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Cat Island, Lousiana - Brown Pelican Rookery


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(edited)

I'm going to start off with a little background information on myself and my connection to Cat Island.

 

I think many people who know me know I work for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a Biologist. In 2010 I was tapped to help with the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and I was sent to Louisiana. I was tasked with protecting Barataria Bay's critical habitats. Critical habitats being locations of significant ecological importance. In this instance it was mostly Rookeries because it was nesting season and I never identified any live T&E species. In my area Cat Island was identified as a significant Brown Pelican rookery with various other seabirds nesting on the island as well (terns mostly). So I ended up spending the majority of my 3 months on Cat Island.

Here as some pictures of Cat Island when I first arrived.

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This image is of the North facing side of Cat Island, the bare ground is where the oil washed up on shore. Treatment was quite literally to blast it off with water and skim it out of the water. This isn't my call and I still don't think it was the best approach. Everywhere the oil touched eroded away within 2 months,

 

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Protective hard booming was placed around the island in an attempt to keep more oil from contacting the island. This proved to be largely ineffective as wave action pushed oil over the booming, but it did slow the advance.

 

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In an effort to further mitigate the oil, oil absorbent boom was placed outside the hard boom to soak oil that collected. This was replaced every couple days, when we could get BP workers out to our site. You can see all the oil caked on the boat and booming.

 

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Here is a picture of me modeling all the protective gear I had to wear in 115 degree weather. This isn't on Cat Island. 

Generally what we did was monitor the islands, and assess damages. Then we would direct clean up crews to the most critical areas. It worked a lot like triage. In the end our assessment was we would loose half of Cat Island to oil related vegetative die off and subsequent erosion.

 

Over the past 5 years I've monitored my old island out of curiosity. As expected half of the island died off and eroded into Barataria Bay over 2 and a half years.

 

However, something tragic and unexpected happened. The die off continued. The erosion continued. Over the next 2 years I watched at Cat island shrank from 400 square yards down to 200, then down to 100, now it's down to 10 square yards when the tide is low and 0 when the tide is high.

Cat Island is no longer a thriving rookery home to hundreds of Brown Pelicans. Today Cat Island is a sandbar that is only above water for a couple hours each day.

 

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The truly tragic part is Brown Pelicans every year, return to this sandbar where they were born. They don't find a suitable nesting site so instead of flying off to find a new site, they just don't nest. They probably wont nest ever again.
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(Last two photos aren't mine, they are Nat Geos, but of the Cat Island)



This is a sobering reminder of the damage done and continuing to be done by the oil spill.

Edited by Happyfeet
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I read something about this a week or so ago. It's really crazy about the whole thing. They are still finding oil.

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Wow. What a picture story. Thanks for sharing it. It's sad that the damage is not "done" but still in progress.

 

You mentioned at one point that oil would wash over the boom by wave action. Was this was mostly a one-way trip when it happened? That is, I'm assuming that there would be insufficient wave action on the island-side of the boom to wash it back to the other side, so that the practical outcome was that oil would concentrate on the island-side of the boom (just the opposite of the desired outcome), until the absorbing boom was laid in place.

 

Is there a theory on why this is happening? Is it simply loss of vegetation and erosion? Is the oil accelerating the erosion by not only killing off the vegetation, but also infiltrating, separating and lifting smaller particles of sand up and away?

 

It really is amazing what's happened here.

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Because the island was located at the mouth of Barataria Bay currents generally push water up into the bay and past the island, wave action would push the oil over the boom in periods of high wave action, such as before and during a storm.  Since the current and wind was almost always pushing in a single direction the oil almost always would be pushed onto the island or around the island and pool inside the booming on the other side. The booming did a good job of flattening the water inside the booming and generally the oil couldn't escape from inside. On rare occasions the wave action was so intense that oil did go back and fourth over the booming. There was also another situation where a hurricane hit and tore the booming apart.

 

The interesting thing about the hurricane was afterwards the oil was no where to be found, the water was still more turbid than normal, but all the floating oil slicks where gone. (We later found it washed most of it up and into the grasses or back out into the gulf.)

 

I follow your logic on the booming, but but it did indeed keep out the majority of the oil. The oil traveled around in slicks and would break apart as they got into the bays. So long as the wave action wasn't too bad the boom would prevent all of the oil from getting in. When wave action was really bad it prevented the majority from getting it, but did lock in the portion that did get through. I wouldn't consider it completely counterproductive as it would have been much worse with out it. This island weathered the oil MUCH better than some of the other islands. 

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This is another island close by which didn't have the hard boom (There simply wasn't enough to protect everything). We decided to see if a soft boom would be enough to stop some of the oil coming in. It wasn't

 

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Here you can see how the booming was set up. Bamboo poles where cut to length and then inserted into the mud. Absorbant booming was then wrapped around it where they were tied together. This kept the booming from washing to shore or washing back into the bay. 

 

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It turned out the bamboo sticks couldn't withstand storms. Everytime where was a storm the boom was pushed over the sticks and up onto the shore. It was largely an exercise in futility. 

 

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Soft booming was was replaced everytime it got washed up on shore in an effort to mitigate some of the oil. It was decided booming should be left on shore for 1 of 2 reasons. Not enough manpower to replace hundreds of miles of booming and remove hundreds of miles of booming. Also, the booming on shore may prevent oil from going further on shore (it didn't to any great note) 

 

The island the above pictures are from was diminished in size from roughly 1000 square yards down to 500 square yards in under a year.

 

 

Well I'm no expert on crude oil, but I would have thought the oil itself would have slowed the erosion, by kind of acting as a glue. I wouldn't be surprised if your hypothesis proved to be correct as the oil weathered in the water and separated out.

 

I think it's likely due to the mangroves being unable to handle the large amount of oil and dying off. We had calculated that 90% of the mangroves would die, but the surviving few would be enough to hold the island together as grass colonized it.It's my understanding grass was planted on the island to speed this up (I can't find any FWS projects where this is true), but it appears it did little to slow the erosion.

 

I talked with a contact at the Audubon society and he said that this year its been noticed some of the returning pelicans, now that the island is gone, have been nesting at another island just north of this one. They have plans to try and create and improve possible sites for them as well.

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A big difference with the second island is the area to shoreline ratio seems to be much smaller. Has anyone studied these effects to try to determine which islands suffer and wane away, and which suffer but recover? I'm sure that there will be lessons to learn from this accident for many years to come.

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(edited)

The amount of money being spent in the gulf to monitor the impacts is astounding and a large portion of it is BP money too!

 

But yes there are a lot of studies being done on that very question in one form or another. In Louisiana it's especially hard to answer because the natural progression is this sort of waxing and waning of islands as the Mississippi river meanders, except human activity has prevented the Mississippi from meandering. The Mississippi River as it flows into the Gulf deposits sediments at the mouth of the river and eventually dams itself up, so much so that it flows over its banks and creates a new mouth. The dammed up section creates new islands, which over time erode away as the cycle repeats. So there is this weird situation where we are trying to preserve an ecosystem that naturally wants to fade away, because the thing that breathes life into it, isn't, or at least isn't being allowed to.

 

Billions of dollars are at stake to figure out the question of, what allows an island to recover when other islands would have faded. If the answer isn't found the vast majority of those islands will be gone and billion dollar industries will be impacted, shrimp, oysters, and crab just to list a few.

Edited by Happyfeet
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Wow, thanks for sharing all this. It makes me a sad panda to read. I'm happy to hear a lot of it is BP dollars.... That's the way it should be.

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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BP went above and beyond.  I think the law only states they owe a maximum of 35 million or so.  They spent way over that.  Its sad but at least they are trying to do whats right.

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BP went above and beyond.  I think the law only states they owe a maximum of 35 million or so.  They spent way over that.  Its sad but at least they are trying to do whats right.

 

I highly doubt they are doing that because of good morals. I think it's more a PR move. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I highly doubt they are doing that because of good morals. I think it's more a PR move. 

PR move or not... still paid billions.  

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