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(There is) no more vegetation, just stubble in a high organic mud flat. “So where (the land) was a week before, it’s now all dead. “When you get a high tide or get strong wave energy, (the shell hash) moves and smothers the vegetation, and then when the next frontal system comes in and the winds pick up to 20 mph and you get 6 and 8 ft waves, that moves the shell hash another 30 to 40 to 50 ft inland,” explains Trosclair. BREAKWATER CROSS SECTION (Figure courtesy of HDR Engineering Inc.) The sun-bleached shell hash might look like sand, but it is actually a very lightweight material that gets easily washed around by wind or wave action, notes Brett Geesey, P.E., an HDR office principal. One of the greatest challenges the designers of the stabilization project faced was the site soil conditions, which at the surface feature a few feet of shell hash - formed from crushed shells of oysters, clams, or other bivalves - atop about 40 ft of very soft clay. Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the most infamous storm of the period, struck further east and did not have much impact on the refuge.
Breakwaters woven geotextile full#
Meanwhile, Hurricanes Rita in 2005 and Ike in 2008 caused additional damage along the Gulf Coast Ike alone resulted in roughly a full year’s worth of erosion in just a few days.
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Moreover, obtaining funding for this sort of land protection effort can be a “hard sell,” says Trosclair, “because there are so many unknowns: Will it really work? What are the cost benefits? How much land will be reclaimed? Do we know for sure we’ll actually protect much?”
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The general contractor was LeBlanc Marine LLC, now part of Patriot Construction and Industrial LLC.Īdditional breakwaters are planned as parts of future projects that could ultimately extend protection along the full 9.2 mi length of the most endangered portion of the refuge.īetween the early 2000s and 2020, the design and construction of the stabilization project went through multiple iterations and had to overcome numerous challenges, including the need to repeatedly compete for available construction funding that is awarded only once a year, “which can cause years of delay,” says Bevin Barringer, P.E., a CPRA engineer and project manager. was the lead design firm, working for CPRA. (Photograph courtesy of HDR Engineering Inc.)
Breakwaters woven geotextile series#
Known as ME-18, according to its designation under the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act, the stabilization project is a $33 million-plus effort to protect the refuge shoreline by constructing a 4 mi long series of breakwaters.īags made from a woven geotextile fabric are filled with lightweight aggregate and then stacked to form the breakwater cores. Implemented by the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and the National Marine Fisheries Service - the local and federal sponsors, respectively - the stabilization project focused on that heavily eroding 9.2 mi long section of the refuge, which is located entirely in the Cameron Parish portion of the site. When erosion losses started to accelerate around 2000, the Rockefeller Refuge Gulf Shoreline Stabilization Project was taking shape. People worried that “if we keep getting hit with this pattern, we’re not going to have any land left,” Trosclair recalls.īut even as the refuge seemed in greater danger, a solution was already in the works. The rate of loss in that region increased to around 70 ft a year, then 100 ft, and then by 2016 surveys indicated that more than 300 ft of land had disappeared in a single year, Trosclair says. Twenty years or so ago, a key 9.2 mi stretch of the refuge was losing about 50 ft of land per year, notes Phillip “Scooter” Trosclair III, a biologist program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, which manages the refuge. But over time, ongoing coastal erosion has reduced the refuge to 71,000 acres. When it was created in 1920, the refuge originally encompassed 86,000 acres of biologically diverse coastal wetlands in Cameron and Vermillion Parishes. The Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Louisiana, which borders the Gulf of Mexico for 26.5 mi, is disappearing at an increasingly rapid rate. Despite extremely poor soils and ongoing erosion that kept changing the shoreline throughout the project, the breakwaters are already showing dramatic results. (Courtesy of CPRA)Ī series of breakwaters to protect a coastal wildlife refuge in southwestern Louisiana incorporated an innovative, lightweight design. Although the new breakwaters were primarily intended to stop erosion, sediment is already building up behind the barriers as a side benefit.