Louisiana floodsLa. flood protection agency sues 97 energy companies for wetland destruction

A Louisiana state agency on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against ninety-seven energy companies, charging that the companies have inflicted severe damage on fragile coastal wetlands, damage which left New Orleans and other Louisiana cities more vulnerable to hurricanes and storm surges.

The agency wants the court to order these companies to pay steep penalties which would help the state restore the wetlands and thus recreate the natural buffer which had protected New Orleans.

“This protective buffer took 6,000 years to form,” the state board that oversees flood-protection efforts for much of the New Orleans area argued in court filings, adding that “[the buffer] has been brought to the brink of destruction over the course of a single human lifetime.”

The New York Times reports that Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, denounced the suit.

The suit was filed in civil district court in New Orleans by the board of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPA-E). The SLFPA-E is represented in the litigation by Jones,Swanson, Huddell, and Garrison, LLC, of New Orleans; Fishman Haygood Phelps Walmsley Willis & Swanson, LLP, of New Orleans; and Veron, Bice, Palermo & Wilson, LLC, of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

The SLFPA-E board says the energy companies should be held responsible for the severe damage they have inflicted on the fragile wetland by cutting thousands of miles of oil and gas access and pipeline canals through the wetlands. The law suit argues that the network functioned “as a mercilessly efficient, continuously expanding system of ecological destruction,” killing vegetation, eroding soil, and allowing salt water into freshwater areas.

“What remains of these coastal lands is so seriously diseased that if nothing is done, it will slip into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of this century, if not sooner,” the filing stated.

Gladstone N. Jones III, a lawyer for the flood protection authority board, said the plaintiffs were seeking damages equal to “many billions of dollars. Many, many billions of dollars.”

Jones noted that the government also might have had in wetlands loss – for example, through decisions by the Army Corps of Engineers over the decades to design navigation and flood-control systems for the Mississippi River that kept its waters from delivering the sediment that once nourished the wetlands – but he said that the government had spent billions on repairing and strengthening hurricane defenses since the system built by the Corps of Engineers failed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Taking the companies to court means that “we want them to come and pay their fair share,” he said.

The Times notes that the role of the industry in damaging the wetland buffers is well documented in scientific studies and official reports. A 2012 report by Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said, “Dredging canals for oil and gas exploration and pipelines provided our nation with critical energy supplies, but these activities also took a toll on the landscape, weakening marshes and allowing salt water to spread higher into coastal basins.”

In the papers filed in court, the SLFPA-E board argues that the wetland buffer serves as an essential protection against storms by weakening the severity of incoming hurricanes before they get to the line of levees, flood walls, and gates and pumps maintained and operated by the SLFPA-E. Losing the “natural first line of defense against flooding” means that the levee system is “left bare and ill-suited to safeguard south Louisiana,” the lawsuit says.

The “unnatural threat” caused by exploration, the suit states, “imperils the region’s ecology and its people’s way of life — in short, its very existence.”

No other state agencies have joined the lawsuit, but members of the SLFPA-E board said that they had not discussed the case with other levee boards. Jones, the lawyer for the board, said, however, that  now that the case has been filed, “it really raises the question that’s going to be asked at a whole lot of boards across southern Louisiana: Can we really afford not to do this?”

Governor Jindal, a Republican, harshly criticized the lawsuit, releasing a statement saying the levee board had “overstepped its authority” and would damage Louisiana’s ability to tackle coastal issues effectively.

Jindal added:

This is nothing but a windfall for a handful of trial lawyers. It boils down to trial lawyers who see dollar signs in their future and who are taking advantage of people who want to restore Louisiana’s coast. These trial lawyers are taking this action at the expense of our coast and thousands of hardworking Louisianians who help fuel America by working in the energy industry.
We’re not going to allow a single levee board that has been hijacked by a group of trial lawyers to determine flood protection, coastal restoration and economic repercussions for the entire State of Louisiana.