Corps ‘ignored’ endangered species along Coast when opening Bonnet Carré, new lawsuit says
Two nonprofit environmental groups claim in a federal lawsuit filed against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Mississippi River Commission that the agencies have violated the Endangered Species Act by failing to properly study the damage Bonnet Carré Spillway openings cause.
The nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group headquartered in Washington, and Healthy Gulf, based in New Orleans, name treasured Gulf Coast species harmed by the openings, including the Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, piping plover shorebirds and Gulf sturgeon, an enormous fish often referred to as a “living dinosaur.”
The lawsuit is at least the third filed against the Corps in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. The Mississippi Secretary of State has filed one of the lawsuits, while a second was filed by Coast localities and two associations.
All three lawsuits are pending before U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr.
Mississippi River water that floods into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi Sound beyond to avoid flooding the New Orleans area decreases salinity levels, carries a high load of pollutants and sediment, and lowers water temperatures. All these factors potentially harm the endangered species and their habitats, the lawsuit says.
The Corps has long operated under the assumption that the Bonnet Carré would open an average of once every 10 years, the lawsuit says. But with increased river flooding, the spillway has opened six times in the last nine years, including an unprecedented 123-day opening in 2019 that resulted in federal fisheries disasters for Gulf states, including Mississippi.
“In 2019 alone, when the Spillway was opened twice for a total of four months, oyster beds were destroyed, commercial fishery operations devastated, and hundreds of dolphins died and washed ashore potentially as a result of the decreased salinity in the Mississippi Sound,” the lawsuit says.
“ . . . Yet neither the Corps nor MRC have acknowledged or evaluated the many potential impacts of these diversions on nine threatened and endangered species that inhabit and migrate through the Lake Pontchartrain Basin and Mississippi Sound.”
The impact on endangered or threatened species and habitat never studied are:
▪ Five species of sea turtle (Kemp’s ridley, loggerhead, green, leatherback, hawksbill)
▪ Two species of shorebird (piping plover, red knot)
▪ West Indian manatee (found in Lake Pontchartain and Lake Bourgne in the summer months)
▪ Gulf sturgeon
▪ Critical habitat for the loggerhead sea turtle, Gulf sturgeon, and piping plover.
“The Corps and MRC failed to complete consultation despite substantial scientific evidence establishing that operation of the Spillway may affect these listed species and critical habitat in myriad ways,” the lawsuit says.
“Instead, the Corps and MRC have concluded that some individual Spillway openings would have ‘no effect’ on these species. These findings are unsupported by any stated rationale and contrary to available evidence. For other openings, the Corps and MRC have ignored these species altogether.”
“Moreover, to the extent the agencies issued ‘no effect’ findings, they did so only after the Spillway had been opened and closed and the damage was done.”
The Army Corps and MRC do not comment on pending litigation.
The lawsuit asks that Guirola declare that the Army Corps and MRC are in violation of the Endangered Species Act, order them to consult with either the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service, depending on the species or habitat in question, and award attorney’s fees and court costs.
The Army Corps and MRC are being sued because the U.S. Army Corps commander over the Mississippi River Valley Division also heads the MRC and ultimately decides whether the Bonnet Carré should open.
The Bonnet Carré most recently opened April 3. It has opened for a record-setting three years in a row when the river reached a flow of 1.25 million cubic feet per second established in the 1927 Flood Control Act.
The Corps announced Monday that it would begin closing the spillway, a process that takes time. But the river remains high, and 80 of its 350 gates were open on Tuesday, the last date for which information is available. Water was pouring into Lake Pontchartrain at a rate of 81,000 cubic feet per second. The maximum rate is 250,000 cfs.
“As more extreme storms and varied weather increase the number and intensity of floods in the lower Mississippi River valley region,” the lawsuit concludes, “it is likely that the Spillway will be opened more frequently and for increasingly longer duration in the future.
“This in turn will increase the frequency and duration that imperiled species and habitats are subjected to Spillway water pollutants and other impacts.”
This story was originally published April 16, 2020 at 11:43 AM.
