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Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is at war with the federal government over his plans to build protective barrier islands, or sand berms, to shield the state's coast from BP's oil spill. He called a news conference yesterday to blast the government for standing in the way of his plan. "We don't have time for red tape and bureaucracy," Jindal told reporters. "We're literally in a war to save our coast."

Tom Strickland, the U.S. Interior Department's assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks notes that removing sediment from the island actually makes the region more vulnerable to storms, and hurricane season is already underway.

"The short-term fix isn't going to hold for very long, but it makes Jindal look like a hero," says Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president at Defender of Wildlife and a former USFWS official. "They're robbing from Peter to pay Paul and digging a hole to build a berm that is going to collapse anyway."

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U.S. Sen. David Vitter said the decision to approve only one island is an indication that President Obama “doesn’t seem to have a clue.”

“His decision on the emergency dredging barrier island plan is a thinly veiled ‘no,’ ” Vitter said. “Approving 2 percent of the request and kicking the rest months down the road is outrageous, absolutely outrageous.”

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http://climateprogress.org/2010/06/25/berm-notice-jindal-sand-barrier-
louisiana-bp-oil-disaster/

Scientists warned that it may have unforeseen consequences.

The berm system could reroute the spill up the Mississippi Delta, and it would be unlikely to survive even a mild storm during the current hurricane season.

It also will absorb the short supplies of sand badly needed for projects to restore the state’s coastline, damaged by past hurricanes.

Heavy equipment, including barges and dredge lines, could interfere with nesting season, now at its peak, for protected bird species….

The berms “will not survive even a low-intensity tropical storm in the northern gulf,” said Jack Kindinger, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Coastal and Marine Science Center in St. Petersburg, Fla. “If we have one next week, the berms will be gone. We have to be careful not to do more harm than good.”

Kindinger said that the new barriers may increase tidal action in open water, which would boost the salinity in estuaries and alter the lives of marsh plants and wildlife.
In a similar manner, the project could inadvertently drive oil into the Mississippi sound, the Biloxi marshes and Lake Borgne, according to the Army Corps’ analysis.
Gregory Stone, director of the Coastal Studies Institute at Louisiana State University, warned that scooping sediment out of the sea bottom could accelerate wave action.

“It’s not advisable to go out into shallow water and dredge and not expect potential negative impacts,” Stone said. “That’s going to increase the energy of the waves.”
Such worries prompted the Interior Department to conclude: “We do not think the risks inherent in proceeding without more environmental study and knowledge are acceptable.”

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Remember those sand berms Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was so insistent on getting to stave off oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill? Remember how he ignored science and law to put them up? Remember how they're the same berms that Jindal uses as part of his evidence to bash the Obama administration's spill response and conclude that, in Washington, "Political posturing becomes more important than reality"?

Well, as it turns out, the berms were an expensive, wasteful idea.

On Thursday, the National Oil Spill Commission released a draft working paper, "The Story of the Louisiana Berms Project," that concludes that building the berms were nearly useless for dealing with the spill. They were considered environmentally unsound, and a presidential commission has found that they didn't even work,

All-in-all, "The Commission staff can comfortably conclude that the decision to green-light the underwhelmingly effective, overwhelmingly expensive Louisiana berms project was flawed."

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On November 15, Jindal appeared on the Today Show touting the project's effectiveness: "The reality is, it worked. And the reality is, it prevented that oil from getting into the wetlands 15 to 20 miles away." Hmm. How well did it work? According to the presidential commission's report, the berms only stopped about 1,000 barrels of oil... out of about 5 million barrels that were spilled into the Gulf of Mexico.

According to the report, "A Coast Guard officer present at the summit [in June] offered a similar [dismal] assessment. According to that officer, the experts ‘all said it's pretty crummy' and offered no ‘glowing endorsements' of berms as a spill response measure." That sure doesn't sound like something a fiscally responsible Republican would get behind.

Jindal responded, calling the report "partisan revisionist history at taxpayer expense," which means we can call Bobby's Berms "the result of very little scientific evidence, at the environment, and people of Louisiana's expense," right? So, to all of the Gulf residents struggling to squeeze money out of BP in the wake of the oil spill, you can thank Bobby Jindal for sucking up hundreds of millions of dollars for a joke of a relief project.

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Wrong. Defense is the primary function of Gov't.

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