A couple of weeks earlier, the county also helped the 65-year-old, who has been living off a fixed income from Social Security disability payments for more than a decade, replace her broken gas furnace with a new, cost-effective, and energy-efficient electric heat pump. It was an upgrade that Moorer would have been hard-pressed to make on her own. Her average monthly income is about $2,600, pooled from Social Security, a small pension from a previous job before her disability stopped her from working, and dog-sitting. She also rents out a room in her house to a family friend. The cost of replacing her old furnace could have topped $10,000.

For years, she had paid repairmen $50 here and there to keep the furnace running, despite being warned about how long those repairs would actually last. “I try to conserve what funds that I do have – I intend to live here for the rest of my life, so I need to be able to have some smart avenues in order to maintain it,” she said. As the cost of property taxes, insurance, and other basic living expenses continues to rise, her budget gets that much tighter.

In November, when Moorer’s furnace went out completely, she layered sweaters and ran space heaters in her den, where she naps with her two dogs, Kimi and Anna Stella, and the ones she dogsits, Izzy and Dozer. “The rest of the house was an icebox,” she said. When it got really cold, she even ran her electric oven just to heat up the house. In January, her electric bill from Puget Sound Energy was over $250. Her usage had skyrocketed, and her bill was more than three times its usual amount.

Despite her financial situation, Moorer wouldn’t have qualified for federal assistance programs aimed at reducing energy bills for low-income households. The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) directly pays people’s utility bills, and the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) funds upgrades of old, energy-hogging HVAC systems with newer, cost-efficient models. The income cut-off for those programs is tied to the federal poverty line, which Moorer hovers just above.

Instead, thanks to assistance programs run by King County, where Seattle is located, and funded in part by Washington State, Moorer got the help she needed without having to choose between draining her savings or staying uncomfortably cold the rest of winter. The King County program, called Energize, helps households pay for energy-efficiency upgrades and connects residents to other funding sources, like the county’s housing repair program, to cover weatherization costs. Energize is part of a slew of energy assistance programs funded by the State of Washington’s Climate Commitment Act (CCA) – a statewide carbon cap-and-invest program, which incentivizes high-emissions businesses like fuel suppliers and utility companies to reduce their emissions – with the overarching goal of reducing state-wide carbon emissions by 95 percent by 2050.

The funds have been used to shore up climate change planning, clean energy projects, and other programs that reduce carbon emissions. Household energy consumption accounts for some 300 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the United States. The CCA offers funds to swap out gas heating systems for electric heat pumps to reduce energy consumption and make homes more efficient for low-income residents, addressing both economic and social inequities. 

According to a 2025 report from the state’s Department of Commerce, more than 270,000 low-income households in Washington are considered energy burdened, meaning that they pay more than 6 percent of their monthly income towards electricity bills. In some rural counties, nearly a quarter of the population is energy burdened. In rural Ferry County, in the state’s north east corner,  the number rises to 41 percent— the highest rate in Washington. About 15 percent of the county’s population is Indigenous, and the Colville Indian Reservation makes up a large swath of the county. 

When families and households can’t afford their energy bills, some simply turn off their heating and cooling; others might forgo necessities like food, medicine, or clothing to keep the lights on. Energy burdens are often cyclical. Lower-income households tend to live in homes or apartment buildings with inefficient appliances, walls and ceilings that lack insulation, and windows that let hot or cold air from outside seep in. For Moorer, running inefficient space heaters constantly meant it took even more energy to heat her home to a semi-comfortable temperature, which then cost more at the end of the month.

“We initially came at this from a direct emissions climate perspective,” said Terry Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy program manager. “But then increasingly with the climate justice perspective, [we’re] trying to make sure that homes are [prepared for] extreme temperatures.” The county has mapped urban heat islands, identifying which neighborhoods have more exposure to high temperatures during heatwaves, for example. “We use that as a scoring mechanism for most of our programs, since there’s such a high demand,” Sullivan said. King County is also directing resources to places that need upgrades the most, he added. This includes energy-efficient insulation to withstand cold spells or heat waves in the event the power goes out.

King County includes renters in its weatherization and assistance programs, a group often left out of federal programs if landlords don’t participate. A 2025 survey found that more than two-thirds of renters in the region making less than $50,000 struggled to pay their utility bills over the past year.

In 2024, Washington launched its own version of LIHEAP, the State Home Energy Assistance Program, with a $35 million budget from CCA funds. The income threshold is set at 80 percent of the area median income. That means regions can have different metrics that more closely reflect the local cost of living, said Brian Sarensen, the program manager at the Department of Commerce who oversees the State Home Energy Assistance Program as well as LIHEAP. In Seattle and the surrounding county, the income threshold for a family of four rises to $110,950; in areas with a lower cost of living, like Spokane in Eastern Washington, that number is $78,300. 

“There’s a little piece of the population where you make just enough that you don’t qualify for any [federal] services, but you’re not quite self-sufficient,” Sarensen said. “We want them to spend the money to heat their homes so that they can be safe and healthy, but at the same time, where does that money come from?” 

In its first year, the program has served over 20,000 households with bill assistance and furnace upgrades, and prevented utility disconnections for over 4,000 households. The average household reduced its energy burden by over 50 percent. “After 10 years, we see that a home has saved basically the same amount of money we’ve invested in it,” Sarensen said. 

As energy costs are predicted to rise across the country, energy assistance and weatherization programs will continue to be vital tools that help families afford higher bills and reduce overall energy use. An analysis of census data shows that nationally, 48.5 million households struggled to pay at least one monthly energy bill in 2024. Despite this, the Trump administration has signaled a desire to slash assistance programs such as LIHEAP and WAP that have a proven track record of making energy costs affordable for millions of Americans.

Moorer is already seeing the benefits: In February, a couple of weeks after her heat pump was installed, her electric bill was already $100 lower, and her average daily electricity usage dropped from 45 kilowatt-hours in January to 30 kilowatt-hours in February. The heat pump also provides her with central air conditioning for the first time. During the 2021 heatwave that broiled Seattle with temperatures over 100 degrees, Moorer remembers running a window AC unit all day and night, and it eventually leaked all over the floor of her living room.

As climate change will cause more frequent heatwaves, Washingtonians without air conditioning— nearly half the state’s population, according to federal data— are also at risk of prolonged exposure to heat and a plethora of negative health effects from kidney failure to stroke, and in extreme circumstances, even death. A 2019 report from the state’s Department of Health estimated that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, average temperatures during a “normal” year by midcentury will be hotter than 20th-century records.

In Central Washington, where the weather isn’t as mild as in coastal cities like Seattle, the need is particularly pronounced. “The bills are so damn high right now, in the summer, it’s the extreme heat where you need an AC running 24-7,” says Oskar Zambrano, a Yakima-based community organizer with Washington Conservation Action. 

Over the past few years, the city has had to set up more cooling centers at community centers on 100-degree days for people who don’t have AC. “Like during the pandemic and other times that there has been an urgent need, the funding [for energy assistance] dries up,” he said. “There’s a higher intake of people needing these services than funds available, and as the economy worsens, we can see that happening.”

As the Trump administration targets and surveils undocumented immigrants with increasingly violent tactics, state programs can still provide vital resources to undocumented or mixed-status households. Federal programs require social security numbers and verification of immigration status. In Washington, additional information can be collected to ensure that payments and benefits aren’t duplicated for the same household. “We just have to make sure you’re a resident of Washington State, and that you have an active utility account,” Sarensen said. “Nobody’s going to freeze to death, and nobody’s going to have heatstroke if we can help it and we still have funds available.” 

Even so, in Yakima, where a large Latino community resides, undocumented and mixed-status families are hesitant to put themselves in any sort of spotlight, Zambrano said. “Sometimes, signing up for these programs is in-person,” he said. “We’ve seen a decrease in turnout for our events and activities because people are afraid to be out and about.”

The energy sector’s growing crisis

Historically, Washington state has benefited from low energy prices, thanks to abundant, cheap hydroelectric generation. According to the Energy Information Administration’s most recent data, the average cost per kilowatt hour of energy in the residential sector was 13.33 cents in Washington, compared to a national average of 17.24 cents. But between December 2024 and December 2025, the state’s average price per kilowatt hour had in fact climbed by 12 percent.

The causes of these rising costs, across the nation, are complex, said Elena Krieger, the senior director of research and policy at Just Solutions, an organization focused on equitable climate policy. “In the West, we’re dealing with issues related to wildfires, insurance costs and damages being paid out, and grid hardening investments,” she said. “In the Southeast, they’re dealing with hurricanes, and there are bill increases related to the damage and recovery from those.” Components of the nation’s power grid, for example, are aging and need to be replaced. For example, the Department of Energy estimated in 2023 that 70 percent of transmission lines are nearing the end of their 50 to 80-year lifespans.

Additionally, as the tech industry builds out massive, energy-intensive data centers to fuel the growth of artificial intelligence models, energy consumption is projected to further skyrocket. That will require new, costly infrastructure, if not new power plants as well. If the industry doesn’t shoulder those costs, which could exceed $1 trillion according to an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, they could be passed on to utility customers writ large.

“We’re also seeing that there are power plants that were going to retire are staying online, because of projected demand growth,” Krieger said. At the federal level, Trump and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright claim the plants are necessary for reliability, a decision Krieger says keeps high-emissions and particularly expensive plants online. As costs rise for consumers, those closest to these dirty power plants will also continue to breathe polluted air and suffer the health impacts. As of January, Wright had intervened to block the planned closure of at least five coal plants in Indiana, Colorado, and Michigan, as well as one in Washington.  Research suggests that the move could increase utility customers’ costs — and the administration has announced it will pour hundreds of millions of dollars into financially struggling coal plants in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and North Carolina. 

The coal plant in Washington, the last in the region, is set to transition to natural gas in accordance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act, a state law passed in 2019 that bans utilities from providing coal power starting in 2026. In its efforts to keep the plant running, the Department of Energy cited emergency conditions from increased demand. The state’s attorney general fired back, calling the Department of Energy’s order illegal and clumsy; as lawsuits are pending, the state legislature passed a bill that will penalize the plant, owned by a Canadian company called TransAlta, if it continues to burn coal. 

Against this political backdrop, energy efficiency programs serve another dual benefit. “These efficiency measures can bring down household costs at each individual house, and collectively that can reduce peak demand, and reduce the need for peaking power plants and other expensive resources that are used to meet those needs,” Krieger said.

At the local level, advocates like Zambrano are also wary that utilities will use compliance with the Clean Energy Transformation Act as an excuse to pass off the cost of decarbonization to customers. PacifiCorp, which operates one of the three investor-owned utilities in Washington, is required to meet an 80 percent clean-energy goal by 2030, said Julian Santos, a climate and clean energy advocate with Washington Conservation Action.

“We are four years away from the first big milestone,” Santos said. “They have a long way to go.” The company’s implementation plan suggests it is currently below 40 percent clean energy and would need to double its renewable energy sources by the end of 2029. During a public comment period on the company’s clean energy plan, environmental advocates argued that attempting to ramp up major infrastructure upgrades in just a few years could make the process more costly than necessary. Last May, the state’s Utilities and Transportation Commission, which regulates power companies, rejected PacifiCorp’s plan, citing its lack of detail and measurable goals to achieve renewable energy targets.

Further complicating matters, in late February, PacifiCorp announced it will sell its Washington service area, which includes Yakima, to Portland General Electric for $1.9 billion. It’s not immediately clear what comes next, Santos said.  “We’re concerned about what that could mean for people in Yakima who are already facing rising rates.”

In a statement, the company said it is “actively engaged” in acquiring additional clean energy sources and does not anticipate service disruptions during the acquisition process. “PacifiCorp is conscious of affordability concerns and will do what it can to mitigate customer cost pressures driven by Washington’s policies,” a spokesperson said

Trump’s Energy Assistance Takedown

After taking office for his second term, President Trump proposed eliminating LIHEAP entirely. In a 2025 budget document, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget called LIHEAP "unnecessary,” and pointed to a government audit from 2010, which found possible evidence of fraud valued at roughly two percent of the program’s budget, in just seven states. The 2025 proposal seeks to instead support low-income individuals through “energy dominance, lower prices, and an America First economic platform.” The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s a move that Trump repeatedly tried to make in his first term, as well. “We’ve managed to overcome it every time,” said Shaylee Stokes, who directs The Energy Project at the Washington State Community Action Partnership. Advocates worked to convince their congressional representatives that the funding was, and still is, vital. Community action agencies work with local clients and contractors to distribute federal energy assistance funding. In Washington, these organizations collectively serve 100,000 households annually.

The White House’s position doesn’t reflect the fact that LIHEAP, in particular, has typically enjoyed broad, bipartisan support from lawmakers as a long-running, cost-effective, successful program. WAP also has a proven track record of keeping people safer in their own homes when their bills are paid, and of reducing costs and energy-related climate emissions. For every dollar spent on WAP, which has operated since the Ford administration, communities receive numerous health and safety benefits. That could include better health outcomes from reduced exposure to heat and indoor air pollution as windows are sealed up, as well as the removal of mold and mildew when homes are weatherized.

Over the past decade, LIHEAP has typically received over $3 billion annually. Under the Biden administration, LIHEAP received major funding boosts, jumping to $8 billion in 2021. WAP received an additional $3.5 billion dollars as well. In February, Trump signed off on a spending bill renewing the program with a $4 billion budget, a $20 million increase from the previous year.

However, federal programs have never met the true need. According to a 2021 report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 16 states have their own state-funded bill assistance and weatherization programs. These programs allow states to expand the benefits of weatherization and bill assistance to more residents.

RMI, an energy and climate policy think tank, estimates that it would take $9.3 billion in annual assistance to end energy poverty and ensure that households never pay more than 4 percent of their income on energy bills — less than 0.25 percent of the federal government’s spending in 2024.

Stokes said that the administration’s rhetoric is far from the reality that community action agencies see every day. Money from LIHEAP and other assistance programs runs out quickly because of the high level of need, she said. “We (did) extra advocacy last year, and we’re expecting to have to do that every year of the Trump administration to make sure that our legislators are hearing about how important (this funding) is,” she said. Ultimately, Stokes said she doesn’t expect the Trump administration to fund LIHEAP in the 2027 budget without pressure.

Without federal funds, the state would fall further short of meeting the full needs of residents facing energy burdens, at an estimated annual cost of $275,000,000 as of May 2025. Washington received $55 million in federal LIHEAP funds in the current fiscal year. Meanwhile, the state is facing its own budget crisis and may need to cut billions of dollars in spending over the next few years.

The Trump administration also attempted to freeze or terminate energy-efficiency grants announced in Biden’s signature bills, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. Sullivan, King County’s climate and energy programs manager, said that departments are still waiting to see if the programs for home energy retrofits and customer rebates for energy-efficiency appliances will be funded at about $80 million each.

The government shutdown in 2025, along with mass layoffs of federal employees, created uncertainty about the status of funds that local programs were banking on. “It created a lot of chaos and uncertainty in our networks,” Stokes said. “You would hear one thing at 10 AM and the exact opposite at 4 PM.” The entire LIHEAP staff was fired in April 2025; at least one staff member was rehired when no one else in the government knew how to disburse the correct amount of remaining funds already appropriated to states.

“It’s a wreck. The loss of institutional knowledge and the increase in administrative burden due to these shake ups has not made things more efficient or saved anybody money,” Stokes said. Instead, local program administrators have had to spend more of their own time and resources to fight budget cuts and keep programs running, and provide vital assistance to families. After the 2025 shutdown ended, Washington received 90 percent of its annual LIHEAP funding, said Jeff DeLuca, the executive director of Washington State Community Action Partnership.

Moorer’s Peace of Mind

Energy assistance programs are also vital because they enable lower-income households to access resources and benefits that would otherwise be concentrated at the top. A 2024 study found that between 2006 and 2021, Americans collectively received over $47 billion in tax credits for energy-efficiency and clean energy upgrades, including rooftop solar, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. About 60 percent of those benefits went to households in the top 20 percent of income.

“This is sort of what you see with capitalism in general — the rich get richer, and that happens in the energy system, too,” said Justin Schott, the director of the Energy Equity Project. He pointed to a case study in the Detroit area, which found that LED lightbulbs, a simple efficiency upgrade, were harder to come by at stores in lower-income neighborhoods. Switching to these bulbs from incandescent bulbs cuts energy usage by 90 percent, but requires an upfront investment.

Larger, systemic inequities are baked into the system, down to the bills that consumers receive. “Everybody pays the same surcharge per kilowatt hour,” Schott said. That means, effectively, energy inefficient households are penalized for using more energy. If those households are energy burdened, that also means they can’t afford thousands of dollars in upfront investments to reap the benefits of a tax credit. “The fact is, low-income households have been subsidizing the wealthy’s access to energy efficiency and clean energy for a very long time.”

Moorer’s high bills from Puget Sound Energy, for example, were affected by a 12 percent rate hike that the utility implemented in January. The utility will use most of the new revenue for clean energy and reliability investments, according to filings with the state’s Utility and Transportation Committee. About one percent of the increased revenue will be diverted to bill assistance programs. Because Moorer used so much extra energy to run space heaters when her furnace broke, she’s paying more into those investments than a household that could have afforded to fix the problem immediately. 

Krieger of Just Solutions says the disparity is akin to regressive tax, like a sales tax. “(Low-income households) pay much more of their income, compared to wealthier households, because their incomes are lower and because they often don’t have access to efficiency measures that would enable them to use less energy for the same set of services.”

A 2024 study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that nationally, communities of color that would have benefited the most from lower energy bills were the least likely to use heat pumps. Further, a 2025 study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that nearly 1 in 5 homes that qualify for weatherization assistance are deferred from the program because significant, costly repairs are needed first. That could include replacing leaking roofs, damaged floorboards, or hazardous, outdated electrical panels.

At the state legislature this year, advocates successfully pushed for legislation to enact a dedicated fund for bill assistance. (The bill, passed on March 12, still needs to be signed by the governor.) “One of our goals is that a state-run program will provide sustained and predictable assistance, not just one-time bill credits,” said Aqsa Mengal, the climate and clean energy policy lead at Front and Centered, an environmental justice advocacy group. It could also reduce burdensome applications for people who need help, for example, allowing Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program recipients to automatically enroll, and the agencies that serve them, by creating one umbrella of funding instead of a patchwork of grants and programs, she said. 

“This has been a multi-year effort on behalf of energy and low-income advocates,” Mengal said. “We are hopeful that the governor will sign the bill.” 

While Washington already mandates that electric utility companies provide bill assistance programs to low-income households, the state Department of Commerce’s 2025 report found that participation rates varied widely. Across Washington’s 39 counties, 32 had enrollment rates below 25 percent. The report also found that nearly all programs failed to align with the state’s mandate, as different electric utilities, some investor-owned, some consumer-owned, doled out different amounts of assistance to households in similar financial situations. Some utilities, for example, required proof of a disability or senior status, in addition to income.

In Yakima, Santos said that means many residents who need assistance fall by the wayside. Utilities are required to provide assistance to customers who meet the state’s definition of low-income, at 80 percent of the area median income. The Department of Commerce estimates nearly 12,000 low-income households in Yakima County are energy burdened, yet PacifiCorp reported providing bill assistance to just over 7,500 customers in the 2025 fiscal year across its service area, which includes portions of two other counties. 

This is despite the state requiring utilities to develop “customer benefit indicators” that track the needs of vulnerable communities in their service area. “What we want now is to see those numbers move in the right direction, to set goals to reduce energy burdens and improve weatherization,” Santos said. “If they just continue tracking these numbers, that’s not going to accomplish anything.” In a statement, the company said that it “follows all state requirements to provide assistance to customers who need it.” The company also provided internal data showing that as of March 2026, it had enrolled more than 9,500 customers in bill assistance. 

In the meantime, advocates are also uneasy that the Climate Commitment Act’s funds could be siphoned off to address other affordability issues. At the start of the legislative session, Gov. Bob Ferguson proposed using $569 million from Climate Commitment Act revenue to maintain the state’s working families’ tax credit. The governor’s proposal was not included in the final budget that passed, according to the Washington State Budget and Policy Center. For now, that marks another victory for environmental justice advocates. (The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

“It’s a slippery slope, [the tax credit] isn’t directly related to climate mitigation by any means,” Stokes said. “There are plenty of initiatives that the CCA can fund that are approaching environmental justice and energy equity.”

In Renton, once the dust settles from all the contractors working on her house, Moorer looks forward to finally getting rid of the bulky space heaters and the AC window unit in her living room. A stain on her carpet from the AC leak will serve as a reminder of how uncomfortable her house could get before the county installed her new heat pump. But she’s thinking of fixing that up on her own.  “Now I’m sitting nice and cozy, not all bundled up,” she said. “The peace of mind that I get, I can’t thank [the county] enough.

***

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

I woke up on Sunday, September 29, 2024, with a headache that was unusual for me, but I took Tylenol and pushed through. It was a church Sunday, and I had plans for my daughter, Nicole Green, and my grandson to join me at my church, an hour away.

After the service, during the long drive back home, my daughter received an alert on her phone around 11:30 a.m. about a fire nearby. We mistakenly thought the risk was in our town of Covington, so we took Exit 82 in Conyers. Little did we know that this was where toxic flames ignited that morning. 

We drove right through a danger zone.  

A few months before my headache started, BioLab, a plant in Conyers known for manufacturing pool and spa water chemicals, established an around-the-clock fire watch protocol in response to strong odors detected in on-site storage. According to a May 2025 investigation by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB), the so-called permanent fire watch was responsible for “identifying and managing hazards, detecting early signs of product decomposition or fire hazards, notifying site leadership of any observed leaks or other water intrusions, and contacting the third-party sprinkler company if a sprinkler head was leaking.”  

However, the state and BioLab then began preparing for a different kind of emergency. Hurricane Helene made landfall on Sept. 26, 2024, around 300 miles away in Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, the deadliest storm in the contiguous U.S. since Katrina. BioLab closed down following our governor’s state of emergency declaration in preparation for the hurricane. The fire watch continued to work, using buckets to capture rainwater from the leaking roof, as approximately 10 inches of rain descended on Conyers between Sept. 26 and 27. As Helene continued north into Appalachia, she left a breeze that lingered after the rain stopped. But a new disturbance would soon descend upon us. 

At about 5 a.m. on Sept. 29, 2024, a member of the fire watch team at BioLab heard a loud popping sound and initially believed it to be the nearby ice machine. Upon investigation, the employee found that some chemicals had gotten wet, which likely caused the popping noise. 

The BioLab plant stored trichloroisocyanuric acid and sodium dichloroisocyanurate, two chlorine-based disinfectants. When these chemicals come into contact with water, they produce nitrogen trichloride, or in simpler terms, “an explosion hazard,” according to the CSB investigation. In the month of the fire, BioLab’s inventory had grown to more than double what the company told local officials it would store, with about 13.9 million pounds of chemicals. The company stored these chemicals in “super sacks,” thousands of pounds stacked on top of one another, some of which were stored outside the plant’s firewall. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) previously fined BioLab $61,473 in April 2024 for improperly storing the chemicals that triggered the fire.

Pollution from the BioLab Fire

The following map visualizes the dispersion of chemical pollution following the BioLab fire over several days following the incident, coupled with annual household income data for the surrounding affected areas.

By approximately 5:10 a.m., a member of the fire watch called 911 as smoke began to fill the warehouse. News reports later confirmed that on this initial 911 call, the employee mentioned a sprinkler head had burst inside the facility. Around 6 a.m., local emergency services issued shelter-in-place and evacuation orders, going door-to-door to neighbors adjacent to the warehouse. Hours later, a second, more intense fire broke out, sending plumes of black and multicolored smoke into the air, as “small explosions” shot chemicals out of the building. Rockdale County Fire Rescue personnel said it sounded like the gun range. The fire destroyed the warehouse, trapping chemicals that personnel were unable to remove ahead of the second fire.  

At the time, I lived nine miles from the BioLab plant; my daughter and grandson were 11 miles away. I kept a close eye on 11Alive News and reassured my roommate and her visiting granddaughter that it was safe to be outside in the post-hurricane breeze. However, local officials had evacuated about 17,000 people and implemented a shelter-in-place advisory for the metro Atlanta area as the toxic smoke moved through. 

The day after the fire, I drove my roommate’s granddaughter to the Atlanta bus terminal to return home to celebrate her mother's birthday. To ensure everything went smoothly, I decided to leave 30 minutes earlier than planned. On the drive, we encountered a roadblock at Exit 84 to I-20, forcing us to take a detour instead of taking the main highway through Conyers. We navigated to Highway 155 North and drove through what I assumed to be thick fog, drastically limiting visibility to about five feet.

Returning from the bus terminal, I started coughing, my eyes burned, and the headache I had hoped would go away returned with a vengeance. Later that evening, I experienced stomach cramps, too. I informed my roommate of my intent to visit urgent care if my symptoms didn't improve by morning. While heading to bed, I noticed a slight chlorine smell in the house, which was puzzling since I hadn’t done any cleaning.

By Oct. 1, my headache had worsened, and a powerful bleach odor permeated the entire house. My eyes burned intensely, my cough worsened, and my chest felt constricted. At this point, I was not just concerned; I was furious. 

That same day, around 10:30 a.m., I visited the urgent care center. Without health insurance, I initially managed all my doctor’s visits out of pocket. There, the doctor administered a nebulizer respiratory treatment and a steroid injection. She prescribed a regimen: 10 mg steroids for a week, 800 mg ibuprofen three times a day for five days, eye irritation relief drops, an albuterol inhaler, medication for a sinus infection, and antibiotics.

As I glanced at the material my doctor handed to me, the phrase “Today’s Diagnosis Includes” caught my eye. Along with the other diagnoses, it stated, “Exposure to biological agent.” I had suspected as much, but seeing it in writing crystallized the reality of the situation. Reading my diagnosis stirred a whirlwind of emotions—fear, anxiety, and yes, anger. Standing outside the building, my heart racing. I took a moment to collect myself, got into my car, and, while driving, allowed myself to feel what needed to be felt. I cried. 

Although I considered leaving the area temporarily, I didn’t have the funds for a hotel stay. However, I had a Kairos prison ministry weekend scheduled for Oct. 3 in Hartwell, Georgia, about 80 miles away. The hotel was taken care of, and I was determined to attend. I hoped that this would provide me with some much-needed relief, even if I couldn’t be much help; at least I could breathe some fresh air. 

I checked into a hotel, borrowing my daughter’s nebulizing machine for her asthma to assist with my breathing. 

On Oct. 6, around 7 p.m., I returned home and noticed a resurgence of symptoms—chest pain, coughing, burning eyes, a persistent headache, and now itching. I made myself a bowl of soup and settled on the sofa with my late mom’s blanket for comfort, but I started itching. I chose to go to bed early, but the itching continued throughout the night. 

Within the next 48 hours, I realized that a residue had settled on the sofa, bed, walls, and floors. I immediately got to work, thoroughly cleaning and dusting all surfaces and washing all exposed linens, comforters, towels, and clothes—an effort that took up most of my day. I saw dead bugs in the windowsill, which made me think to collect as much evidence as possible. I collected the dead bugs and air conditioning filters. I took pictures of my garden and filmed a short video.

After cleaning the house, I felt extremely weak and struggled to catch my breath during basic tasks like showering and eating. For the next five days, using the remaining medications I had been prescribed, I tried to endure without going back to the doctor. I had little to no appetite and only ate enough to take my extra medications.

On the morning of Oct. 11, 2024, I returned to urgent care, where the doctor provided me with two more nebulizer treatments and administered another steroid shot. She prescribed a higher dose of steroids to take home, an additional inhaler, and more nebulizer medications. The doctor also recommended that I purchase a nebulizer machine and mentioned that we would take an X-ray of my lungs at my next appointment. I invested in an air purifier, though in hindsight, I should have gone straight to the ER, but I was worried about my finances and couldn’t fathom the cost of that hospital bill.  

Like many people, I faced my share of challenges in life. Last year, I relocated to Covington in January, had a car accident in February, and lost my mom in April, all while navigating a divorce. Coupled with my emerging health issues, it was all a lot to handle. 

Meanwhile, I found a shared community among those who were also trying to catch their breath, quite literally, in the wake of the BioLab catastrophe. I’ve interviewed at least nine people and attended multiple related community meetings to capture what we learned and lost in the shadow of that plume that erupted in our backyards just over a year ago.

“We want BioLab shut down…” 

In the days and weeks following the BioLab fire, many of us in the surrounding area sought answers. I joined a Rockdale County Resident Facebook page and came across a recording of the state House and Senate Rockdale County legislative delegation meeting held on Tuesday, Oct. 8, 2024.

The Rockdale County Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, Kenny Johnson, insisted that all Rockdale County residents undergo blood testing and that Georgia’s congressional representatives pursue a federal criminal investigation into BioLab. Soon after his remarks, Johnson stepped out into the hallway and collapsed. The Associated Press reported that Rep. Viola Davis (D-Stone Mountain) administered CPR until medical officials rushed Johnson to Grady Memorial Hospital, where he died later that day. 

Walter Bannister, a resident of Conyers and founder of The Citizens of Rockdale, spoke at the same meeting just before Johnson delivered his remarks. Citing his disaster recovery experience with the defense coordinating element for FEMA groups 2 and 3, he said he believed the governor should have issued a state of emergency. 

“We want BioLab shut down and moved out of Rockdale County,” he added, drawing applause from attendees.

Last year wasn't the first time the BioLab warehouse caught fire; it’s happened at least three times in the last two decades. BioLab’s lawyers continue to battle lawsuits, including one on behalf of Rockdale County and a class-action lawsuit, both of which are still in litigation. In a Sept. 2025 ruling, a federal judge dismissed parts of Rockdale County’s lawsuit seeking reimbursement for public services such as firefighters and for monitoring air and water quality, and dismissed claims of violating the Clean Air Act without prejudice, meaning the state can refile those in another case. In the class-action suit, a federal judge agreed with BioLab’s motion to dismiss allegations of “strict liability” for any and all damages arising from storing potentially hazardous chemicals. The Georgia Supreme Court will weigh in on the legal grounds of the medical monitoring fund. The class-action suit seeks to compensate members for treatment and screenings “necessitated by their exposure to toxic chemicals.” In May 2025, BioLab announced it had completed remediation of the Conyers facility and wouldn’t restart its operations there.

The way forward wasn’t as simple for the rest of us. 

Bannister lives a few miles from BioLab, or “ground zero,” as he calls it. For nearly three weeks following the fire, nightly shelter-in-place warnings continued for the communities in a two-mile radius of the plant. He likened the smoke that engulfed the community to the 1980 horror film “The Fog.” The silence and stillness were particularly eerie. The birds and the insects that normally chirped or stung were gone. He told me the grille of his 2022 Toyota Tundra had corroded, making the car appear to be decades old. The oak trees in his yard and vegetables in the garden looked like they’d been through a fiercely cold winter. The trees were green one day and dead the next, he said.

His initial symptoms were similar to those of others I’ve interviewed, watery eyes and frustration with the persistent smell of chlorine. He and his wife bought bottled water to wash their faces after being outside. “Every time you’d go outside, your skin would literally burn,” he told me over the phone in October. “It almost [felt] like somebody putting a butane torch to your face—you can actually feel the heat coming from it.”  

Every time you’d go outside, your skin would literally burn,” he told me over the phone in October. “It almost [felt] like somebody putting a butane torch to your face—you can actually feel the heat coming from it."

Bannister shut the HVAC off, taped the windows, and sent his family to Ocala, Florida, to get away from the “chemical, acid smoke smell” that still seeped into the house. His wife returned when yet another storm, Hurricane Milton, was spinning toward Florida. But the Bannisters’ kids stayed behind. “The kids are like, ‘We know the hurricane is only going to be like a day, and it’s going to knock down some trees, and it’s going [to] rain…but y’all [are] fighting invisible wounds up there—we’re not going back up there.’” Walter was proud that they didn’t want to put themselves in harm’s way. 

I could relate to Bannister’s desire to keep his children safe. With my breathing trouble, I’ve been empathizing with my daughter, Nicole, who’s dealt with asthma symptoms for years. Feeling a tightness and pain in your chest because your airways are inflamed is something you can’t fully understand unless you experience it.

Nicole worked retail in Conyers, about four miles from BioLab. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, she wanted to figure out what she needed to do to feel better—she needed me, her mama, as she later told me. But, she had to return to work in the days following the fire, so she brought her nebulizer with her to try to manage the increasing asthma attacks. “The smell was in the clothes, and that did nothing but make my asthma worse,” she said. 

She stopped going into work for about four days to find relief. When she returned with a doctor’s note, management let her go. My daughter has two children, then ages 11 and 21, and she needed to support them. She didn’t have her own car, so she rented vehicles to pick up groceries for Instacart. More than a year after the fire, she says her asthma still feels worse than it did before the BioLab fire.   

“I just feel like everyone was treated unfair[ly] healthwise, whether you got respiratory problems before and it worsened, or you got respiratory problems when it happened,” she said. “Where’s the empathy, where’s the care?"

Chemical Incidents in the Southeast United States

The following map depicts chemical explosions, fires, and leaks that have occured between 2021-2025. Additional details are available for each individual incident.

Data is provided by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters.
 

The Opposite Effect

After several months of visiting urgent care, I mentioned to my doctor that I would get sick every time I went out to pick up groceries, shop for clothes, or handle other errands. She told me, "I need you to stop going out." I kept repeating her words to myself on the way home, feeling helpless. At that point, the only option I saw was to leave the area entirely.

While searching for housing in neighboring counties, my symptoms worsened just before Christmas—I thought I might die. I had to look for a house, pack mine up, then unpack a whole house, all while I was deathly sick. I felt so weak I couldn't even sit up long enough to make a bowl of soup. After a trip to urgent care and taking more medication, I would start feeling better after about a week, only to experience weakness, exhaustion, stomach pain, and difficulty breathing again. I purchased a health care plan at the beginning of this year, which I could barely afford. If Congress lets the Affordable Care Act subsidies lapse, I’ll be uninsured again. Lately, I’ve been seeing a pulmonologist—it’s been a relentless cycle of doctor's appointments, X-rays, CT scans, and, most recently, an MRI.

I’m trying to focus on the bright spots. 

There are people like Cheryl Garcia of Conyers, who was also preparing to go to church the Sunday of the fire, but paused when she saw news reports. She had a metallic taste in her mouth, smelled chlorine in her home, and her husband complained that his eyes, throat, and nose were burning, and his chest felt tight after being outside. Garcia, who is a retired nurse practitioner, developed vocal cord dysphonia and underwent eight weeks of speech therapy twice a week. She and her husband had all the vents cleaned, the crawl space in the basement encapsulated, and their roof replaced. And they pray—a lot. She’s also fighting for accountability from local officials and industry.

“I have pretty much forced myself onto the local emergency planning committee, which was not active before BioLab, and I made a lot of noise about that,” she said. “They are now meeting monthly. And as a citizen, I am there every month to hold them accountable, and hopefully that will prevent something like this from happening again.” 

There is a disaster waiting to happen in every community on the margins, from the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to the petrochemical plant explosion in Roseland, Louisiana, to the ammunition factory explosion in Tennessee, to the recent ammonia leak near Yazoo City, Mississippi, where a plume of yellow smoke spread through the air. 

It's easy to become isolated—many of us were literally encouraged to stay home and isolate. In many ways, we are still emerging from the shadow of that plume.

However, it is having the opposite effect, and I hope communities are becoming aware of how much we need each other. It’s part of why, this September, almost a year to date from the fire, I completed Henry County’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training to learn disaster response skills, search and rescue techniques, and disaster medical operations. Next, I’ll learn CPR. In the event of the next emergency, I will not merely seek assistance from others but serve as a proactive resource to aid my community.

***

Alfonso Figueroa and Anel Juarez drove 100 miles from their cobalt-blue manufactured home in Winchester Heights, Arizona, to a hospital in Tucson, where Anel’s OB-GYN had scheduled an appointment to induce her labor.

Countless times, Alfonso made the two-hour drive with his wife for prenatal care. But on this ride, Anel, who was having contractions, felt every pothole on the dirt roads of her community. At least it was under 100 degrees that day.

Just after midnight on September 4, 36-year-old Anel gave birth to their third child, Alaia Isabela. The next day, the couple drove their newborn home, navigating those bumpy roads. Anel supported her baby’s head in the car seat.

“I feel like she gets shaken up a lot because of the movement of the car, because of the road,” Anel said in Spanish.

Alfonso and Anel moved to Winchester Heights from Mexico 16 years ago. Before that, he worked a back-breaking job at a factory for next to nothing. Working on a farm in the U.S. allows Alfonso, 38, to earn more in a couple of days than he did in a week back in Mexico, while Anel stays home with the kids.

He loves his job and is currently caring for 108,000 pistachio trees near Wilcox. When Alfonso returns home to Winchester Heights and looks around, he sees his community in disrepair: “My place back in Oaxaca seemed better than here. I thought this was an abandoned town,” he said in Spanish.

Rows of manufactured homes and trailers, some more sophisticated than others, line the six parallel streets that form Winchester Heights. The dirt roads connect to a soccer field. Nearby, a tienda sells beer and snacks, and roses bloom outside the community center and a small playground. 

For most residents, Spanish is their mother tongue. Instead of Winchester Heights, some call it Perras Flacas, or Skinny Dogs, a nickname for the community's many stray dogs, including pit bulls, said Alfonso, who won’t let his older children, Ashley, 9, and Alfonso (Jr.), 12, play far from home. 

Alfonso and Anel have worked hard to create a home, investing time and money to improve it for their growing family. Their house has a well-kept lawn and fruit trees form a neat line along the front fence. Inside, they hang out on spotless leather couches in front of a large flat-screen TV. 

No matter how much they invest in their home, they alone can’t change the community’s lack of infrastructure. Winchester Heights—a tiny dot on the map of southern Arizona— is a colonia, roughly translated as “neighborhood” in Spanish. It’s home to several hundred people living about 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of its residents are farmworkers on nearby pistachio and tomato farms. Some have lived here for decades with their families, while others are temporary workers. 

There are at least 2,000 colonias dusted along the southwestern border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, many of them unincorporated like Winchester Heights.

Most of these communities were established by workers who came into the U.S. during waves of labor migration. Families settled close to the industries where they were employed, sometimes in mountain canyons or in the middle of a desert. Today, around 1 million residents, most of them with Mexican roots, call colonias home.

Climate Risks Affecting Colonias in Southern Arizona 

In the eyes of the U.S. government, when a community is certified as a colonia, it has significant needs— little to no access to potable water and wastewater services, and substandard housing and poor infrastructure. Additionally, "regions with colonias have poverty rates 3 to 9 percentage points higher than other border regions," according to a 2024 federal government report. Getting resources and infrastructure improvements to colonias has always been challenging, and it is getting more difficult now with cuts across the government agencies that fund them. 

Nearly 60% of colonias in the country are at risk of losing their status and funding in the next few years, according to a 2024 report on rural development in colonias by the United States Government Accountability Office. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s outdated rules, the metropolitan statistical areas that colonias belong to cannot exceed 1 million people. Colonias in the Tucson metropolitan statistical area crossed this threshold in 2014.

In July 2025, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales introduced a bipartisan bill, aiming to protect colonias’ funding by increasing the maximum for the metropolitan statistical areas surrounding colonias from 1 million to 2 million people. The bill, the Ensuring Continued Access to Funding for Colonias Act (H.R. 4498), sits in the House Committee on Financial Services, awaiting further action.

Due to their geographical location, colonias are particularly vulnerable to climate change, with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and flooding threatening their residents. And federal funding supports repairs to water systems, infrastructure upgrades, and housing. The combination of inadequate water access and poor infrastructure makes people sicker. In Arizona, most of its 58 colonias are in medically underserved areas, where the ratio of population-to-primary care physicians is greater than 5,000 to 1.

Residents of colonias are among the most vulnerable populations in our country, authors of the 2024 GAO report found.

The Margin and Arizona Luminaria visited eight colonias in Arizona, including some that lost their designation. Many of these communities rely on septic tanks or sewage lagoons and receive water from communal wells. Those outside of the well system store water in cisterns or tanks, which exposes it to contaminants. Many residents don’t believe the tap water is safe to drink, so they mostly use it for dishes and bathing. Interviews with 48 residents, local and state officials, nonprofits, researchers, and healthcare providers revealed that all are concerned that compounded stressors to which residents of colonias are exposed are leaving them in harm’s way.

A Legacy of Impermanence  

Arizona’s colonias first emerged in the late 19th century, following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which created a labor shortage in railroad construction and slowed mining and agriculture. To adapt, companies sought cheap labor from Mexico. Recruited Mexican workers settled in worker camps along the border. Some of these camps, including places like Clifton, two hours north of Winchester Heights, remain colonias today.

One reason these informal settlements endure is the state’s land-use policies. In the 20th century, especially the 1990s, Arizona saw a boom in “wildcat subdivisions,” where developers split large parcels into smaller lots without guaranteeing water access or other essential services. Angela Donelson, co-author of the book “Colonias in Arizona and New Mexico,” has spent part of her city planning career studying colonias and trying to improve conditions in poor rural communities.

“There's roads that are impassable. There's irregular lots, irregular streets, probably issues with electrical connections,” Donelson said. Those irregular homesteading and uneven development patterns are a signature of many wildcat subdivisions, and, in turn, colonias in Arizona.

Since the 1990s, the federal government has taken strides to improve living conditions in colonias. The 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act established a designated set-aside Community Development Block Grants from HUD and mandated the four states—Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California—to spend up to 10% of their community development funds on projects that benefited colonias. In 1997, Congress made the colonia set-aside funding permanent.

This money is competitive, and HUD allocates it to state agencies annually. In the latest funding cycle, according to the data from the Arizona Department of Housing—the agency administering the funds—the state received just over $2 million to spend on housing and water infrastructure improvement in four counties with colonias.  One of these counties was Cochise, which was awarded $119,372 for housing rehabilitation in up to five colonias, including Winchester Heights.

A Glimpse into Neighboring Colonias

Explore the following colonias to hear from residents and view images from each area.

“It’s never enough,” said Christine McLachlan, the director of Development Services in Cochise County. “Any money we could possibly get would instantly be absorbed. The need is great.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) also has targeted funding for colonias through rural development grants and loan programs for water, wastewater, and housing improvements. And colonias are eligible for the funding for “disadvantaged communities” under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law administered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Still, without the designated set-aside grants, it will be even harder for colonias to secure the funding needed to improve their living conditions. Colonias will have to compete against a much bigger pool of communities in need. 

“We have a lot of need, but so do other counties, and so it's tough,” McLachlan said.

For the amenities—or ad hoc solutions—colonias do have, residents largely have themselves to thank. In Winchester Heights, residents pulled wild mesquite trees through the dirt, carving out their own streets. In the case of fires, residents are often their own first responders. Alfonso Figueroa shared that he once had to bring a water truck from work to help put out a fire, as there are no fire hydrants in his colonia. Instead, neighbors run to help each other with their own hoses or buckets of water.

Hydrants aren’t the only thing Winchester Heights lacks. Stormwater drainage, streetlights, public access to water and sewer infrastructure, trash removal, health care and schools are nonexistent. Alfonso and Anel’s kids go to a small elementary school 20 minutes away. This unincorporated colonia has no formal governance structure, leaving residents to seek resources and funding on their own with little to no outside support. Coupled with working and raising families, making time to pursue those resources is an unrealistic expectation.

“We don’t know anything,” Alfonso Figueroa said about the funding options. “It makes me sad, because even though there are funds to help the community move forward, nothing gets done.”

This is not only Winchester Heights’ issue. Olga Morales-Pate, the CEO of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP), said there’s one common denominator in a lot of colonias: They're managed and operated by volunteers. 

“Most of them are small in size. They lack the financial capacity to afford a paid workforce… You don't have the staff with the right level of sophistication, the right level of training to navigate the regulatory requirements, the funding requirements,” she said. 

The lack of capacity translates into the lack of progress on the ground. In 2015, RCAP, a national network of nonprofits that work to improve living conditions and access to funding in colonias and other rural communities, published a report on the water and wastewater infrastructure needs in colonias. RCAP found that a third, or 604 colonias, housing over 134,000 residents, lacked adequate access to potable water and wastewater management. The 2021-2022 follow-up report showed that conditions in 63 colonias had deteriorated.

“ Having water in Arizona is kind of [a] privilege, but the quality may be terrible,” said Adriana Zuniga-Teran, an associate professor at the School of Geography, Development and Environment at the University of Arizona. Connecting colonias to a public water supply can be prohibitively expensive or logistically impossible due to their remoteness.   

“The horizontal infrastructure, the underground infrastructure–the water and the wastewater–will basically determine a community's ability to build the housing, the medical facilities, the school systems, the grocery stores–everything that makes a community sustainable,” said RCAP’s Morales-Pate. “And that is the one thing that is lacking in our communities.”

Colonias’ Capacity Crisis 

Set in a breathtaking canyon and cut in two by the San Francisco River, Clifton was founded in 1873 after copper ore was discovered in the area. The town is approximately 5 miles away from the Morenci mine, the largest copper producer in the U.S. The historic downtown is adorned with local shops, a museum, an old jail, and a century-old county courthouse. Yet, many of the houses that line Clifton’s canyon roads are crumbling. Paint peels off walls, windows are broken or covered with foil to reflect heat, and some people reside in other people’s backyards. 

Less than half a century ago, Clifton was thriving. Here, in Greenlee County, the residents are whiter and older than those in the Cochise County colonias, and many used to work in the mines. It had schools, an auto shop, and department stores, including a J.C. Penney. Frank Monjaras, 72, used to roam the outdoors as a teenager after his father had taught him desert survival skills and how to shoot a .22-caliber rifle. “My days were spent at the river, running around, riding a bike all day long,” said Monjaras. “I would go out, grab my rifle, box of the .22 [caliber] shells, a blanket, two canteens, can of soup, and hit the mountains up around here, what they call Clifton Peak, Mulligan's Peak, and upriver. I'd be gone all weekend,” reminisced Monjaras

Today in Clifton, hundreds of older residents depend on free meals at the senior center and food pantries. Carolina Cortez, a community health worker with Southeast Arizona Health Education Center (SEAHEC) distributed goods at a food drive in Clifton in September 2025. She rose with the sun to make an hour-long drive, and when she arrived 15 minutes before opening, a line of cars was already waiting. A little over two hours after the opening, the pantry ran out of food. That day, they were able to provide groceries to 108 people, and turned away 32 vehicles. Many of the seniors who come to the food drives retired from the mines.

Monjaras was in his 30s in 1983, when everything changed. That July, the Morenci miners began a year-long strike against the owner, Phelps Dodge Corporation, demanding fair wages. Eventually, they were defeated, and many lost their jobs. In October that same year, the “Great Flood” devastated Clifton, with the San Francisco River rushing through its streets, covering roughly 90,000 cubic feet per second. Following the storm, Frank and his wife Margaret resettled to their house in North Clifton, where they live now.

Over four decades later, Clifton never fully recovered. Businesses left, schools and stores closed, roads cracked, and the houses aged with their owners. Unlike other colonias, Clifton has a government, yet the colonia still doesn't have the capacity to go after competitive grants, a town administrator told The Margin and Arizona Luminaria.

The housing conditions in Clifton upset the Monjaras family, but they don’t surprise them. Their own home needs a paint job and new siding, but they can’t afford it. “It's the money, you know,” Monjaras said. “My wife gets Social Security. I get Social Security. We have to pay our bills, food, you know—take care of ourselves, and what we have left has to stretch out till the next monthly payment.”

Besides, Frank can’t do much fixing on his own. Ten years ago, he got a bad knee infection. As a veteran, the nearest Veterans Affairs (VA) medical center is roughly 41 miles away in Safford. After three years of going back and forth, he developed gangrene. Ultimately, he had to go to Tucson, about 170 miles away, for an amputation. 

Early one afternoon this September, the Monjaras sat in their living room, Margaret, 73, on the couch next to a basket of black and red yarn—the Morenci school colors. A few feet away, Frank engaged in conversation from his wheelchair. They stayed close to their swamp cooler, an energy-efficient cooling unit that infuses moisture into the air. The cooler blew, but didn’t do much else.

“Swamp coolers don't work very well during the summertime. When it's hot, it is hot, and my house will get really hot,” Margaret Monjaras said. Steady air conditioning on a fixed income is a luxury for the Monjaras, but on some days it’s the only way to survive the heat, which reached 111 degrees in mid-August, 2025. “So, we try to do the best we can. In our bedrooms, we have little window air conditioners, which are great. We close the door, turn that on, and we’re nice and cool,” Frank Monjaras added.

The southern border region, where all of Arizona’s colonias are, has more consecutive days with temperatures above 90 degrees than the rest of the country.  Being able to stay cool is a matter of survival. “You're choosing between somewhere this money could go and cooling your space. Which, depending on the time of year, may be a life and death situation,” said Nathan Lothrop, associate director of the Building Resilience, Innovation, Sustainability, and Assistance Center for the Environment and an assistant research professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona.

Heat-related deaths in Arizona have increased by 350% from 2020 to 2024. According to state data, 990 people died of heat in 2023. In the first nine months of 2024, 742 people died from heat-related causes, according to the Arizona Public Health Association's resident epidemiologist, Allan Williams.

On July 20, 2023, a farmworker in his mid-20s and father of two from Yuma County collapsed in the field in the morning, and died before 10 a.m. during the 11 days of temperatures at and above 110 degrees. “No one should be dying, but the fact that someone died at 8:00 a.m. from heatstroke, and who was a young man, it doesn't fit the stereotypes of who is being impacted by heat in the past,” said SEAHEC’s executive director Brenda Sánchez. 

Heat is exacerbating the multidecade drought in the American Southwest known as the “megadrought.” It is depleting rivers, groundwater, and aquifers, thus further compromising water availability and quality for all, but particularly for those relying on water wells, like the residents in Arizona’s colonias and other remote rural communities.

“Even if someone had a heatstroke, if someone was dehydrated… they didn't miss work. They went to work sick because they had to go to work,” said Sánchez. “They don't have sick time; they need to be able to put food on their table. I don't like to use the word ‘resilience’ because I don't think it's resilience. It's life or death for them to be able to, to just survive,” she said.   

When seasonal monsoons or heavy rains come, rain pounds the baked desert ground. Water remains on the surface instead of being absorbed, causing flash floods. If a community doesn’t have adequate drainage, it floods.

The eastern part of Winchester Heights is flood-prone. “When a strong storm hits, all the homes and streets fill with water,” said Jose Rodriguez, 43, Alfonso Figueroa's co-worker and neighbor, speaking in Spanish. Flooding makes dirt roads dangerous. “Those floods have caused accidents, too… Fort Grant Road is where many accidents happen,” he said. 

In Pirtleville, a former colonia in Cochise County that wasn’t included in the Arizona Department of Housing’s 2024 list of designated colonias, water stays for days after a storm and breeds mosquitoes and flies. “It smells really bad,” said Elizabeth Vertrees, 44, who had water in front of her house for a week after the last significant rain. She said the back roads were flooded and she had to go “all the way around” to drive her daughter to school. 

Research shows that historically, people in colonias have been sicker than the rest of the country. According to a 2014 EPA-USDA report, border counties with colonias had significantly higher rates of Hepatitis A, along with water and foodborne illness, compared to the rest of the U.S. In August 2025, according to Cochise County officials, West Nile virus, a disease spread by mosquitoes breeding in standing water, was detected through vector traps near Pirtleville.

“A Colonia Means Something”

When a colonia is decertified, it not only loses critical access to federal set-aside funding, but other grants also become more challenging to obtain. Without the designation, former colonias compete with all localities applying for HUD’s community development funding.

Colonias must continuously demonstrate they meet the criteria HUD established 35 years ago. Naco, a historical frontier community of 800 to 1,000 people in Cochise County, was certified as a colonia in 1995. In 2024, the Board of the Naco Sanitary District, the de facto leaders of this unincorporated community, discovered that Naco had technically lost its status in 2008. 

According to the Arizona Department of Housing, the HUD Office of the Inspector General discovered that due to HUD's own lacking guidelines, Arizona had incorrectly certified most of its border communities as colonias, and as a result received and spent millions of federal dollars on communities that did not meet criteria under the 1990 Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act. HUD officials disputed the findings but agreed to address certain issues identified in the inspector's audit. All Arizona colonias had to apply to recertify within a two-year window, but Naco did not. The Sanitary District Board hopes to get the status back.

“A colonia means something. It has genuine political and financial implications to it. And thus, there's this sort of constant tension with identifying and labeling something as a colonia,” said Lucas Belury, a geographer and University of Arizona Ph.D. candidate researching colonias. 

However, not all colonias are reckoning with the same challenges. Elgin, a scenic colonia in Santa Cruz County, is studded with vineyards, distilleries, and ranches. And Patagonia, a colonia with an arts center, plant nursery, two grocery stores and community members advocating for environmental monitoring and resources. San Simon is another example. The community’s original draw, a railroad track, runs through the northside of its three-quarters of a square mile. With two churches, paved roads, a brick firehouse, and two stores, San Simon’s amenities far outnumber Winchester Heights’ with less than two-thirds the population. Three shiny white tanks flank the San Simon Water District office of board president, Robert “Chuck” Fickett, 76.

In 1985, Fickett took it upon himself to form a water district and update the failing water infrastructure. “Things were deteriorating. There [were] leaks around town,” Fickett said. Recently, after the old well faltered, the water district obtained funds from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and purchased a new well, which they plan to connect in early November 2025.

Despite San Simon’s efforts, it still has issues to address. Kathy Clark, who rents a trailer there, is still reeling after losing her home in the 2024 wildfire in another colonia, Bowie. “We had a fire that destroyed everything, and we moved over here,” Clark said. There were no fire hydrants near her home in Bowie, she said. San Simon has none, either.

Like Winchester Heights, San Simon is roughly an hour from the nearest hospital, but here, when people seek medical care, they go see Frances Grill, a family nurse practitioner at a Walker Family Medicine clinic. The clinic was founded in 2003 by Grill and Heather Lentz, now an EMT, and is located within the walls of San Simon High School, complete with two custom-built private exam rooms and a partitioned waiting area.

“We started it because we live here and we found that people really would use it if it was local, but they didn’t want to go far away,” Grill said.

In four hours on a given Tuesday, Grill estimated she would see around 25 patients. She notices the difference access has made. “I think they’ve gotten healthier, actually, because we’re here. … Some of these old ranchers who would never go to a doctor now come here,” she said. Some of Grill’s patients, even those now living in cities like Tucson and Willcox, still drive all the way to San Simon to see her.

When Winchester Heights residents fall ill, they wait for the next mobile clinic to arrive and hope it’s nothing serious. Aida Garcia, a SEAHEC-trained health worker, or promotora in Spanish, and community organizer, worries about the health of her community members, most of whom are seasonal workers.

“Families have to choose: go to the doctor or feed their kids. Sometimes people endure illness because there’s no money and the work is temporary,” she said in Spanish.

Aida has lived in Winchester Heights for 25 years. As a promotora and president of the Winchester Heights Community Center, she is an unofficial community leader who runs the food bank, health care outreach, and maintains the community center on her own.

At 4 p.m. on Friday, September 12, cars lined up in front of the Winchester Heights Community Center for the monthly food drive. Garcia and eight volunteers helped people load their vehicles with supplies, including a few melons, cartons of milk, cereal, and pasta. Forty minutes into the food drive, the wind picked up and lifted the tent sheltering the food off the ground. The volunteers rushed to hold it down. A storm was coming, but cars kept pulling up.

Alfonso returned from work in his pickup truck. During every storm, he worries his home could be destroyed: the roof could blow off or the trailer could tip over. He and his wife spent the last nine years making their slice of Winchester Heights their own. Colonias remain one of the few places where people like Alfonso and Anel can afford to own a home.

“Thank God the house is already ours,” Anel said. 

The couple and their growing family said they will remain as long as there’s water in the wells. But they hope for the kind of improvements that would make their young children’s lives better: like paved roads where thorns and rocks won’t puncture bike tires. 

“We hope someone looks at this community and sees hardworking people—and improves the streets, lighting, everything. So our kids grow up in a clean, healthy, beautiful community,” Alfonso said.

***

The Puyallup River flows through the Tacoma Tideflats of Washington state, where a migrant detention center sits on a former branch of the river channel. It is also the site of a former slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant.

The migrant detention center, privately owned by The GEO Group and currently known as the Northwest Immigration Processing Center (NWIPC), is built on the Tacoma Tar Pits—part of an EPA Superfund site. Some of this waste is under a prone-to-failure asphalt “cap” situated at a higher elevation, causing it to flow downhill toward the detention center’s southern property line. To the west, a former bulk fuel terminal has contaminated the groundwater with diesel, gasoline, and motor oil, all of which flow directly toward the detention center. Additionally, the site previously housed a slaughterhouse that contaminated the soil with petroleum products and metals. The toxic chemicals from the previous century gel and unfurl in the groundwater beneath the detention facility in ways that are not fully understood.

Meanwhile, migrants—many of whom have no criminal record—drink from the water faucets, take showers, and breathe the air. When they do, they have complained of seeing dark water flowing from the taps that sickens their digestive systems, been afflicted with rashes on their skin after showering, and sickened by gasoline exposure, even as air conditioning systems are shut down during extreme temperatures, according to records obtained by open records law.

The NWIPC is also a place where detained migrants have complained of, and alleged, physical, sexual, and verbal abuse and medical neglect at the hands of staff. This is a story of how those with authority have, thus far, failed to prevent these human rights abuses. 

The GEO Group, Inc., which owns the facility, has a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that expired last month (September 2025). Neither GEO Group nor ICE has announced whether the contract has been renewed. Jurisdiction is shared between several local, state, and federal agencies, specifically the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The city of Tacoma issued building permits for the facility to be constructed in 2002 and expanded in 2008. The Tacoma Police Department (TPD) has jurisdiction to conduct criminal investigations at NWIPC, where, according to federal records, GEO Group is guaranteed a minimum of 1,181 detainees.

As of December 31, 2024, the city of Tacoma’s Employees’ Retirement System (TERS) had indirect exposure to $859,634.73 of GEO Group Inc. corporate bonds by owning shares in two funds that held these bonds. Mayor Victoria Woodards is the Chair of the TERS board.

In response to this, a Tacoma spokesperson stated, “It is understandable how the presence of any controversial holding in TERS’ portfolio, no matter how small, raises questions.” The spokesperson went on to state that the city’s retirement board can’t invest in “any single company within large, diversified portfolios.” The spokesperson stated what investments are made, “is not a choice the City or the TERS Board makes.”

“The TERS Board has a non-negotiable, legally mandated fiduciary duty to see to it that TERS’ assets ensure the long-term security of its members. TERS Board members cannot, by law, place their own personal or political beliefs above that fiduciary duty,” according to the spokesperson.

One former NWIPC detainee requested to use the pseudonym Roxanne for safety reasons. Born in Mexico, Roxanne lived through domestic violence, survived attempts at her life, and fled to the United States to survive; she sought asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“When I turned myself in to the officers at the border, I was denied the opportunity to seek asylum,” Roxanne said. “I was discriminated [against], I was verbally attacked, and I was forced to sign an involuntary removal [order],” she added. 

By Roxanne’s account, U.S. border officials sent her back to Mexico, where she was kidnapped by cartel members and held for ransom. Roxanne said this is increasingly common with more deportations from the U.S. to Mexico. 

“[Cartels] kidnap people and force them to communicate with their families and request huge [amounts] of money, and if families are unable to pay them, then they just don’t set them free or they simply disappear,” she said. 

After paying the ransom, Roxanne stayed the night in a cartel-controlled hotel, and she returned to the border the next day to seek asylum again. She was turned away again. “[Later], I tried a third time. I turned myself in to the officers, but this time I was detained by the sheriff officials and [taken] to a detention center,” she said. Being detained allowed her enough time to locate an attorney who would advocate for her asylum claim.

Released from detention, Roxanne said she went to the Pacific Northwest, where she faithfully attended her check-in appointments, until one day, she was arrested by ICE at her check-in appointment, and taken to the NWIPC in Tacoma, where she was faced with xenophobic detention officers. “‘Here, we speak English. This is America,’” Roxanne recalled being told by the GEO Group guards. She continued, “There was a lot of racism.”

Pathways of Contamination

Complaints made from January 2023 to February 2025 to the Washington Department of Health (WADOH), obtained via open records request, reveal reports of contaminated drinking water from various units across the detention center. A significant majority of these reports originated from units in the southeast building, which the GEO Group added in 2009.

Legal records show the land for the detention center, built before 2004, is under a partial consent decree with the EPA and the Department of Justice. This decree requires that any use of the land must not disturb remedial actions, thus prohibiting the use of groundwater or the disturbance of the cap containing toxic wastes. According to an EPA spokesperson in a statement to The Margin, “GEO Group did not violate land use restrictions established in the 1991 Partial Consent Decree related to the Tacoma Tar Pits site. The NWIPC building expansion occurred outside of the Tacoma Tar Pit’s protective cap, and groundwater was not used.”

In 2003, DVR, LLC (DVR), a limited liability company, implemented institutional controls through a restrictive covenant due to residual concentrations of diesel and heavy oil. DVR then granted property to Correctional Services Corporation LLC (CSC), which the GEO Group would later acquire. The restrictive covenant contains eight sections, including the prohibition of groundwater use, the prevention of activities that could compromise the integrity of the voluntary cleanup program for the Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology), the prohibition of actions that might cause the release of hazardous substances into the environment, and the prevention of the creation of new pathways for exposure. Additionally, the restrictive covenant requires the landowner to notify and obtain approval from Ecology for any use of the property that is inconsistent with the restrictive covenant. Once the restrictive covenant was filed with Pierce County on March 27, 2003, a “No further action letter [NFA]” Ecology issued to DVR on March 7 of that year took effect. In the NFA letter, Ecology stated it can rescind the “no further action” determination if GEO Group violates the requirements of the covenant.

According to a publicly available EPA report, in 2008, the GEO Group’s construction of an addition to the detention center violated Section Six of the restrictive covenant because GEO Group was required to obtain written approval from Ecology before starting construction.

A GEO Group spokesperson claimed in a news article at the time it was unaware of any violations of the restrictive covenant, stating it received required permits from the City of Tacoma. However, statutory warranty deed records show that, in being granted the property from DVR, the restrictive covenant and other relevant restrictions—most notably, a partial consent decree with the EPA—came with the property. In other words, these restrictions were granted by DVR to CSC in 2003—and therefore, to GEO Group in 2005.

“The GEO Group did not inform us about the expansion," an Ecology spokesperson said at the time, as per the covenant, GEO Group is required to notify Ecology of construction that could cause a release of contamination into the environment. After informing GEO Group of the violation, Ecology committed to “working with the company to properly handle construction at the site to meet the state’s requirements.”

In 2003, CSC began construction of the NWIPC, with the auguring of holes for stone columns to support the foundation. These columns were installed to a depth of about 45 feet below the surface of the ground. In 2008, GEO Group expanded its facility by adding several buildings. Notably, a large, three-story building was constructed on the southeast corner of the existing compound using essentially the same auguring technique for stone column installation, with 40 foot-deep columns spaced on a grid of approximately every eight feet. In all, hundreds of these holes were augured.

The new building’s location and the underground stone columns meant the drilling may have gone through a known contaminated site, even as GEO Group’s contractors stated on January 22, 2009, that construction activities were, “unlikely to have resulted in a release.” GEO Group’s consultants, who had tested groundwater from three wells adjacent to where the southeast addition would be in June 2008, stated that two of the three wells contained no polyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, but that, “Low levels of anthracene and phenanthrene were detected” in a sample taken from where the southeast addition would be constructed. Very high levels of lead were detected in one site adjacent to the southern edge of where the southeast addition would be constructed. GEO Group then hired a separate contractor to conduct additional lead testing, which found no dissolved lead in the area where it was previously detected at high levels.” Ecology became aware that GEO Group’s contractors had begun construction on December 9, 2008. On December 23, 2008, an email from Tamara Langton, EPA Remedial Project Manager for the Superfund site, to the Washington Department of Ecology expressed concern that the construction could breach an area known to be contaminated with petroleum products and affect surrounding soil and groundwater. 

“I can't tell with certainty that the expansion isn't negatively impacting the 2002/2003 cleanup action (of most concern is the auguring for stone foundations on or close to the SP‐8 cleanup area),” Langton wrote. An analysis later penned by Langton stated that another site (SP-11) was likely breached by the auguring in 2008-2009. Despite the violation, Ecology worked with the GEO Group to mitigate the problem via a voluntary cleanup action.

In 2008, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), led by Tim Smith, alerted Ecology, EPA, and the City of Tacoma. They expressed concern that auguring for the stone columns had punctured the EPA Superfund cap, opening a potential pathway of contamination to NWIPC detainees and workers. In December 2009, the EPA’s analysis concluded that BORDC’s concerns were unsubstantiated, stating the Superfund cap had not been compromised by the construction activity. In responses provided to The Margin for this story, EPA stated it is not currently aware of any impacts from the Tacoma Tar Pits site to the NWIPC. However, less than 20 years later, detainees are complaining to the Washington Department of Health about contaminated water in the very building addition BORDC had originally raised concerns about. 

Below the Surface: Contamination within the NWIPC

The below visual highlights how recent unapproved construction coupled with surrounding pollutants and underground water flows exacerbate the reports of contamination within the NWIPC.

In an interview, Peter Knappett, associate professor in hydrogeology in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Texas A&M University cited a legacy of industrial contaminants to the west and south of the detention center based on his analysis of Ecology and EPA reports. Knappett reviewed groundwater contour maps from a site to the west of the detention center that was previously a Chevron bulk oil storage facility and stated the groundwater is flowing steeply toward the detention center. 

“There were observations even in the parking lot of the detention center of high overall levels of petroleum products in the shallow groundwater,” he said. Knappett added the groundwater contaminated with petroleum products in the western part of the site “has a continuous contaminant plume that goes at least underneath the parking lot of the [detention center] building.” Monitoring wells adjacent to the NWIPC have both revealed diesel and heavy oil above Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) cleanup levels in both aquifers, at approximately seven feet below the pavement.

Knappett continued that if holes were drilled through both contaminated aquifers, it would open “cross-formational flow.” He said whenever construction of any kind occurs and holes are made across horizontal geologic layers, “Then you’re opening up potential conduits for water contamination, things to go up or go down.”

“There’s no reason to think that a contaminant plume would stop in the parking lot and not continue to flow down gradient,” he said. Knappett added since contaminants were sourced from the surface, it is likely they remain present throughout the soil zone. 

From 2023 to 2025, as the levels of diesel and heavy oil rose in groundwater monitoring wells adjacent to the detention center, so did detainee complaints of contaminated water, according to publicly available documents and documents obtained by public records act request. Complaints made by detainees also note water systems being out, coming back on again very cold or hot, or pipes breaking. Lauren Jenks, Assistant Secretary of the Environmental Public Health Division in WADOH told The Margin, “There's likely some sort of maintenance issues or pipe issues or something like that, that's causing some of the things that people are complaining about.” Joe Laxson, the policy director in WADOH's Environmental Public Health Division added that in a complex plumbing system like at the NWIPC, circulation needs to be maintained. “From our water program’s perspective, that could be the main issue, that there just isn't routine maintenance happening on the plumbing,” he said. 

When asked about contaminated water complaints, an Ecology spokesperson responded that they haven’t received complaint records from DOH and don’t have updated information. “[T]herefore, we don’t think an interview at this time will be beneficial,” the spokesperson said. “[T]he water supply for the building is city drinking water, which should be a pressurized system. This means that if there were cracks in the pipe, water would push out, and any contamination would not be able to enter the pipes. The pipes are in the upper feet of soil, and any soil contamination around the property (e.g., Chevron Bulk) is deeper.” An Ecology spokesperson stated if DOH’s investigation “indicate[s] there is a possible environmental concern, then Ecology can investigate under the full authority of the [MTCA].”

A WADOH spokesperson stated it “has not specifically shared the complaints with [Ecology] because there is not an apparent pathway for the clean-up sites near the NWIPC to impact the water supply. The plumbing for the building is typically located above grade and should not have a direct path for contamination.”

GEO Group and ICE have allegedly denied state officials access to enter and test the water in the secure areas of the facility, including the units with the highest number of contaminated water complaints from detainees from 2023 to 2025. During the 2023 legislative session, the Washington state legislature passed HB 1470, which the governor signed into law, allowing the state Department of Health to investigate complaints made by detainees, including those of drinking water contamination. GEO Group sued the state to prevent such inspections, allegedly denying an in-person inspection of the secured area of the facility attempted by a DOH technician in July 2024. GEO Group denies this allegation. According to an analysis by The Margin of DOH records released under public records law, there are nearly 100 contaminated drinking water complaints from 2023 to 2025.

Reports of Contamination

The Washington Department of Health has captured reports of contamination from within the NWIPC as told from detainees or from the families of detainees. The complaints accessible below via the map or buildings list span from 2023 to 2025.

On August 19, 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated an injunction entered by the Western District of Washington that prevented the state of Washington from entering the facility to test the water in all parts of the facility. When DOH recently sent representatives to the facility on September 3, following the court ruling, they were again denied access by the GEO Group facility administrator and ICE staff. 

“We believe we have authority to [test water in all parts of the facility] in two different ways, under the Secretary’s authority and then under the new law that has passed to allow us to inspect it and respond to complaints there,” Jenks said.

The August Ninth Circuit Court decision removed the injunction that prevented WADOH from entering the facility, but the district court has not yet mandated that inspectors from WADOH be allowed to enter the facility. When asked what WADOH would do if they were denied access after the district court entered such an order requiring that they be given access to the NWIPC, Jenks said, they’ll take it to the state Attorney General.

Years earlier, in 2018, Mayor Woodards said in an interview, “If we were to be notified by an agency responsible for health and welfare, and they evaluated (the NWIPC) through a health-and-welfare lens and found there to be a violation, then we could look into those violations.”. A Tacoma spokesperson clarified to The Margin these comments were general in nature. 

Tacoma Mayor Woodards shared the following statement with The Margin:

My City Council colleagues and I have been actively engaged on the issue of conditions at this facility and have consistently advocated for greater state oversight. We strongly supported the legislation requiring the Washington State DOH to develop rules and enforce measurable health and safety standards in private detention facilities. The Washington State DOH has the authority to conduct these inspections. We support these efforts and consider them a critical partner in this work. We are aware of the ongoing litigation challenging the Washington State DOH's jurisdiction and support the State's effort to ensure this vital oversight can be carried out. The health and safety of every person in our community, including those in detention, is of paramount concern, and we will continue to advocate for accountability.

In an audio recording obtained by public records act law, a WADOH employee states a meeting was held between WADOH, the Tacoma Mayor, and a Tacoma Police Department (TPD) deputy chief. (A Tacoma spokesperson responded regarding this meeting, “While Mayor Victoria Woodards is kept apprised of inter-governmental affairs regarding a variety of issues, neither she nor her staff have met with [WADOH] to discuss specific complaints from facility detainees regarding conditions in the facility, as health and welfare complaints fall within the purview of the [WADOH].” A WADOH spokesperson confirmed the City of Tacoma representative was not from the mayor’s office.) The WADOH spokesperson stated the meeting established, “a protocol for how DOH reports complaints to TPD that we receive that are of a criminal nature.” According to the records obtained by open records law and statements from TPD officials following that meeting, WADOH is to call 911 and make a report,which according to a TPD spokesperson, would lead to TPD following standard procedures.

According to the Washington State Investment Board, which oversees the investment of Washington public trust and retirement funds, “As of March 31, 2025, the WSIB owned 58,426.29 shares of The GEO Group Inc. with a market value of $1,706,631.92.”

“They can do anything with impunity”

Roxanne recounted being harassed by several fellow detainees. “I would go to the officers, and I would tell them what was going on, but they wouldn’t do anything,” she said. The harassment continued. Fellow detainees stole her panties. “I would try to approach the officers, but they wouldn’t say anything. They would simply say, ‘go back to your bed.’” When she pushed the person in an attempt to retrieve her underwear, she was attacked from behind. Roxanne was scolded by an officer and later a supervisor.

While Roxanne did not make official reports, her story reflects many other experiences at NWIPC, repeated, over and over, in thousands of detainee complaints, as detailed by records obtained via open records law from WADOH and detailed by the University of Washington Human Rights Center (UWCHR).

According to an April 2, 2024 TPD incident report, a detainee alleged that during a routine unit search, the GEO Group officer told the detainee to, “Come here.” “The [GEO Group officer] then put his hand in [the detainee’s] pants and squeezed his ‘private parts’ multiple times,” according to the report. On the same day, a second detainee alleged the same GEO Group officer “touched [another detainee] inappropriately during a pat down [search].”

As stated in a log from the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system obtained by public records act law, the following day a separate GEO Group officer reported the alleged assault to Tacoma Police Department (TPD) on the first victim’s behalf. The report reads: “An officer in [the Administrative Review Unit]” attempted to call back this GEO Group officer, but they were no longer on shift. Instead, the officer spoke with yet another GEO Group officer who stated they were conducting an internal investigation and “would notify [TPD] once the investigation was completed if necessary.”

On April 15, 2024, one of the alleged victims called TPD to ask why officers had not collected his statement. According to a report, he said the 911 dispatcher later informed him that a GEO Group officer had prevented TPD from entering the facility to investigate. “All of this is recorded on [GEO]’s cameras,” the complainant stated in a grievance submitted to WADOH and obtained by The Margin via public records act law.

According to the CAD report, on May 20, 2024, a TPD detective learned of one alleged assault while investigating the other. Over a month later, on June 25, 2024, TPD detectives visited NWIPC to investigate. The visit followed a call on June 21 from the attorney of one of the victims, who officially reported the second assault.

Based on the TPD detectives’ report, they visited NWIPC and spoke with an investigator, who “advised that an investigation into the allegations of both the complaint from [one of the alleged victims] as well as the other complaint was completed and deemed unfounded,” according to the South Sound 911 incident report. The investigator added that both complainants reside in the same POD (a self-contained housing unit), and there was information about possible contraband there or on the detainees. The GEO Group investigator stated to TPD that a Correctional Emergency Response Team (CERT) was deployed, and all detainees were temporarily removed and PAT searched. Afterward, detainees were returned to the POD. TPD detectives did not interview any alleged victims, according to the incident report

The GEO Group investigator then provided TPD detectives with a copy of the internal investigation, and a handwritten statement by the GEO Group officer accused of the sexual assaults, “denying placing his hands inside the detainee’s pants during the pat down.” TPD Detectives stated that this evidence would then be forwarded to the Pierce County Prosecutor’s office for review. The incident reports do not indicate that the investigators contacted either victim for an interview.

An internal report of the investigation into one of the assaults conducted by the GEO Group was released to The Margin in response to an open records request. At the time, the GEO Group officer in question led a CERT team.  The GEO Group investigator who communicated with TPD Detectives, stated in the internal report that, concerning the alleged assault, "Video footage is unavailable. The PAT search was conducted outside the view of the camera." Later in the report, however, a GEO Group sergeant, separate from the investigator, contradicted the first allegation: "CCTV shows [the GEO Group officer accused of sexual assault] conducting a pat search in accordance with proper policy and procedure." No mention of this footage—or lack thereof—was made by TPD detectives in their incident report.

According to a Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office spokesperson, that office did not receive a copy of the GEO Group’s internal investigation nor any surveillance footage. The spokesperson responded to questions from The Margin, “After reviewing the evidence submitted by TPD, charges were not filed from this incident. In any prosecution, we need sufficient evidence, probable cause to believe a crime occurred, and a basis to believe that the charge can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

A TPD spokesperson responded that the investigating detectives were not available by press time to confirm or deny whether they had reviewed surveillance footage. According to the incident report, on July 9, 2024, one of the TPD detectives received a document stating the Pierce County Prosecutor’s office was not filing charges against the GEO Group officer in either case.

The Washington Department of Health has captured reports of abuse from within the NWIPC as told from detainees or from the families of detainees. The reports below span from 2023 to 2025.

[LIGHTBOX=reports-of-abuse]

Records indicate that the same individual accused of committing the two aforementioned assaults faced additional accusations. In February 2024, DOH records show a detainee alleged to have been subjected to “sheer retaliation” by the same GEO Group officer and his “CERT gang” after filing complaints. The complainant reported they had accused the same officer of sexual assaults and were told that, “I’m just a immigrants [sic]. Nobody is going to believe me.” The complainant concluded his grievance thus, “He is right about that because no one do [sic] anything about these dehumanizing and abusive behaviors. They can do anything with impunity, including sexual harassments.”

The following month, another detainee submitted a complaint, reporting a hunger strike involving every person in their unit. “We are probably going to be […] a subject of retaliation by ICE and GEO for our peaceful protest, but it has to be done. The condition is getting worse every day,” the complainant stated. They specifically accused the same GEO Group officer of “targeting detainees with mental health [sic] and others who [are] protesting about staff misconduct and other imperative issues.” The complainant identified the GEO Group officer’s “coconspirators,” whose names are withheld here. 

In November 2024, a detainee submitted a complaint that, upon returning to their cell, GEO Group officers had “destroyed” the room. “I confronted them about trashing my room and they laughed at me. As I was talking to [one GEO Group officer], [the GEO Group officer accused of the aforementioned sexual assaults] keeps on touching me,” the complaint stated. Another complaint, made the same day, stated the same GEO Group officer, accused of sexual assaults, “kept touching my arm. I told him to stop touching me. He kept doing it.” According to the complaint, another officer said, “let’s go to intake.” The detainee was roughly taken by the arm, they pulled away in response, then the GEO Group officer accused of sexual assaults and a third GEO Group officer, “retaliated slamming my head onto the ground, cuffing my hands and feet,” according to the complainant. One officer allegedly kneed the detainee in the right side of their ribs. “I couldn’t breathe and they damn near killed me. That’s assault, battery, and abusive force. It is on camera. I want to press charges and file a lawsuit,” the complainant stated.

GEO Group has surveillance cameras throughout the detention facility and records incidents, including those occurring in the minutes after Jose Manuel Sanchez Castro was found unresponsive on Oct. 27, 2024, at age 36. The Tacoma Fire Department responded, attempting to save his life. According to ICE, the cause and manner of Sanchez Castro’s death is currently undetermined by the Pierce County Medical Examiner. Sanchez Castro died after being under GEO Group’s medical observation for several days, when EMS was unable to save him after he was found unresponsive.

The allegations of assault have continued. 

On April 5, 2025, a GEO Group officer called 911 on behalf of a detainee to report a sexual assault. Because the alleged victim was Spanish-speaking, an interpreter was contacted. The interpreter spoke with the man over the phone and relayed his message. That same day, an incident report notes a TPD officer was dispatched to the NWIPC to investigate the detainee’s allegation of unwanted touching. The TPD officer called the NWIPC and spoke with the on-duty Lieutenant, who informed them they were aware of the situation. The officer reported, “[The Lieutenant] stated the reporting [alleged victim], was just having another ‘episode’ and talking with an inside psychologist,” adding it was not the only report he made and indicated “he was well known for making complaints and allegations against staff.”

Similarly, records reviewed by The Margin do not show that the TPD officer spoke to the alleged victim. On the 911 call, the alleged victim repeatedly said GEO Guards were trying to poison and kill him. He also claimed they tried to bribe him to conceal the name of the officer who allegedly sexually assaulted him. The TPD officer wrote in his report that he was unable to establish probable cause or any evidence of a crime.

On April 8, 2025, a call taker from the Rebuilding Hope Sexual Assault Center called 911 dispatchers to report a call from a detainee wanting to report unwanted physical touch at the NWIPC, but the detainee did not know the address. The 911 dispatcher, interpreting this as an alleged sexual assault, called the NWIPC to try to determine if the alleged victim was there. The dispatcher was transferred to a sergeant who informed the dispatcher that the detainee was in segregation and was considered to have a “mental altered status.” The dispatcher concluded the call stating, “I am not doing any documentation.”

Weeks later, on April 24, 2025, a GEO Group officer called 911 for a detainee who said he had been physically assaulted. The 911 dispatcher requested a TPD officer to call or go to the NWIPC. A TPD officer called the NWIPC and asked if GEO Group actually needed a response. The GEO Group officer who answered the phone said allegations of assault are usually handled internally

A few days after the previous incident, on April 28, 2025, a separate call taker from Rebuilding Hope Sexual Assault Center called 911 to report a detainee who had experienced sexual assault in December at the NWIPC and was now contemplating suicide. The call taker explained that the detainee said he had attempted suicide two or three times before. The 911 dispatcher relayed this information to the Tacoma Fire Department (TFD) and requested that emergency responders be sent to the NWIPC. During the call, the detainee’s report of suicidal ideation was shared with the TFD representative. The TFD representative stated, “We can’t enter that facility without their permission, so they’re going to need to contact the staff of that facility,” clarifying later in the call, “We can’t access that facility without a call from them.” The call ended.

After the call with the TFD representative ended, the dispatcher followed up by contacting the NWIPC to verify whether the situation was being addressed. The officer confirmed they were handling it and planned to speak with the person who made the complaint. The dispatcher then concluded the call.

The UWCHR recently published a report that found authorities often do not investigate detainee assault allegations. The report concludes that current policies fail to protect detainees or ensure accountability,asserting, "ICE and GEO often deter police investigations, and that TPD regularly fails to push back or follow up." 

A TPD spokesperson responded: "Following the publication of the [UWCHR] report, the Tacoma Police Department has clarified procedures and delivered departmental guidance reiterating its commitment to safeguarding constitutional guarantees and ensuring that safety, security, and respect for rights remain central to its role."

The over 1,300 complaints provided by DOH detail abuse, retaliation, and threats by GEO Group staff, poor quality food, medical neglect, and potentially contaminated drinking water. Weighed alongside 911 audio records and police incident reports, a concerning trend appears to emerge about the conditions in the GEO Group-owned NWIPC.

In response to our questions, an ICE spokesperson responded, "ICE remains committed to transparency and accountability... ICE operates in accordance with established laws and regulations, and we do not comment on rumors, allegations, or opinions."

A GEO Group spokesperson responded to our questions with the following statement:

"We are proud of the role our company has played for 40 years to support the law enforcement mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Over the last four decades, our innovative support service solutions have helped the federal government implement the policies of seven different Presidential Administrations. 

In all instances, our support services are monitored by ICE, including by on-site agency personnel, and other organizations within the Department of Homeland Security to ensure compliance with ICE’s detention standards and contract requirements regarding the treatment and services ICE detainees receive.  In the event issues are identified, we quickly resolve all of ICE’s concerns as required by ICE’s Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan.

The support services GEO provides include around-the-clock access to medical care, in-person and virtual legal and family visitation, general and legal library access, translation services, dietician-approved meals, religious and specialty diets, recreational amenities, and opportunities to practice their religious beliefs. Additionally, all of GEO’s ICE Processing Centers are independently accredited by the American Correctional Association and the National Commission on Correctional Health Care.

At locations where GEO provides health care services, individuals are provided with access to teams of medical professionals including physicians, nurses, dentists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Ready access to off-site medical specialists, imaging facilities, Emergency Medical Services, and local community hospitals is also provided when needed."

***

Detainees face abuses, yet cannot even call law enforcement for help without the assistance of the very same people who allegedly abuse them. Even when they do call out of the facility this way, the authorities charged with protecting them don’t always do so. As attempts to test water preempt investigations into water contamination, detainees are forced to choose whether or not to drink and bathe in potentially contaminated water.

For now, despite the revelations of this investigation, the answers to so many questions remain hidden within the chain link fence and concrete walls of the NWIPC, flowing in and through, the groundwater beneath its banal design, in the tide flats of Tacoma.

Roxanne was released from the NWIPC, and her lawyer continues to advocate for her asylum claim. “I feel free, but I don’t feel safe, especially because I live with that uncertainty of whether I’m going to be detained or not,” she said.

“What I would like for people to know is to not lose hope. They shouldn’t stop fighting—they need to continue fighting—to keep that faith because it is possible to leave from a detention center.”

***

On October 12, the remnants of Typhoon Halong—a tropical storm that originated in the Philippine Sea—hit western Alaska communities. The storm slammed the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region the hardest, bringing 100 mile per hour winds and record flooding to the villages across the coast. Governor Mike Dunleavy has issued a disaster declaration. According to the National Weather Service, this storm may be the strongest one to impact western Alaska since Typhoon Merbok in 2022. Like Merbok, Halong is a storm fueled by climate change. Warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean increase the likelihood that tropical storms will migrate eastward, maintaining hurricane-force winds and heavy rainfall as they barrel towards the Bering and Chukchi regions. 

Forty-nine communities have reported damage from Halong, but two villages were hit especially hard: Kwigillingok and Kipnuk. The Margin mentions these communities in our story. In both villages, Halong has torn houses from their foundations, trapping families inside as homes float atop floodwaters. The Alaska State Emergency Operations Center estimates that dozens of homes, as well as critical infrastructure like the utility poles and runway in Kipnuk, have been destroyed. As of publishing, the Coast Guard and National Guard have rescued at least 51 residents of these villages, including 24 people from two Kwigillingok households. One woman from Kwigillingok has been found dead, and two other villagers remain unaccounted for. U.S. Coast Guard Commander Captain Christopher Culpepper compared Halong’s impact to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “Several of these villages have been completely devastated, absolutely flooded, several feet deep,” he said. More than 1,000 residents across the Y-K Delta have been displaced from their homes. 

Community groups across western Alaska are collecting disaster relief funds through the Alaska Community Foundation.

On the anniversary of her mother’s death, 50-year-old Christina Waska wakes up in the Yup’ik village of Mertarvik. As the late October sunrise gently illuminates the tundra landscape, she retrieves food thawed from her family’s freezer—typically, herring, seal, or halibut gathered earlier in the season—and begins preparing a feast. Sometimes it takes until the evening for her to finish. “When it's all done, I invite the whole community of 300 to come and eat. Join us during the celebration of life,” Waska said.

Waska is hosting an annual village feast for ancestors. Common in predominantly Yup’ik communities along southwestern Alaska, the ceremony acknowledges the healing power of communal remembrance. Attendees who knew the deceased fondly reflect on their memories of them. The atmosphere is simultaneously celebratory and melancholic. 

Mertarvik is where Waska feels closest to her late mother, who was laid to rest there in 2021. Waska has returned nearly every fall since, but the homecomings are bittersweet. 

Waska grew up nine miles away in the village of Newtok. In 2007, as Newtok was rapidly losing land to permafrost thaw and erosion, the Waskas and other residents began a painstaking process to relocate. They planned to rebuild the entire village, from the school to the houses to the water and sewage system, at a new site called Mertarvik. National headlines in 2013 dubbed Newtok’s residents “America’s first climate refugees.”

The process, which formally began over 30 years ago in 1994 and cost $160 million, was a historic effort. The Newtok Tribal Council requested funding from a patchwork of state and federal governmental agencies to rebuild critical infrastructure in a harsh climate where construction can be prohibitively expensive. A 2020 report by the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium described the project as being complicated by a “vicious cycle of underinvestment,” which can significantly increase the cost and length of time it takes to complete the relocation.

Federal law does not consider “erosion” or “permafrost thaw” as disasters. Instead, the law describes these as gradual environmental changes, making many of these villages ineligible for Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster funding. Currently, funding is ad hoc, with environmentally threatened villages competing against one another for limited state and federal funds. Grants are often ill-suited to address specific climate needs, and are administered by government groups that have little expertise in the environmental challenges of rural Alaska, according to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. 

For years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has urged the federal government to fund climate migration efforts more heavily, pointing out in 2019 that “most of the federal government’s efforts to reduce disaster risk are reactive and revolve around disaster recovery.” In 2020, the GAO examined the cases of Newtok and Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, the first two communities in the country to relocate in the face of the climate crisis, and concluded that “unclear federal leadership” is a clear challenge for current climate migration models. The agency recommended that the federal government establish a clear strategy around relocation and a central agency to coordinate these efforts.

The lack of a federal plan for climate adaptation and inconsistent federal funding have led to challenges at the new village site of Mertarvik. Some of the houses, poorly-built and rapidly deteriorating in the subarctic climate, are plagued by rapid mold growth and icy-cold drafts. Meanwhile, the construction of new homes has slowed, leading to overcrowding.

Waska hoped that the additional infrastructure planned through the relocation to Mertarvik would allow her to raise her family in a village environment. She had moved to a big city before, opting for Anchorage in 2008 due to a lack of housing. In 2024, Waska moved in with relatives in Mertarvik so that her 16-year-old son could play village basketball. But, after again trying and failing to find suitable housing, Waska and her son made the difficult decision to return to Anchorage months later in 2025. Home to roughly 40 percent of Alaska’s entire population, Anchorage, the state’s largest city, is more than 1,000 times the size of Mertarvik.

The shortcomings of current climate-caused relocation models, which saddle small Tribal governments with the immense logistical challenges of community-wide moves, make it difficult for households like Waska’s to remain in villages. 

A Yup’ik adage goes:

The ocean cannot be learned, but the land stays in place.

The rapid temperature rise in subarctic regions has upended this tenet of traditional knowledge. Across rural western Alaska, the terrain is shifting. It’s sinking and collapsing due to permafrost thaw, retreating with rapid erosion, and being embattled by increasingly harsh storms. These climatic changes are destroying housing and infrastructure in villages across Alaska’s western coast. As public funding declines and federal programs fail to keep up with the rapid pace of climate change, people are pushed toward more extreme modes of adaptation. 

One way of adapting is to migrate. Out-migration often involves a multi-leg journey across hundreds of miles to urban settings that possess vastly different cultures and environments from those of small, remote communities. The Margin spoke with over a dozen people who had relocated from Native villages to Alaska’s major cities. Their stories covered a wide range of geographies and experiences. Some had moved recently, and others had been living in cities for decades. Nearly all identified how climate impacts are making it more difficult to remain on their traditional homelands.

These moves, large and small, bring mental health consequences. Former village residents reported a sense of loss around access to land-based practices, kinship networks, Native languages, and traditional knowledge systems. Reminiscence of home was tinged with feelings of what psychologists call ecological grief, which encompasses both the mourning of a land long lost and anxieties about anticipated changes to the environment. Time and time again, The Margin heard about how village life can be crucial for accessing subsistence lifeways, community ties, and cultural and linguistic practices—all key determinants of emotional well-being for Indigenous communities. 

A growing body of research is seeking to understand the many ways that human-caused environmental change disrupts people’s mental health. And much of this research focuses on Arctic and subarctic regions, such as western Alaska. In these locations, not only are temperatures rising at faster rates than those of more temperate climates, but people also rely more heavily upon land-based activities for culture and identity.

Vincent Paquin, a Montreal-based psychiatrist and researcher who has studied climate change’s impacts on the mental health of Indigenous communities in the Circumpolar North, says the loss of access to ancestral lands can bring a unique sense of loss for Alaska Native communities. “Ecological grief is different from the traditional notion of grief,” Paquin said. Changes to the environment and the resulting loss of species, meaningful landscapes, or traditional knowledge systems characterize this type of mourning. “It’s an ambiguous loss in the sense that it doesn't happen overnight, but gradually and almost insidiously.” 

Research on the Australian Wheatbelt and Canadian Inuit communities by Ashlee Cunsolo, the director of the Labrador Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Neville R. Ellis, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia, has demonstrated how witnessing changes to the land or weather can bring feelings of anger, frustration, and despair. When there is no specific disaster to blame, people may experience a lack of closure, and ecological grief can manifest as “living with both the presence and the absence of what was lost,” according to Cunsolo and Ellis.

Newtok’s land eroded so rapidly over the last three decades that Waska’s family had to demolish her childhood home. Today, all that remains at the old village site are boarded-up gray buildings. While Mertarvik is less than 10 miles away from Waska’s hometown, the loss of Newtok remains. 

In 2009, two years into the relocation process, Waska gave birth to her youngest son. She named him Newtok after the village she still considers home. “I gave him a strong name. Something that I'll carry close to my heart for the rest of my life,” she said. “So even if it's gone, I'll always have Newtok.”

"It's the loneliest feeling in the world, out-migrating"

Although many of Alaska’s 229 federally recognized Native villages are rapidly losing land to permafrost thaw, erosion, and flooding, the majority do not have plans to relocate. Waska’s homeland, Newtok, remains a marked exception, especially as federal grant freezes and funding cuts under the Trump administration have stalled several climate mitigation projects. 

The 2020 Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium report described village out-migration as the “worst-case climate scenario,” one that becomes more likely as government funding wanes. Although resettlement is often proposed as a solution to climate threats in rural Alaska, the report emphasized how out-migration from Indigenous communities has been linked to a wide range of adverse outcomes, including greater encounters with racism and stigma, homelessness, and other social harms.

Forcing people to move and just ignoring the problem is not an option. It's a culture-killing option.”

Without the funding in place to shore up village housing options, some researchers predicted widespread rural-to-urban resettlement as environmental threats to villages escalate—a prediction that hasn’t borne out in the data. There is evidence, however, that climate displacement is happening in some Alaska Native villages, often in response to acute disasters. In 2021, Kwigillingok, a Yup’ik community of around 370 people located on the northern shore of the Kuskokwim Bay, experienced severe tidal flooding. Kwigillingok had been sinking for years due to permafrost thaw, and its lower elevation occasionally allows the ocean to submerge nearly the entire village at high tide. The year after the flooding, 32 people left the village, with half of them leaving for Anchorage. 

Kwigillingok, like Newtok, is part of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska, and is represented by the Calista Corporation, one of the twelve Alaska Native corporations that the federal government distributed land to as part of the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Today, the Calista Corporation represents the 56 permanent and seasonally occupied villages located in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. According to Curt Chamberlain, deputy general counsel for the Calista Corporation, the Middle Kuskokwim area of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta experienced a 30 percent out-migration from 2013 to 2023. In many cases, people follow a stepping-stone pattern of migration—moving first to a rural hub, such as Bethel, before settling in Anchorage, Fairbanks, or Juneau. 

In 2020, the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium urged the federal government to close the over $80 million gap in annual funding that they anticipate villages will need to face these climate threats over the next decade. This year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has canceled at least $280 million in funding for the state of Alaska. Many of these grants were slated for rural villages, including for environmental infrastructure projects such as the creation of erosion barriers to mitigate flooding from permafrost thaw. Earlier this year, the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk joined a coalition of Tribes, nonprofits, and local governments led by legal nonprofit Earthjustice to sue the Trump administration for the termination of $3 billion worth of Environmental and Climate Justice Grant programs.

Climate Risks Affecting Federally Recognized Native Villages

Permafrost, erosion, and flooding are climate risks that negatively impact federally recognized Native villages in Alaska. Toggle on each climate risk layer below to see its impact across Alaska, and hover over each federally recognized Native village to view its climate risk score by threat, provided by the Alaska's Statewide Threat Assessment Rankings.

And still, demographic data shows that Alaska's rural villages are displaying stable or even growing populations. Birth rates in recent years offset out-migration in many environmentally threatened villages, said Chamberlain. In 2024, demographer Guangqing Chi, associate professor of rural sociology and demography at Pennsylvania State University at the time, found that demographic trends fail to paint a unified picture of mass climate displacement in Alaska.

Understanding how environmental change influences migration can be a complex process. Chi and his colleagues found that since climate change can seem abstract compared to day-to-day stressors, people often don’t attribute drastic life changes to its impacts. Instead, they might identify pressing socioeconomic conditions, such as a lack of housing or high living costs, as reasons for moving. Environmental changes, however, can exacerbate many of these conditions. 

Those seeking to preserve Alaska Native village life worry that, without sufficient housing to withstand the environmental changes already underway, it will become increasingly difficult for people to remain in villages. “The Y-K [Delta] region is actually the one region in the whole state that's actually still growing, despite the housing shortage,” said Peter Evon, the executive director of the Association of Village Council Presidents Regional Housing Authority (AVCP-RHA), the regional housing authority in the area. “We know people want to stay here. But unfortunately, because of these climate impacts, the shortage is getting worse.”

Chamberlain understands firsthand the importance of preserving people’s right to stay in their villages. When he returns to the village where he was born, the sight of the Aniak River through the plane window brings a swell of emotions. “I get choked up on that river because that's where my tie to the land is,” Chamberlain said. “It’s a very central part of who I am as a person,” Chamberlain recalled memories of boating and fishing on the Aniak River in the summers. With subzero temperatures, his family traveled atop its thick river ice, part of a network of ice roads that averaged 200 miles, providing safe passage to waterside villages up and down the Kuskokwim River. “That river's a part of me,” Chamberlain said, tears in his eyes. “It fed and provided for every aspect of my life and my culture.”  

Psychologists at the University of Victoria in Canada define attachment to place as the cognitive-emotional bond that forms between people and their essential settings. This bond provides a range of psychological benefits, including feelings of comfort, safety, freedom, and joy. Place attachment is also commemorative—places become tangible symbols of past events, indispensable for remembering and reimagining them. Present-day villages are not only hubs for the preservation of traditional practices, but also for the emergence of new permutations of Native Alaskan culture.

Now, without infrastructure investment, Chamberlain expects out-migration to increase as community instability rises due to climate change. Having grown up in a predominantly Yup’ik community of around 430 people, he remembers arriving in Anchorage as an earth-shattering transition. “When you grow up within Yup’ik culture, it's very different from Western culture,” he said. “And as you move out, you tend to find yourself displaced and isolated.” Chamberlain compares the move to leaving for another country, describing how foreign it felt to live in urban areas, where cultural ties faded and traditional belief systems retracted. 

“Every time I'm outside of my region, there's an immense feeling of separation and loneliness,” Chamberlain said. “Like a big part of who you are as a central being is being starved.” He continued, “It's the loneliest feeling in the world, out-migrating.”

‘I can't even imagine not going home’ 

Fall is Debbie Demientieff’s favorite season in Holy Cross, a village of 140 people located on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. In early September, the shrubby willows on the village’s rolling hills transform into glowing golden brush. Moose roam the tundra, feeding on the spread of these stocky plants. The powerful rush of the Yukon River blankets the landscape in a sheet of calm. Before climate disruptions, the river brought abundant chinook salmon runs that fed the entire community.

Demientieff, a 63-year-old Deg Xinag Athabascan woman, was raised in Holy Cross but left the village for Anchorage in 2010. “I really didn't wanna leave because I love living by the seasons,” she said, referring to a rural lifestyle that revolves around seasonal food gathering. 

Although her job keeps her in Anchorage, Demientieff and her husband return home every year for their family’s moose hunt. “When August 1st hits, this big clock starts ticking, and it's time to get ready to go home,” she said. For a few weeks every fall, Demientieff moves back and forth between Holy Cross and a subsistence camp located roughly an hour from the village by boat, depending on ideal weather conditions for food gathering. 

Subsistence camps are seasonal settlements that Alaska Native communities use to harvest wild foods. Perhaps the most well-known are the fish camps that dot the riverbanks of southwest Alaska. For generations, people flocked to these sites during summertime, catching, processing, and preserving salmon under the midnight sun. Camps are the legacy of nomadic lifestyles. Hundreds of years ago, they formed part of a vast network of hunting and fishing routes that crisscrossed the region. People often set up camps a few miles from kin and from larger settlements that would become modern-day villages. Today’s camps are the result of the steady preservation of land-based knowledge throughout several generations. 

When she’s not hunting big game, Demientieff fishes and goes berry-picking. All year, Demientieff looks forward to the delicate, salty-sweet caviar she harvests from broad or humpback whitefish. These small freshwater species have long served as an essential subsistence food base for communities like Demientieff’s along the Yukon River. On a mountain near camp, crowberries are abundant. They are subtly-sweet, tundra blackberries with black pearly exteriors that burst in the mouth with a juicy pop and are perfect for pie. 

Demientieff also uses the fruit for another one of her favorite treats. She whips the crowberries with moose tallow, sugar, and poached whitefish—flaky and cod-like—until the mixture reaches the consistency of cake frosting. This traditional dessert is shared amongst several Native Alaskan communities across the state. It is called akutaq by Yup’ik communities, nonaałdlode by Athabascan communities, akutuq by Iñupiaq communities. Demientieff simply calls it “fish ice cream.”

Traditional foods bring back memories. The taste of moose can recall the hours spent preparing its meat. The ceremonial harvesting process, which typically requires at least two people, is carried out with painstaking care to honor the animal and ensure no part goes to waste. Full-grown bull moose in prime condition can provide roughly 500 pounds of meat, feeding a family for an entire year. In remote regions of Alaska, where access to groceries is limited, putting away subsistence foods during the fall is critical for surviving harsh winters.

Food does not just mean physical satiety, however. Food supports the unique, extended family and kinship relations that underpin village life. According to a 2020 survey of Alaska Native adults conducted by researchers at Yale School of Medicine and the University of Alaska, Anchorage, land-based activities form the foundation for ways of relating to loved ones. Extended kinship relationships are established and reinforced through the harvesting of fish and wildlife. Alaska Native Elders describe “food sharing as not only a way to demonstrate relatedness, but a way to create relatives.” In the 2020 survey, people also described a spirit of interdependence in villages that is lacking in cities. Villages can be places where people access social networks that protect them from emotional harm. 

For Alaska Native communities, being at camp is a crucial cultural tradition. It’s a time of year when relatives congregate to pass on knowledge about their land and history to future generations. Moose meat is central to Athabascan culture. Families like Demientieff’s have passed down knowledge of moose processing for hundreds of years. Demientieff’s subsistence camp is owned by her husband’s family. Her mother-in-law, who is in her nineties, was the key figure at camp for many years. When one of Demientieff’s granddaughters was a toddler, Demientieff brought her to camp to expose her to traditional ways of living.

“It's all connected to family,” she said. “We're not there just to get food to put away in the freezer.” Demientieff brings moose meat back to Anchorage to share with her father, a 96-year-old Athabascan Elder who lives near her in the city. “I learned a lot [about] putting away food from him,” she said. “Throughout [my] childhood years and teenage years, that’s how they provided for us.”  

It’s getting harder to preserve life at camp. As the fall of 2022 arrived, so did Typhoon Merbok. Fueled by warmer waters in the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea, the storm slammed the western coast of Alaska, ushering in hurricane-force winds that covered the Yukon River in roiling waves. Merbok damaged countless hunting and fishing camps across the west Alaska coast, at times sweeping away the valuable drying racks and smokehouses needed to preserve food for the winter. More extreme storms like Merbok, once abnormal for the region, are expected to increase as ocean temperatures continue to rise.

Demientieff was at her family’s subsistence camp in Holy Cross during the typhoon. “I've never seen the Yukon River look like an ocean before,” she said. “The waves were just rolling in constantly.” Flooding from the storm swallowed several feet of shoreline: “We lost a lot of land from where [our camp] used to be.

As a result of the flood damage, Demientieff’s family tore down one of their cabins, which had been at the campsite for over 50 years. That hasn’t stopped her or her family from returning. 

The remoteness of Holy Cross means that Demientieff typically takes small regional aircraft from Anchorage that can cost over $1,000 in round-trip airfare. When flights were grounded, during the coronavirus pandemic, Demientieff and her husband launched a boat from a bridge 135 miles north of Fairbanks. They sailed for several days on the rough waters of the Yukon River to get to camp. 

Access to her village is core to Demientieff’s identity. “I can't even imagine not going home in September,” she said. “That whole relationship with the animals and the environment and where we live [...] that really uplifts us as people.”

"My ancestors were here before me" 

Chefornak is a Yup’ik community of around 500 people in southwestern Alaska. Chefornak is nestled between the Bering Sea and the Kinia River, both of which are eroding rapidly with storm surges and sea level rise. Volcanic eruptions from a now-dormant volcano a few miles south shaped the village’s terrain, creating boulders of hardened lava separated by icy silt and mud. With rising temperatures, these frozen layers have melted, softening the ground and creating uneven dips and valleys. Its unique geography makes it vulnerable to a variety of climate risks. According to a 2019 report by the Denali Commission, the independent federal agency responsible for providing infrastructure support for rural Alaska communities, Chefornak ranks in the top 25 of the state’s environmentally threatened communities.

These environmental changes are destroying Jessica Kaagyugaq Lewis-Nicori’s childhood home. “My mom's house is falling into the land because permafrost is thawing and a new creek is forming right by her house,” she said. “The wood is going to deteriorate soon, and then it’s gonna actually fall.” The house’s foundation is in constant contact with water, leading to serious mold issues. This creates an unsafe, allergy-inducing environment for Lewis-Nicori’s four children, who range in age from several months old to 12 years old. Lewis-Nicori’s experience highlights how ecological grief can be anticipatory: an underlying sense of anxiety about an impending loss to your home and land. 

“The world is changing, and the Chefornak I grew up with, it’s never gonna be the same,” she said. “There used to be a creek where there’s no creek anymore, and the land that was [...] solid is now mushy.” 

Chefornak is facing a climate-induced housing crisis. In 2021, rapid permafrost collapse caused a four to six-foot sinkhole to open up under a home, forcing the family that lived there to evacuate. The slow-moving nature of erosion and the difficulty in documenting its impacts make it challenging to secure funding under the Stafford Act, the law governing FEMA’s emergency response program. Although Chefornak has received a total of $7.6 million from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) Branch of Tribal Community Resilience from 2021 until the present, the AVCP-RHA, the regional housing authority for the Y-K Delta region, estimates that the village needs $37.1 million to address its housing needs in full. The remoteness and extreme climate of rural western Alaska make building new homes extremely expensive. Building materials must be barged in during a narrow window between May and October, and construction season is confined to a few short months in the summer. The estimated cost of building a single home in Chefornak is over $750,000.

The transition to city life has been hard on her mental health. “I tend to get depressed. And I won't tell anyone,” Lewis-Nicori said. She associates Chefornak with feelings of comfort, safety, and acceptance. There, she found it easy to lean on others for emotional support. “It’s so small and you know who your family is,” she said. “If I have a problem, I can go to an auntie [...] a cousin or an uncle or whoever.” Her sense of community in Anchorage pales in comparison.

Part of the difference lies in how people communicate. Lewis-Nicori grew up speaking Yugtun, the Central Alaskan Yupʼik language. In Chefornak, she was surrounded by it—its guttural tones, abundant suffixes, and tendency to emerge through rounded and pursed lips. She speaks Yugtun with all her children. In the city, however, preserving the language feels more difficult. One day, her two-year-old son returned from daycare in Fairbanks, refusing to speak Yugtun. “Mom, nobody talks like that,” he complained. “We’re not in ‘Chefornak world’ anymore!” 

“My language is slowly dying. We can see it,” she said. She recounted a visual metaphor from her uncle, who passed away earlier this year: “We see that it's falling, so we're catching it right before it falls and breaks.” A review paper published earlier this year by researchers at the University of British Columbia found that speaking Indigenous languages is associated with a wide range of positive health outcomes, including feelings of resilience and healing, as well as overall psychological well-being. 

For many Alaska Natives, villages are places of strength, places of power rooted in traditional ways of being. Lewis-Nicori’s family also holds recent memories of violent campaigns of assimilation.

Alaska Native communities are distinct from Indigenous groups in the contiguous U.S., in part due to later periods of American colonization. Even in Alaska, the remote location and absence of resources that settlers deemed profitable, like bowhead whales, sea otters, and gold, meant that the predominantly Yup’ik communities in the southwestern part of the state remained relatively protected from the boom-and-bust colonization cycles that plagued other Native Alaska communities. 

“Western contact for my region was two generations ago,” Lewis-Nicori explained. Her grandparents were nomadic until a 1929 federal schooling mandate led to forced sedentarization. “They had to settle because their kids had to go to school or else they'd go to jail,” she said. “My mom got taken, and she went to boarding school.” 

These Alaska schools formed part of a nationwide campaign of violent assimilation that lasted over a hundred years, with origins in the Indian Civilization Act Fund of 1819, through which the federal government partnered with missionaries and church officials to establish schools to aid in the “civilization process” of Indigenous communities. Boarding schools sought to erase Indigenous culture through force. They took children as young as five from villages, referring to them by government numbers, and disciplined them for their language and cultural practices.

Yet, the boarding school system’s lasting harm wasn’t acknowledged by the federal government until recently. In 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior began the first federal investigation into the “loss of human life and lasting consequences of the Federal Indian boarding school system.” The report they released in July 2024 found that nearly 1,000 children, likely an undercount, died as a result of the rampant abuse at boarding schools. The findings prompted President Joe Biden to issue a formal national apology to the descendants of boarding school survivors in late 2024. In Alaska, some of the state’s 26 boarding schools remained open until the 1970s.

Decades after the boarding school system, many people are seeking to remain in villages. There, they look after cultural practices, nurturing kinship networks and harvesting wild foods at subsistence camps. Language revitalization efforts are underway, especially in southwest Alaska’s coastal and lower Kuskokwim regions, where the Yup’ik language is spoken by roughly 10,000 people, representing the most commonly spoken Indigenous language in the state. Elders pass on land-based oral histories and establish themselves as advocates and culture bearers.

For centuries, the land in southwest Alaska was knowable to the predominantly Yup’ik communities that lived there. They passed down land-based knowledge through generations, with Yup’ik oral histories documenting how the topography formed and changed over time. This traditional wisdom made changes to the terrain more predictable. According to Yup’ik Elders, adapting to harsh weather is ingrained in their bones. In centuries past, anticipating the behavior of weather, broadly defined by the Yup’ik word ella to include changing seasons, temporary atmospheric conditions, and the natural ecosystem, structured the activities of day-to-day life. 

Chefornak will always be Lewis-Nicori’s home. It’s a place that grounds her in her lineage. It’s where she remembers her great-grandmother, who, until the day she stopped walking, left early in the morning and returned late in the evening with salmonberries to sustain them through winter. It’s where her grandparents traversed the length of the Urrsukvaaq, the Kinia River, seasonally to access hunting and fishing grounds. “In Chefornak, I always remember, my ancestors were here before me,” she said. “If we actually had a house, we would still be there.”

For now, Lewis-Nicori lives in the city, where she demonstrates a quiet defiance in remembering these histories. Like the rural-to-urban migrants that came before her, Lewis-Nicori extends aspects of village life into urban centers. Lewis-Nicori attends yuraq, or a weekly dance practice for Yup’ik and Cup’ik peoples at Anchorage’s Alaska Native Medical Center. She translates her wisdom about medicinal flora and fauna to the wetlands surrounding Anchorage. 

“I'm not from this region, but I see the same medicines that we have on the coast here,” she said. This knowledge is precious. “We don't have generational wealth,” Lewis-Nicori said. “Our generational wealth is our knowledge and our culture and our traditions.”

“I like still being Yup’ik in the city,” she said. “It feels like I'm taking a stand.”

***

Near gale force winds stretched nimbostratus clouds that resembled alpine peaks turned sideways above the heavily industrialized zone known as the Tacoma Tideflats on a Saturday afternoon in mid-March. Concertina wire spiraled down the top of the chain-link fence marking the western edge of E. J Street. A nearby train engine billowed diesel exhaust, contaminating the wind. Its unmistakable stench stung the nostrils. Reflections of the compound buildings appeared in pools of rainwater and pulsed and blurred with each passing breeze. From the south, a big wind rose, slanting heavy raindrops against a group of some 40 protesters led by La Resistencia. They stood together with protest signs that folded and unfolded in the wind and rain. Inside soaked jackets, members and allies of the activist organization stood in solidarity against the Northwest ICE Processing Center, also known as the Northwest Detention Center, which is owned by The GEO Group and is contracted by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The facility houses all genders. 

The detention center imprisons people who are suspected of violating civil immigration laws. While immigrants detained in the facility are from countries across the globe, many are from Latin America, one of several regions that has felt the brunt of European colonization and American imperialism. The impacts of these forces have made life in the countries unlivable for many, forcing people to migrate. However, when they reach the borders of the countries, including the United States, which have contributed to or caused their displacement, they are met with hostility and immigration policies that turn their plight into profit.

The GEO Group acquired Corrections Services Corporation and its detention facility in a heavily industrialized area, allegedly exposing immigrants to numerous sources of pollution. Over nearly 30 years, numerous test pits and groundwater monitoring wells, both immediately adjacent to and beneath the detention facility site, have revealed the presence of petroleum products, including diesel, gasoline, and heavy oil. Furthermore, the detention facility has a notorious reputation due to years of documented human rights abuses.

Despite these man-made forces, La Resistencia movement leaders and their allies are standing up to fight the facility and what it represents, mindful of those who’ve been targeted and whose rights have been taken, just as so many of their ancestors’ labor, land, and natural resources were—and continue to be—taken. The GEO Group is paid by the federal government to house people there, and is guaranteed a minimum number of detainees, causing the people detained in the facility to be valued as commodities. 

As the rain continued to pour, the protesters were quickly drenched, yet they remained, resolute and unified in their demands. Rufina Reyes, director of the La Resistencia, led the group by declaring: “¡No están solo!” Her voice was amplified loud enough for the sound waves to echo off the detention facility’s walls. The crowd echoed in unison, “You are not alone!” The sound waves of the calls interweaved like a multilingual prayer sanctified by the heavy rain and wind.

“We’re opposed to detentions and deportations, and we don't want any more family separation!” Reyes shouted through an interpreter.

The volcanic mountain known as Tahoma towered above the valley and flatlands. Prior to the construction of the GEO Group’s detention facility, the site was a rich tidal estuary, known by many names, and was the ancestral homeland of the Puyallup people since time immemorial. Following colonization, conflict, and the eventual signing of the Treaty of Medicine Creek in 1854, the land was settled by American immigrants. Still, the Puyallup Tribe retains certain rights over the area as a result of the 1854 treaty and the subsequent Land Claims Settlement Act of 1990.

The Washington State Department of Ecology has stated that the EPA Superfund site around the detention facility is remediated, “capped” by layers of supposedly impermeable barriers, asphalt, and crumbled cement from the meatpacking facility. It now resembles an innocuous mound covered, bizarrely, in green grass. But an underground benzene plume exists just below the surface, not far from the southern edge of the property line where the detention facility now stands.

In 1988, a 3,500-gallon underground oil storage tank had to be removed, and along with it, 376 tons (752,000 pounds) of petroleum-affected soil and over 8,000 gallons of petroleum-affected groundwater. Yet more remained. Adding to the petroleum contamination, the nearby Standard Oil facility, which Chevron now owns, leaked petroleum products into the soil, contaminating the surrounding groundwater. Washington state Department of Ecology’s groundwater monitoring wells have detected diesel and heavy oil in wells just outside the walls of the detention facility as recently as November 2024.

In 1996, Correction Services Corporation, now owned by GEO Group, began searching for a site to build a migrant detention facility near Seattle. After considering several locations in neighboring towns, they ultimately landed on 1623 E. J Street in Tacoma. Then Tacoma City Council member Kevin Phelps was a vocal supporter of this location, citing economic benefits, specifically business and occupation taxes the city would garner. GEO Group was issued contract revenue bonds by The Washington Economic Development Finance Authority in 2003 for $57,415,000 and in 2011 for $54,375,000 to construct and expand the facility. Washington Representatives at the time, Adam Smith and Norm Dicks worked alongside Tacoma city leaders to persuade GEO Group to seek to build the facility atop the Superfund site. Dick and Smith didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment. Senator Patty Murray would also support the site's construction of this facility on this location as early as 2002. Smith later opposed the GEO Group’s facility receiving another contract. Murray later scrutinized the facility, but nonetheless had accepted campaign contributions from the GEO Group in the amount of $5,000 in 2016. Senator Murray and her staff didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment for this story. Along with Representative Pramila Jayapal, Smith wrote a letter in July 2024 to the then-secretary of DHS urging it to move away from the use of private for-profit migrant detention facilities. Jayapal previously founded a non-profit organization that partnered with the Seattle University School of Law to produce a report on the human rights abuses at the facility.

The city council adopted a resolution approving the facility on March 28, 2000, stating, “CSC [GEO Group] has an excellent reputation in the communities where it has facilities.” However, a local news report published in 2004, when the facility was being finished and opened, cited a 1995 riot at another GEO-acquired facility (under the name of Esmor Correctional Services) in New Jersey that led to a federal investigation. “Three guards at the facility were later convicted of misconduct and sent to prison,” a Tacoma News Tribune report stated as the Northwest Detention Center was about to open. 

Between 2018 and 2024, GEO Group paid Pierce County, where the detention facility is located, roughly $5,643,100 in property taxes. The city responded to questions about the total amount paid by GEO Group in business and occupation taxes, stating that such information could not be divulged because it is confidential.

The GEO Group, Inc., based in Boca Raton, Florida, has received $6.85 billion since July 2009 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which, since 2003, has included ICE. $995.08 million of this has been obligated to the GEO Group in Washington state. Congress’s 2025 Trump-supported continuing resolution allocates nearly $10 billion for ICE. The American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) estimated that the continuing resolution allocates approximately $350 billion for immigration enforcement and argues, however, that it does not include checks and balances on Trump’s mass detention and deportation plans, nor allow for a legal pathway to citizenship. “Under our legal system, the rule of law also requires fairness and respect for due process, but the Trump-controlled Senate rejected any proposal to inject those principles into the bill passed yesterday,” stated AILA Executive Director Ben Johnson in a press release. 

Trump has recently defied court orders regarding the detention and deportation of migrants, invoking a law used to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, and Italian-Americans during World War II to loosely classify some Venezuelans as members of Tren de Aragua, a gang designated as a foreign terrorist organization by his administration, without due process of law. Trump’s framing of non-white migrants as criminals and subhuman since his political rise in 2015 has served as the basis for his policies that disproportionately target vulnerable non-white people who once immigrated to the U.S.

Meanwhile, those within the financial industry are profiting from the Trump Administration’s policies’ “potential sea change.” GEO Group’s top five shareholders are BlackRock, Inc., Vanguard Group, Inc., Wolf Hill Capital Management, LP, FMR, LLC, and Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. as of December 31, 2024.

Pam Bondi, Trump’s current Attorney General, was formerly a lobbyist for the GEO Group, which has contributed over $2.7 billion to Trump and Republicans from 2016 to 2024, including members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election and promoted the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Two days after Trump’s re-election on November 5th, 2024, GEO Group Executive Chairman George Zoley told his company’s shareholders during an earnings call that Trump’s “more aggressive policy” toward interior and border immigration enforcement means a “potential sea change” for the company he leads. “The GEO Group was built for this unique moment in our company’s—country's history and the opportunities that it will bring,” Zoley said. He said GEO Group could increase the number of detainee beds from 13,500 to 31,000. In the days following Trump’s election, the value of GEO Group stock nearly doubled and peaked on January 21, 2025, Trump’s Inauguration Day.

The apparent commoditization of human beings, in addition to allegations that migrants detained are essentially forced labor, is reminiscent of some of the darkest chapters of human history. Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, recently suggested Trump’s aspirational deportation machine should run more like a business, treating people like products being shipped. 

Before and between Trump’s terms, Democrats also sought to expand the role of DHS and ICE. The Biden administration took actions to expand immigration detention prior to the end of his term. Then Vice President and two-time presidential candidate Harris clearly stated her opposition to migration from Central and South America when, in June 2021, she spoke in Guatemala, unequivocally, saying to potential migrants, “Do not come. Do not come.”

A Long Record of Human Rights Abuses

La Resistencia has dedicated over eleven years to shutting down the migrant detention center. Its Founder, Maru Mora-Villalpando, grew up in Mexico and was influenced by strong leaders, including her mother and grandfather, a union leader. They taught her the importance of supporting laborers on strike, which, she said, was common in Mexico. She recalled working to support striking workers by getting on a public bus, shaking a can with coins, requesting donations while talking with people about the importance of supporting striking workers, and passing out informational flyers. She also recalled riding with her mother and passing a group of striking workers when she was young. Their flag was grayed from age, and her mother said this was because of how long they’d been fighting, adding, “We also need to support them. In order for them to win, we all need to support them.” “They end[ed] up winning,” she said.

ICE has allegedly targeted Mora-Villalpando specifically, as well as other activists, including, more recently, Alfredo "Lelo" Juarez Zeferino, a farm labor rights activist who is currently being detained at the GEO Group facility. According to a lawsuit filed, in part, on her behalf as well as on behalf of other activists allegedly targeted by ICE, Mora-Villalpando was surveilled, then explicitly targeted by ICE, which initiated deportation proceedings against her, specifically for her activism defending human and immigrant rights. DHS ultimately dropped deportation charges against Mora-Villalpando. The lawsuit is ongoing.

On September 15, 2024, La Resistencia posted on Instagram stating, “URGENT. Yesterday a woman in the women’s unit at NWDC suffered [a] fainting [sic] and headaches that were caused by a strong smell of gas. #GEO staff failed to address this issue.” According to Mora-Villalpando, this woman was taken for medical observation and returned an hour later. People detained and impacted said the strong smell of gas and sulfur was unbearable. They thought it was coming from the air conditioning vent, mentioning the door to the yard was left open because of it. According to detained people, one GEO officer said they, too, were suffering from a headache due to the smell of gas. Other GEO officers who later came into the unit stated they couldn’t smell anything, according to detained persons familiar with the event, who opined it was because they didn’t want to acknowledge a possible gas leak. Unit B-3 is located in the northernmost part of the detention facility, where groundwater and soil monitoring and tests have revealed for over 30 years the presence of diesel fuel and heavy oil.

More recently, on a video posted on March 12, a person detained at the GEO Group’s facility stated via video chat to leaders of La Resistencia that clothes coming back laundered are still wet, smell like mildew, and “smell like diesel fuel.” The laundry room is also located in the northernmost part of the detention facility. Mora-Villalpando stated that a fire occurred in this area the previous year, which she and others witnessed while outside in solidarity. 

According to Mora-Villalpando and Liliana Chumpitasi, leader and community organizer with La Resistencia, these instances weren't the first time detainees smelled gas in the facility. The group reported to The Margin that detained people identified the smell of gas when the sinks were clogged, and water was leaking from above the showers. In another incident detailed by the group, detained people communicated to La Resistencia that a gas smell also came from the showers. Per a 2024 lawsuit, the Washington State Department of Health has fielded over 700 complaints in the past year from people detained in the GEO Group’s facility, including reports that “the water is brown and possibly contaminated.”

The project lead of the state’s toxics cleanup of the Chevron bulk terminal facility, Thomas Praisewater, stated in an interview with The Margin that while he has not heard about any toxins, it is hypothetically possible these toxins have infiltrated the detention facility’s drinking water. Praisewater has been working with Chevron’s consultant, AECOM, on the cleanup of the bulk fuel storage and distribution facility that was once across the street, a site now occupied by vehicles used by ICE and GEO. 

Another expert has also said petroleum products may have made their way up through the soil and into the detention facility’s water pipes. Marc A. Edwards, a Distinguished Professor in environmental and water resources engineering at Virginia Tech, told The Margin that gas and other petroleum products can go through or diffuse through porous plastic water pipes. Edwards, who worked on the scientific team that found lead contamination in the drinking water of Flint, Michigan, said, in particular, polyethylene pipes are susceptible to such infiltration. Praisewater made similar statements that if there is, in fact, contamination, it would likely be because of a break or corrosion in the detention facility’s water system. Furthermore, it is unclear if GEO Group installed vapor intrusion barriers, rather than vapor barriers; the former being designed to potentially prevent infiltration of toxic chemicals. A 2009 toxicological evaluation by the EPA of the NWDC indicated that a vapor intrusion barrier was not installed.

The City of Tacoma water department told The Margin that municipal water piped to the facility is clean. According to records from the City of Tacoma in 2009 and 2010, the city approved occupancy permits for renovations to the building based on GEO Group’s detention facility building permit, which meets the 2006 International Building Code standards, requiring third-party certified plastic pipes that conform to NSF 14 standards. NSF 14 standards include polyethylene pipes. The Margin is waiting for the release of records requested via state open records laws from the city to further determine the potential water contamination. 

Despite state legislation requiring the Washington State Department of Health to monitor air and water quality in facilities such as the GEO Group’s detention facility that was signed into law May 11, 2023 as House Bill 1470, the company has fought and denied at least four attempts to inspect the water in all parts of the facility, only allowing access to the lobby and its bathroom. The state health department attempted to test the water in the detention facility but was denied access by GEO facility administrators acting on behalf of ICE supervisors. Joe Wesley Barbee, Jr., the distribution optimization advisor for the operations and training section of the state health department office of drinking water, stated in a declaration included in a lawsuit filed by the state against the GEO Group, that the Department of Health received complaints from individuals detained in GEO Group’s facility between April 2023 and mid-July 2024. 

Barbee described these complaints as being about the water’s temperature, color, smell, and the absence of water from faucets. “Detainees have complained about incidents where there is no water to drink, flush toilets, or otherwise use, and other incidents where the tap water is brown,” he stated. But when Barbee arrived at the GEO Group’s facility, he was met by the facility administrator, Bruce Scott, and two unidentified people, who allowed him only to test water from a faucet in a restroom near the front lounge area, apart from the secured part of the facility where detainees are held. “The testing environment was under intense scrutiny by the facility staff and the supervisor, who asked questions about every step and every chemical/reagent I used,” Barbee stated in the lawsuit. He added that typically, a water test in a bathroom sink wouldn’t be acceptable for quality tests. “The administrator asked for identical samples of any water I took,” Barbee said. 

“I welcome them to prove us wrong, but they closed their doors even more,” said Representative Lillian Ortiz-Self (WA-21), who introduced House Bill 1232 in the state legislature that amends parts of House Bill 1470, which a federal judge partly blocked, saying it singled out GEO Group. HB 1232, which amended the law to include other facilities, was passed by the legislature on April 14 along party lines and signed into law by Governor Bob Ferguson on May 12. Part of the current legislation would require the Department of Health to specifically investigate complaints, monitor air and water quality, and publicly report findings on routine unannounced inspections of the facility, and to post these results in multiple languages for detainees and the public. It would also expand the facilities it covers to facilities other than the GEO Group detention facility in Tacoma. GEO Group had argued that HB 1470 was unconstitutional, alleging it violated the Constitution’s supremacy clause, stating ICE was the authority that denied the state access to the entire facility. “They have refused to be more transparent, and instead, the complaints have doubled and continue to increase. We continue to have hunger strikes and complaints and suicide attempts,” Rep. Ortiz-Self told The Margin. “A couple questions come to mind: How much money do you want to make off of people suffering? And you know we’re looking at you, so do you care that little that you think you can continue to treat people this way? And if you're treating them that way, knowing that we have our eyes on you, what’s really happening inside? We're really scared for everyone that’s in there,” she said. “What are they hiding?” Rep. Ortiz-Self asked.

U.S. Marshals have recently confirmed a separate GEO Group detention facility in Laredo, Texas, to be exposing detainees to carbon monoxide, which families of the detainees allege sicken detainees without adequate medical treatment. GEO Group previously denied the presence of the deadly gas. The local fire department required GEO Group to take corrective action, according to an April 17th KGNS news report.

In addition to having no choice but to drink potentially contaminated water, independent experts have alleged human rights abuses in complaints since the GEO detention facility was first opened in 2004.

A 2008 report by OneAmerica and the International Human Rights Clinic at Seattle University School of Law identified major issues, including the unnecessary detention of refugees, conditions violating legal due process protections, especially the forced signing of papers, lack of access to attorneys, and failure to ensure confidential communications. Other concerns included overcrowding and lack of privacy, inadequate emergency medical care and pain management, inhuman and degrading treatment by guards and U.S. Marshals, failure to adequately address mental health issues and punitive segregation of those with mental health problems, extremely poor quality and quantity of food, inadequate visitation time, and long waits and inadequate access to telephones. Several reports by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) have documented similar abuses since then. These include complaints of being served uncooked or worm-infested food, allegations of medical neglect, extensive use of solitary confinement, COVID-19 response and health standard issues, reports of sexual assault and abuse going unanswered, and complaints about the use of force and chemical agents.

Suicide attempts at the facility are another especially significant issue. The UWCHR obtained 911 calls and detailed at least six suicide attempts from January 1 to March 18, 2024, alone. From August 2017 to April 2023, the UWCHR identified at least an additional 12 suicide attempts as categorized by South Sound 911. A man with Russian citizenship who was seeking asylum died following a suicide attempt while detained in segregation (or what UWCHR would define as solitary confinement). Records of 911 calls obtained by The Margin via open records law detail at least an additional eight suicide attempts since April 2023. In one of the most recent attempts on February 9, 2025, a detention facility representative tells a 911 dispatcher that medical assistance is needed for a man who had cut his wrists. A 2024 report by the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman found the detention center did not consistently complete 15-minute checks of detainees on suicide watch, and did not strictly control and collect disposable razors. Another 911 call obtained by The Margin via open records law details a man who had hit his head “multiple times” on the wall. In yet another recent suicide attempt, on March 12, a man jumped off the upper tier to the lower tier, according to a 911 audio recording obtained by The Margin.

911 Records obtained by The Margin via public records law give a very general description of numerous other incidents, including 17 calls regarding molestation/groping from October 2021 through January 2025, and six calls alleging rape from February 2023 through June 2024. In a report published in 2022, the UWCHR reviewed several data sources from approximately 2012 to 2019 and found 63 reports of sexual assault or abuse. These included allegations by detainees against other detainees, alleged harassment by a GEO Group officer, and alleged sexual assault by medical staff. More recently, on April 24, UWCHR published a report finding the City of Tacoma Police Department failed to respond to allegations of assault and sexual assault made by detainees.

A City of Tacoma spokesperson provided the following response via email: “We are currently reviewing the concerns outlined in the report recently published by the University of Washington. If our review identifies opportunities to better align with our mission in serving those at the [NWDC], we are committed to making necessary improvements and further strengthening our procedures. Our goal is to ensure that safety, security, and respect for rights remain central to our role.”

People detained at the NWDC have also died there. On March 7, 2024, Charles Leo Daniel died while in solitary confinement of undetermined causes. According to UWHRC, Daniel had spent nearly the entirety of his four years at the NWDC in solitary confinement despite being classified as having significant mental illness. La Resistencia told The Margin Senator Patty Murray was touring the facility the day of his death. On October 27, 2024, Jose Manuel Sanchez-Castro also died at the NWDC. According to reporting by The Seattle Times, he was in fentanyl withdrawal. Yet autopsy results have yet to be released. In 2018, another person died by suicide at the NWDC, according to a press release from Rep. Jayapal, who stated that when she visited the facility following Daniel’s death, she wasn’t allowed to speak with detained people.

Angelina Godoy, Director of the UWCHR, told The Margin there's a total lack of accountability regarding the GEO Group’s detention facility in Tacoma because the systems that are there to provide accountability, such as Congress, have utterly failed, “to take any effective action to ensure that conditions within the Northwest Detention Center are even up to ICE's own standards, which would fall far below international human rights standards.”

The recent UWCHR report states “Conditions are critical within the NWDC today, and outside facility walls, we are all witness to a still-unfolding series of federal government policies that revel in the cruel and public dehumanization of immigrants.”

The state’s lawsuit against the GEO Group, which seeks to prevent GEO Group from denying the entry of state officials under state law to investigate complaints, states, “As alleged, these complaints present clear threats to detainee health and safety at [the detention facility].” The Margin has requested these complaints via state public records law but has yet to receive them. The Washington State Department of Health, currently in litigation with the GEO Group, has declined to provide an interview to The Margin on the matter.  

A Washington State Department of Health spokesperson stated in an emailed response to The Margin: “The Washington State Department of Health is aware of many of these and other complaints. We are committed to gain entry to the facility and investigate these complaints. The Northwest ICE Processing Center continues to deny entry to our staff. We are hopeful that the federal courts will bring clarity to the department’s authority and that the facility will allow entry for investigations, transparency, and the welfare of all people inside the facility.”

A GEO Group Spokesperson provided the following response via email: “The support services GEO provides at… the Northwest ICE Processing Center, are governed by ICE’s detention standards. GEO’s services are carefully monitored for quality by ICE personnel, who are onsite 24/7… The locations where GEO supports ICE are also independently accredited by the American Correctional Association, as well as the National Commission on Correctional Health Care...”

A GEO Group spokesperson further stated via email: “GEO strongly disagrees with the allegations that have been made regarding the services we provide at the Northwest ICE Processing Center. These allegations are part of a long-standing, politically motivated, and radical campaign to abolish ICE and end federal immigration detention by attacking the federal government's immigration facility contractors. GEO has comprehensive policies in place for the reporting and investigation of all incidents that occur at the Center, including instances of assault and/or sexual assault. These policies are governed by Performance-Based National Detention Standards (“PBNDS”) established by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The GEO Group provided these general responses, but did not respond to The Margin’s detailed questions.

“That’s what detention centers are… an extension of the prison system.”

Rufina Reyes, director of La Resistencia, hails from Guerrero state, Mexico. She emigrated to the U.S. in 2000 because of a lack of economic opportunity. “I'm Mexican,” Reyes said through an interpreter. “I'm an immigrant. I consider myself undocumented. I'm a mom, I'm a wife, and I believe that most of the people that are in La Resistencia are here because we have been affected by the system.” Reyes has held a work permit for the past two years. Reyes’ brother fled his home in Mexico following his kidnapping by a local organized crime group. Fortunately, he was released, unlike many others, according to Reyes, who have been disappeared. He came to the U.S. and was later detained in the NWDC. She went to find her brother at the detention center, and when she came out, La Resistencia was holding an action outside. She began volunteering with La Resistencia, answering phone calls on the group's hotline. 

Some of the most impactful calls, she said, were those in which the person on the other end of the line said that they wanted to harm themselves or when she found out one person had died inside. This intimacy with despair and injustice catalyzed her, and she realized she had to do something more about it. “I have to continue fighting this, not just for my brother, but because possibly one day also I may be in there, and so I want to keep fighting for every single person that is not able to defend themselves,” she said. 

In addition to the violence and corruption of her home state, climate change has brought intensified cycles of drought and flooding that have made it extremely difficult for people to subsistence farm or grow food to sell there. As a result, so many have been forced to migrate, she added. Climate change impacts have been overwhelmingly driven by countries of the Global North, including the U.S. 

Reyes recounted how Mora-Villalpando reached out to her when she walked out of the detention facility in Tacoma after visiting her brother. “She told me who she was, she offered support, and she told me a little bit about what the people were talking about, the conditions inside. She said, ‘You're not alone. Here's my number. Call me if anything comes up,” Reyes said. Reyes has since risen through the ranks of La Resistencia to direct the Organization, as Mora-Villalpando has transitioned to an advisory position.

“I call it a detention center because everybody knows them as detention centers, but they're cages,” Mora-Villalpando said. “That’s the result of allowing governments to decide who's worthy of what. If you are forced to migrate, you're already being shaped into what you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to have, and what you're not supposed to have, and what you don't have is because ‘you deserve it,’” she said ironically. 

She said an ideology is formed where people agree that some people deserve to be caged. “That’s what detention centers are,” she said. “I've always said they’re an extension of the prison system.” In this case, the private, for-profit prison system.

“The idea has been not only how these white invaders took over our continents,” she added, “but how they continue to be exploiting. They already have our land, they already have our labor, they already have our mind, and now they want to have our bodies to further capital—by having these cages, these storage places, where you [store] people like boxes, and you still make money off them,” she concluded.

After Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic damage in the region in 2017, the County identified Mendoza’s old neighborhood, Allen Field, as one of seven that was “hopelessly deep” in the floodplains. The neighborhood, tucked away in the northeast corner of Harris County, was far removed from the skyscrapers downtown. Its cluster of modest homes backs up to Greens Bayou, a watershed that overflowed during Harvey.

Instead of building a dam, widening the bayou, or creating detention ponds, which might run over anyway, the County would offer to buy homes here—and then tear them down. The neighborhoods would then be left as green spaces or other flood control projects to absorb the rains of the next big storm. A voluntary buyout program has been run all over Harris County for decades. Residents could choose to stay or take the buyout. This time, however, the program was mandatory, and there was no choice to stay behind.

In Allen Field, Mendoza could list off the names of floods that devastated the neighborhood over and over again since she was a child. Each time, homes had to be gutted or repaired. So, after Harvey, the County spent nearly six years and over $200 million to purchase some 400 properties and find nearly 700 new residences outside of the floodplain.

For Mendoza, one of the biggest worries was breaking up her tight-knit extended family, who had all lived down the street or around the corner from each other in Allen Field for generations. “We could have been completely happy there forever,” Mendoza told me after Beryl. But Mendoza said the move took her to a different place in life. “Now I know what it is to not live in that area—I know what it is to be somewhere else.”

When Beryl hit, the Mendozas didn’t experience any flooding in their new suburb, some 20 miles away. None of her relatives had to be rescued from knee-deep water, and no one had to deal with gutting and rebuilding their houses after this hurricane, as they had done time and time again after previous storms inundated Allen Field.

Roxana Sibrian, a spokesperson for Harris County Housing and Community Development, said restrictions on development in floodplains came in the 1980s after much of the County was already developed.

"According to the Harris County Flood Control District’s analysis, the areas where buyouts occur should never have been built on in the first place,” Sibrian said.

Mendoza’s family—siblings, parents, and grandparents—are among a few hundred households Harris County relocated through the Post Disaster Relocation and Buyout Program—its first effort at what’s known as managed retreat. In vulnerable areas across the country, there is a growing recognition that local governments will have to assist entire communities and neighborhoods with moving out of harm’s way as climate change causes floods, fires, and other natural disasters to become more frequent and intense. Otherwise, people will be caught in a constant cycle of disaster and recovery, draining funds from programs like the National Flood Insurance Program.

In the initial years of the buyout program, which began in earnest in 2020, residents were skeptical that the County’s program could replace not just a house, but the lives they had spent decades building. As residents simultaneously navigated the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, they attended virtual town halls to learn whether they would have to take on new mortgages, higher taxes, or HOA fees after decades of owning their own property; others worried about finding property that would allow them to maintain their in-home businesses.

Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 50 inches of rain over Southeast Texas as it stalled over the region. It caused an estimated $150 billion in damages, making it one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history. Afterward, however, it presented Harris County with an opportunity to invest in resilience and mitigation programs, as it received millions of dollars in federal assistance.

The mandatory buyout program, funded primarily through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was not without its problems: questions still swirl around why some households were denied extra tax incentives for relocating within the county. Undocumented households were offered less and took inordinate risks to speak up for what they deserved. Some Houstonians lived through disasters on top of disasters: After Winter Storm Uri in 2021, families were left with damage from burst pipes that the county told them not to repair since they wouldn’t get extra funding to cover the costs before moving out. And relocation programs can rupture social ties and connections that are crucial to the well-being of communities—a side effect that’s rarely studied and hard to quantify.

When the next big storm hits, it’s unclear if places like Harris County, where recovery efforts are almost always layered on top of historic patterns of inequity, will be able to replicate ambitious projects like the mandatory home buyout program and improve upon the lessons they learned.

Equity, Extreme Weather, and a Second Trump Administration

Decades of government-sanctioned redlining have pushed communities of color deeper into the floodplain, closer to sources of pollution, or into substandard housing. Many communities still live with the compounding impacts of those decisions today. Race and poverty levels are still closely related to how different communities experience the same disasters.

A 2018 study from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy found that the Greens Bayou watershed, which runs through Allen Field, had only recently started to receive federal funding for flood control projects—despite a history of extensive flooding. The watershed had the highest concentration of poverty in the County, and flood control projects there stalled even after a separate, $2.5 billion county bond was passed in 2018 to address unequal flooding with new infrastructure investments. Meanwhile, projects in some of Houston’s wealthiest neighborhoods, like River Oaks, were already well underway.

Until the buyouts, Allen Field’s main form of flood control was grassy, overgrown ditches like the ones throughout the Houston area, which drew complaints from residents who said the County didn’t maintain them. As storms have become more intense with climate change, ditches have become less effective at funneling floodwaters into the bayous.

“Historically, poor communities are often living in conditions of general government disinvestment, or poverty that results in not being able to maintain a baseline level of functional and livable homes,” says Alice Liu, the Co-Director of Communications, Organizing and Disaster Preparedness with West Street Recovery, a disaster recovery nonprofit that serves Northeast Houston. FEMA aid often comes with strings attached: a homeowner can’t use aid from today’s disaster to pay for damages caused by last year’s hurricane. “You’ll see the cumulative impacts of three or four major storms in the course of a decade—all those damages stack up, and people aren’t able to fully recover.”

In the four predominantly Black and Hispanic, low-income ZIP Codes that West Street works in, FEMA denied 75% of all aid applications. Four years after Harvey, West Street published a report interviewing 21 survivors of Hurricane Harvey. Only six said they had fully recovered from the storm; almost all said they had depleted most of their savings but still lived in damaged homes. Research from Texas Housers, a fair housing nonprofit, also showed that FEMA was more likely to approve applications from higher-income households. Only 10 percent of applicants making over $70,000 a year were denied aid.

Only recently, advocates say, has any progress been made in creating policies that reduce inequalities already baked into the status quo. Just three years ago, for example, FEMA removed documentation requirements for people living in what’s known as “heirs’ property”—a home or parcel of land that has been passed down without clear titles or deeds for generations. That policy had kept many families in rural, Southern Black communities from receiving aid. More than one-third of Black-owned land in the South is passed down informally, making the documentation policy inherently exclusionary.

“There are many ways in which HUD, FEMA, and other agencies were trying to be more attentive to equity in disaster recovery, but there are still a lot of shortfalls,” says Alessandra Jerolleman, the director of research at the Center for Environment, Land and Law, at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. “I don’t want to paint what we had as a panacea– what we had needed a lot of work.”

In the last days of the Biden administration, HUD released new guidelines for its Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery that called for greater attention to equity in recovery. Fair housing advocates have been calling for such guidelines for years. The notice kicked in as nearly $12 billion in aid was finalized, including recovery funds for Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which devastated parts of North Carolina and Florida, respectively, in 2024. The guidelines instruct local and state governments to create citizen advisory groups that represent local demographics, for example, ensuring greater public engagement.

The win was short-lived, and President Donald Trump’s new HUD Secretary, Scott Turner, repealed the rules in March. The agency deleted references to civil rights data and fair housing, and a section requiring language translation and interpretation during public comment meetings.

Earlier that month, Turner also took issue with the City of Asheville’s action plan for distributing federal relief dollars from Hurricane Helene. Turner blasted the city for prioritizing assistance to “minority and women-owned businesses” and said that his department would not approve the plan as it was written.

Under Trump’s second term, his administration wasted no time in targeting equity and justice related policies. On his first day in office, the president signed an executive order calling for the elimination of all environmental justice positions in the federal government and completely terminating equity-related grants, plans, and programs developed in recent years. Soon after, environmental justice databases and tools began disappearing from government websites. His administration has also canceled grant funding and fired federal employees who are responsible for running public assistance programs.

Trump has been making due on what’s outlined in Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto published a year before the election. Conservative leaders from the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, and former and current Trump officials outlined a plan to curb civil liberties and slash federal jobs, with the aim of privatizing many functions of the federal government, ranging from weather forecasting to the National Flood Insurance Program.

Within Trump’s first 100 days, hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who track hurricanes in the Gulf Coast and issue life-saving warnings and alerts, have been unceremoniously fired. The National Storm Prediction Center, which tracks thunderstorms and tornadoes across the country, is also reportedly in the administration’s crosshairs.

“We really need to think hard as a movement if it’s possible to turn the government off for four years and then turn it back on again—but we’re still living through the impacts of the Reagan administration,” Liu says.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan slashed funding for public sector jobs and social safety net programs like Social Security, and gutted agencies like the EPA—also in line with policy guidelines written by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. By the end of his administration, income inequality had grown, and environmental and climate policy faced setbacks.

“I don’t think that (local governments) need to do the Trump administration’s job for them,” said Zoe Middleton, a former Harris County staffer and currently an associate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. She worries that some local governments may preemptively decide to drop equity principles in the future, instead of risking the ire of the new administration, as Asheville’s leaders inadvertently did. “Regardless of the chilling effect at the federal level, [counties] have the obligation to their constituents and residents to run programs as efficiently and equitably as possible.”

Disaster Justice

Today, as the mandatory buyout program wraps up, residents who experienced repeat flooding made worse by climate change are now on safer ground. Some families were able to put down payments on a home after years of renting; others now have more value in their new property and live on safer streets. But it took community organizing efforts to pressure the County to truly care for everyone.

Harris County’s mandatory buyout program didn’t initially account for the costs of relocating undocumented or mixed-status families. Undocumented residents can access public shelters and aid distribution during crises, but have almost always been shut out of direct federal aid for home repairs through FEMA. Local funds, or philanthropic funds, can close the gap.

In the Greens Road Mobile Home Community in northern Harris County, undocumented residents were offered pennies on the dollar for mobile homes that they owned outright. Additionally, county staff didn’t always provide Spanish-speaking residents with resources in their language—including complicated legal documents that would be hard for native English speakers to follow, for example.

“We started hearing things like, ‘The cost of living has gone up, and we’re not going to be able to buy a new home with the little bit of money we’re getting,’’” says Damaris Gonzalez, the lead immigration organizer with the Texas Organizing Project. “People were receiving $5,000 for their trailers. They were crying because they didn’t know what to do or where they were going to live.”

Gonzalez worked with the community in Greens Road, mobilizing people to testify at the County Commissioners Court about their experiences. Some shared their experiences, in Spanish, of their fears of being left homeless and feeling disrespected by the county’s employees as the process moved forward; others recounted that they hadn’t been informed that they could have qualified for extra funding to move out and now found themselves in debt after accepting low-ball offers.

Eventually, the County Commissioners Court unanimously approved an additional $7.7 million in local funding to support undocumented or mixed-status families. Now, former clients eagerly invite Gonzalez to come to their new houses in areas that no longer flood. “That’s when you realize the work you’re putting in is worth it in the end, because people are in better conditions.”

Harris County’s mandatory buyout program revealed some hard truths about the County’s ability to serve residents equally. Sibrian, the Housing and Community Development spokesperson, said that in the future, the county would recommend increasing public awareness campaigns and language access.

Nevertheless, undocumented families took a risk in speaking up for a fair deal. “We still have rights, and we are still human beings,” Gonzalez says. “It was a really hard conversation, but we were sure we were going to win something.”

Under Trump, the fear of retaliation and deportation may be heightened, discouraging people from publicly protesting or speaking up as they did during the buyout. Project 2025 calls for FEMA to collaborate with immigration enforcement to ensure that non-citizens don’t receive a penny of aid.

A 2024 literature review authored by researchers at Tulane University and Loyola found that disaster justice research has widely established that the disaster recovery process is difficult for people to navigate and that people of color, those with disabilities, and non-English speakers often face barriers to aid. But the research also found a case study suggesting that when communities can mobilize, as Greens Road did, they’re much more likely to win more resources for a fair recovery.

Just a year later, researchers like Jerolleman, who advised and co-wrote the paper, are concerned about the future of equity-based disaster research, which often relies on data and documents provided directly from federal agencies.

“We’re seeing less access to data around decisions that FEMA is making— and that makes it more difficult to hold agencies accountable, and get a good picture of what’s happening,” said Jerolleman, who advised the study. “If it was murky before, it’s going to be impossible to say what tomorrow will bring, much less the next hurricane season.”

As government services are gutted, a negative feedback loop seems likely: with fewer scientists tracking storms, severe weather forecasts and warnings may become less reliable. That puts more people in harm’s way and in need of aid when the storm is over. Vulnerable communities may be left further behind as federal policy turns away from equity and justice principles. And the ability to track those unequal paths may become obscured if federal agencies stop collecting such data altogether, or refuse to make it public.

“Disaster recovery is slow, and the effects of disasters are compounding with increasing extreme weather,” Middleton said. “The federal government should be helping to stand up effective and impactful programs quickly, instead of delaying them to fulfill a hateful agenda.”

At the bare minimum, Middleton says, local governments should stick to a long-standing rule that 70 percent of recovery funds go to low to moderate-income neighborhoods, building up infrastructure and repairing homes in the places where there’s the most need. And local governments can marshal funding to fill in the gaps.

For Mendoza and her family, navigating the buyout process was no easy feat, even in less hostile political circumstances: from navigating virtual town halls during the chaotic, early days of the pandemic, to being caught off guard by the level of aid that residents qualified for based on opaque factors. “The point in my life I’m at now, I know what it means to not live in Allen Field—it was too far gone,” she said. “It turned out to be a positive thing for us, but with the program they presented at the very beginning, without us pushing back, we would have been worse off.”

Mendoza and her sisters now live in the same neighborhood in a Houston suburb and send their kids to the same school. They go to the same neighborhood park to play basketball with other neighborhood kids.

“Then my mom said, ‘Well, if y’all are there, then I’m going to go ahead and go there too,’” Mendoza says with a laugh. She doesn’t see her grandmother and great aunt as often as she would like these days—they relocated about 25 minutes away. Her dad and uncles also live on the opposite end of town.

“But no one is completely isolated. Everyone has somebody around the corner.” 

As Gaelen approached his daughters’ college home, he had enough cell service to call Carmela and tell her he was close. Carmela and Asha raced outside when their father arrived. They hugged tight. “There were a lot of tears,” Gaelen remembered. 

Gaelen moved to Burnsville, North Carolina in 1998 to teach farming at Arthur Morgan, an independent middle school. Gaelen and his wife Nicole built a working farm nearby where they raised their two daughters. The girls grew up helping on the farm, feeding animals, and selling produce at local farmer’s markets. Gaelen has graying hair and sun-tanned skin. His resting facial expression is a smile. He walked us around their seventeen acres of land, part of the fifty the family manages, which are now dotted with piles of debris. As we surveyed the damage, Gaelen explained that farming in Appalachia has always been difficult due to the rugged terrain and nutrient-thin soil. The family’s lifestyle requires an unordinary amount of self-reliance, which is part of the appeal. “When something goes wrong, it’s all your fault,” Gaelen said with a laugh.

After losing greenhouses, sheds, tools, and farmland, the family is starting over. Hurricane Helene also took neighbors— a renowned local musician, a sheriff’s deputy, and a Ukrainian family who had recently resettled in the mountains. Burnsville residents leaned on one another in the days and weeks after the storm. Nicole remembers the roughly thirty people who would gather in front of their home each day at a river spring for fresh water, sharing updates about resources and checking in. “That was how we figured out who was alive,” she said. 

Looking at the devastation, Gaelen remained optimistic. He said he had the skills to rebuild because his farming practice and lifestyle involves taking materials others might throw away, scrap metal or loose bolts or wires or fallen trees, and repurposing them. The family maintains this countercultural practice with pride in a society that overconsumes and overproduces. “We salvage what we can,” he said, picking up a beam of wood. “The salvage approach makes it easier to start over again. You have hope. At least I can start.”

Gaelen and Carmela set about rebuilding one of the lost greenhouses using supplies from a mound of debris. He told Carmela the length a pole needed to be for a door frame, and she cranked up her hand saw. Remaking the farm allows Gaelan to express some creativity, for this he is grateful. 

We stood a few feet away from the river that devastated the family’s life. “I’m terrified of water,” Gaelen said. “There’s no obstacle it cannot move.”

II. AND THEN CAME THE FLOOD

Suffocating mud raced down mountainsides, wiping out dozens of homes. One study documented nearly 2,000 landslides during Helene. Parts of Asheville experienced wind gusts over 70 mph, bringing down power lines and century-old trees. Entire neighborhoods were left in the dark, some for weeks. This medley of hazards took out roads and flattened cell towers and power stations, making it difficult for first responders to reach people trapped in their homes. At the time of publication, North Carolina’s Department of Transportation reported that 133 roads remain closed.

This was a climate crisis-fueled disaster. Warmer ocean temperatures strengthened the storm and unusually high atmospheric moisture kept it from dissipating. Scientists have long warned that a hotter climate would allow hurricanes to push farther inland with greater intensity. Helene, the second deadliest inland hurricane since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was tragic proof. Over its lifespan, the storm poured nearly 40 trillion gallons of rain across the southeast.

While the emotional suffering North Carolinians endured cannot be calculated, some figures bring the picture of other damages into clearer view. Hurricane Helene resulted in over 230 deaths across six states, with North Carolina making up nearly half. The economic toll on the state is estimated at $59 billion, making it one of the most expensive disasters in US history and the most expensive in North Carolina’s history. Annihilation forced its way into people’s lives, showing up daily like the sun rises, expressing itself in ways big and small. The stories shared in this project are only a glimpse.

Six months after the storm, the towns of Chimney Rock and Bat Cave remain undone.

“No one could have predicted this,” said Peter O’Leary, the mayor of Chimney Rock.

The mayor met me to show the town’s rebuilding effort. His white hair stood high and he wore a black vest. His cell phone fielded steady texts and calls from contractors, state officials, and displaced residents. He looked tired, but resolved. As we walked Mayor O’Leary pointed out collapsed storefronts and small businesses along the river had been flattened to rubble. The mayor, with his attention locked on the town’s daily needs, did not mention he lost his own home in the floods, a fact I came to learn later.

Chimney Rock is a town with about 140 permanent residents. During peak tourist season, however, it hosts as many as 10,000 visitors per day, according to the mayor. Tourists come for the dramatic rock formations, the trails of Chimney Rock State Park, and the family-friendly waters of nearby Lake Lure. Tourism sustains the local economy. The destruction of roads and infrastructure has raised concerns about how long the recovery will take—and how much the town will lose in the meantime.

The rebuild is expensive. Mayor O’Leary said Chimney Rock was in good financial shape, but Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) relief largely operates on a reimbursement system, requiring local governments to spend money up front before receiving federal funds. This arrangement creates cash flow challenges that impact the pace of recovery so municipal leaders turn to philanthropists, NGOs, and individual donors for additional resources. 

Faith-based organizations like Samaritan’s Purse are investing millions of dollars and deploying thousands of volunteers across western North Carolina. Unexpected sources of help arrived too. An Amish group from Lancaster, Pennsylvania learned about the devastation and immediately sent dozens of volunteers. Because of the group’s homesteading lifestyle, many came skilled as builders and craftsmen.

Sadie, a young Amish woman, has been working on reconstruction projects since the early weeks of the disaster. She builds temporary shelters and “tiny homes,” and cooks meals for volunteers. When I asked Sadie why she chose to travel so far to volunteer in this place where she did not have a connection, she paused. She kept cutting strawberries. It was almost like she hadn’t considered the alternative of not coming. “We don’t know what it would feel like to go through a storm like this and lose everything,” she said. “It’s nice to come down here to be reminded.” It struck me as a form of hyper-empathy, or perhaps true solidarity; to see pain that is not one’s own and claim responsibility for stepping in to help.

Toward the end of our walk, the mayor pointed to the top of the mountains. If you tilt your head upward, you’ll see the chimney shaped rock formation that gives the town its name. Nearby, there is a long waterfall and lines of trees waiting to regrow their leaves. It’s breathtaking. Mayor O’Leary tries to focus on this view rather than the construction vehicles and unfinished roads. “Looking out every day at the destruction and rebuilding, sometimes it starts to get to you,” he admitted. After a moment he added, “But I try to remind myself that it’s also the sight and sound of progress.”

Luis and Angel, friends who grew up in Alan Campo, became full-time leaders in the rebuilding effort after their repair shop was totaled by the storm. They work with CORE, an international NGO that provides disaster relief, supervising new volunteers, teaching construction skills. Luis sat on a four-wheeler at the end of a workday, reflecting on the last few months of work. “It feels good to see people coming to support our community,” he said.

Conducting the entire operation was Kirsty Greeno, a 30-year-old disaster recovery specialist from Vermont. Kirsty wore glasses with thick frames and kept her brown hair tied back in a loose bun. She walked with certainty, responding to volunteer questions, assigning daily tasks, and frequently cracking deadpan jokes. Kirsty has spent years traveling from one disaster site to another, helping communities rebuild after hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. She understands, maybe more than most, the significance of a safe and healthy home, confessing that she hadn’t always had one herself.

Alan Campo is especially in need of private support from groups like CORE because mobile homes that do not sit atop “permanent foundations” are ineligible for FEMA flood insurance. So, Kirsty and her team move from house to house, month after month, trying to make the homes livable for displaced families. They also want to make the homes better. Kirsty said the organization works with homeowners to redesign homes, often lifting their foundations, installing energy efficient insulation, and replacing lost furniture. 

“Things will never be the same as they were,” Kirsty said, standing outside an almost-completed home, speaking over the hum of generators and the pounding of hammers. “This is the new normal.”

She said it as a matter-of-fact, but she was also frustrated. Traveling from disaster to disaster, Kirsty knew Helene could be a preview of what’s to come. Homeowners ask her the same question: Will this happen again? 

“It’s the worst part of my job that I can’t tell them no.” She went on, “I can’t make that promise.”

“We had to go back to old-fashioned living,” Gresham said. He showed me an outdoor showering system he rigged using a tube that pumped water from a natural mountain spring yards away. He sounded proud that the family had adapted so quickly. They washed their clothes in the creek adjacent to their front yard and built fires. One son found a way to connect his Xbox to a generator so he could play games in the tent, a small attempt at normalcy. The backyard has campers and tiny homes – the family’s bedrooms for the foreseeable future. 

I followed Gresham inside of the original house where he pointed out hazards that made it dangerous to stay, including areas in the foundation and behind walls where white mold has begun to grow. Brown silt with silver specks coated nearly every surface, a risk for Gresham’s daughter with asthma. Gresham held the dry river silt in his hands, thumbing through to show how fine it was. The family will rebuild from scratch. Their new home will be located higher on the hill, far above the flood zone.

Gresham sat on the ground, and I joined him as he told me what gets him through the days. He said faith is his resource to confront the loss. “This is all temporary. My home, my material items, even our relationships. Not that it’s not meaningful, but I have to remember it’s all temporary.” Gresham is at peace. He grew warmer and steadier as we passed time together, eventually admitting, “It does get to you at times. I get tired of looking at it.” 

He rarely pauses for long reflection because there is work to do. Gresham’s construction business is still running despite losing thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. The crew mostly takes on rebuilding projects in the local area. "We have to keep working," he said. "That’s how we move forward."

Gresham told me that before leaving the area, I should see the nearby town of Spruce Pine. He said the damage there was worse than what we’d seen in Burnsville. He pulled out his phone and called Jennifer, a project manager on his team, who told us to come see another town’s recovery efforts.

“A lot of these places won’t come back,” Jennifer said. “And some will, but not in the same way.”

Jennifer Newton walked down Oak Avenue, pointing out Spruce Pine’s business district.

In this town, the storm lifted the North Toe River up so high that some buildings had water marks of 10 feet. Buildings remained boarded up and papered over, their owners gone.

Mitchell County had been completely blacked out in the days after Helene. Jennifer remembers finding ways to pass time in the dark with her family. They played a game of preferences. “Would you rather have flushing toilets or hot showers? Would you rather have television or ice?” Jennifer retold the story fondly. “Ice. Ice was what I missed most in those days.” 

Jennifer, who works part time with the town, helps people navigate the extremely complex and sometimes slow recovery systems. “People don’t realize how complicated it is,” she said.

“You’re not just fixing what’s broken—you’re dealing with permitting, building codes, structural engineers. And that’s before you even get to figuring out how to pay for it.” Unlike homeowners or farms, most small businesses aren’t eligible for FEMA or United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) relief, leaving them to find other ways forward. Some turned to private loans, which Jennifer noted are frustrating for businesses already carrying debt. Some relied on community support. Others made the choice to walk away.

Jennifer led us into a building being shared by multiple small businesses. We met her friend, Tricia, the owner of DT’s Coffee, which now operates out of the back of a furniture store. Tricia is proud to live in a place where individuals pitched in to help others start again. She attributes it to Appalachian culture. 

“Mountain living is special,” Tricia said. “I recommend you find a mountain you love and spend all the time there you can.”

On Your Bike worked to re-open as soon as possible, one of the first in the town. People needed a place to sit, to sip a hot coffee, to run into familiar faces and talk, and to hold a sense that things would be okay one day. Alex and Adam worked around the clock to get things back to normal. Alex started MarshallStrong, a GoFundMe where families posted funding requests. This system of private online donations has become an inadequate substitute for a social safety net in America, but Alex is undeterred. “Mountain people are scrappy,” she said. 

Marshall, like much of the region, had little outside help in those first days—no government crews, no large-scale aid—just locals, figuring it out with the tools they had. Adam recalled a local resident man using his personal pressure washer to shower mud off the roads downtown. “Seeing the yellow lines again made a psychological difference,” Adam said. “It reminded people we weren’t buried.”

Over the course of weeks stretching into months, rebuilding has slowed. Professional contractors—electricians, plumbers, carpenters—are booked out indefinitely. Without them, most families can’t move forward. People in Marshall worry that slower funds and dwindling media attention could set back their efforts. When Adam saw the news of the Los Angeles wildfires, he wondered, “Are we on our own now?” 

No disaster holds the headlines for long in the climate crisis.

The environmental cost of Helene is more difficult to quantify, though no less profound.

Floodwaters carried not only the usual detritus—cars, appliances, pieces of homes—but also sewage and pollutants, potentially contaminating rivers and local water systems. Gresham’s family in Burnsville were drinking from their well and noticed the children were getting sick daily. The family stopped using the water, suspecting it was compromised with some bacteria or fungus. Helene flew through delicate ecosystems, disrupting habitats in ways that will take years to fully assess. Some early indicators include significant damage to fisheries and loss of important species. The awesome volume of rainfall reshaped the mountain topography itself. Farmers lost fields of crops, forcing them to rethink their decisions to continue working the land. 

According to some residents, efforts to recover have been moving, but not fast enough. In December, Congress approved a $100 billion disaster relief package for Helene across several states. The package includes funding for infrastructure repair, aid to displaced families, and loans meant to restart businesses. These funds were set to begin in March 2025. North Carolina’s former Governor, Roy Cooper, requested an additional $25.6 billion in federal support and $3.9 billion from the state legislature. As of March, the legislature has proposed a fraction of this amount at $535 million, which lawmakers continue to debate.

Lawmakers, scientists, and advocates have begun thinking about long-term resilience. The desire to rebuild quickly faces the need to plan thoughtfully to prepare for future storms. Some say the goal is to construct smarter, even if it is uncomfortable. Mayor O’Leary said, “people want what’s familiar, but we have to build differently.” He noted the two bridges in Chimney Rock that survived the flood were both modern structures designed with contemporary engineering standards. “That tells you something.”

“The next big storm could be in 100 years,” Gresham said. “Or it could be next year.”

Branson has played in the bluegrass jam sessions since he was a teenager. The sessions typically took place at the Old Train Depot, which is now gone. Helene had lifted the building off its foundation and carried it about 200 yards down Main Street until it crashed into the On Your Bike coffee shop. The town is prioritizing rebuilding homes, medical facilities, and other things people can’t live without. So the Depot, with all its history, would have to wait.

As people entered the church, they stopped to squeeze hands and ask, “How’s your family?” or say, “I’ve been thinking about you.” They hugged. Then entered Pat Franklin, a seventy-one-year-old woman with curly hair, an intense stare, and whip speed humor. Three nights a week of folk, gospel, country, and bluegrass music, and local residents filled the old train station. It had been a heartbeat of the town funded by a Saturday night cakewalk. Pat created the Depot’s music program nearly 30 years ago so the poorest people in Appalachia would have a place to get food and be part of the larger community. Pat doesn’t mind the church as an alternative location, but she knows its limitations. “We can’t square dance in here,” she said. “We’ll end up through the floors in the basement.”

Pat introduced another woman named JoLeigh Bowden, who wore a black sweater and a fuzzy scarf. Pat told us JoLeigh is the daughter of a Baptist preacher and a former Ramones background singer, who now runs a small record company in town. “She’s not just any old redhead,” Pat said with a smile. JoLeigh and Branson began sharing memories from the flood.

Branson remembered the night of the 27th clearly. When he got the emergency text notification, “Dam is at critical levels. Reach higher ground now,” he grabbed his dog, his instruments, and his mother, setting off in his car towards higher ground in Asheville. He said the wind sounded like a jet engine circling above town. Like Branson, everyone I spoke to had an image that the storm had imprinted in their mind. Someone else remembers seeing a semi-truck drifting through Asheville’s arts district. 

A strained optimism occupied the room, a silent agreement between the musicians not to dwell too long on what had been lost. Marshall had experienced an historic flood in 1916, Branson said, and the Depot had shifted on its foundation. But this time, in 2025, it the river washed it away entirely.

The musicians took their seats in a circle. Branson started to tap his foot, counting off a bluegrass standard. Then instruments began to sing. A double bass groove reverberated in the floorboards and in my chest. The banjo, mandolin, and harmonica let out emphatic strums and bright riffs that danced around one another. The fiddle wailed out above the others, a melody which floated into the church’s dark brown rafters. It was a musical concoction big enough to contain grief, melancholy, Appalachian history, and release. 

JoLeigh sat beside the fireplace, taking it all in. Arms pressed to the sides of her chair she shared, “The earth is always changing and, in some ways, I’m grateful. The storm made us more adaptable, more resilient.” She added, “it was a dress rehearsal.”

A dress rehearsal for what? I asked. “For change,” she said. “Change is coming.”

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

 The project, at the end of the day, would've given New Orleans another generation,” Blink said. “ I'm sad for the people that don't have the means to get out of harm's way…This would've bought us time, and we threw that time in the trash.”

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

When you lose everything and so much of your income and your business that your foundation is based on that water… and suddenly it just gets pulled from underneath you. … You can't pick up and say, ‘Well, I'm gonna go start another business here and there,’” he said. “Where are you gonna go?”

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

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Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.