Eroding coast could doom entire state

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said the erosion of the state’s coast is also a threat to our cities that provide employment and wealth to all of Louisiana’s people.

The ugly facts point to the oil and gas industry being partly responsible for some 1,900 square miles eroding away and particularly by companies that didn’t restore wetlands when they finished exploring and drilling on them.

It is a known fact that many of these companies that made use of their gold mine ignored any repairs to the land they tore up and were committed to put back into healthy shape. Canals were left unattended to and were left for Mother Nature to determine if and in which way they should flow.

This led to a lot of eroding wetlands into open water.It is partly the fault of the state of Louisiana that had guarantees that the oil companies would care for the land they worked on to keep them healthy.

Baton Rouge was not very active in voicing its concern about the condition of state lands until it demised to a question of how long our rich coast would last.

Landrieu does not believe Louisiana should abandon the industry that has provided it with so much opportunity.  But what can help our state in the future will also help the industry that has benefitted so much from our goodwill in the past.

The mayor wants to use a process already used by individual parishes to bring oil and gas companies to the table to discuss the cost of the damage caused by drilling and dredging in coastal areas.

There is some disagreement from the oil field, however, from companies that claim they are already doing their share for coastal restoration.

There is no question, however, that the mineral industry is substantially responsible for tearing up the Louisiana coast even though it also was partly caused by the building of levees along the Mighty Mississippi River, which deprived our coast of the rich river water that went into the Gulf of Mexico instead. Hopefully, the bargaining table will soon come about or other means will provide an answer to the question of how our beloved and rich coast can survive.

It is still there and we have a master plan that could help restore it at a cost of $100 billion.

Hopefully we can secure the resources we need to restore our coast.

We cannot afford not to.