012 the Corps authorized the operators to extend the existing road to a new well location, permanently impacting 2.32 acres of wetlands “with the placement of 267 cubic yards of native material and 178 cubic yards of limestone,” the suit alleges.
“They built dams and elevated roads, but since they had applied for a permit, in the eyes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, it becomes a permit violation instead of a Section 404 violation (under the Clean Water Act),” Wilson said.
The Tulane Environmental Law Clinic is handing the matter for the LCPAW and Basinkeeper.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana is located on the corner of Camp Street and Poydras Street in the Central Business District of New Orleans. The entrance to the courthouse is on Poydras Street. The address is 500 Poydras.
“We need as many people as possible to attend the hearing because it is important for the court to see in person people suffering injury from the Corps’s decisions,” Wilson said. “Please come if you can. We need to pack the room!”