Nearly 1.5M people in Louisiana depend on this strip of marsh. But it needs saving.
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- A $101 million coastal restoration project will rebuild 1,320 acres of the New Orleans Land Bridge along the Rigolets, using about 5 million cubic yards of sediment dredged from a nearby lagoon and reinforced with plastic fabric "mattresses" filled with crushed limestone.
- The New Orleans Land Bridge — a roughly 20-mile marsh strip separating Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico — shields approximately 1.5 million people from storm surge; Pontchartrain Conservancy executive director Kristi Trail said it could vanish within 50 years without restoration.
- Louisiana's coastal master plan calls for investing more than $1.1 billion to revive about 29,000 acres of the land bridge — roughly 22 times the acreage covered by the current project.
- The project's funding comes from a pool built on nearly $9 billion in BP penalties and settlements after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, overseen by the Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group, a panel of state and federal agencies.
- Governor Jeff Landry, a Republican, canceled two long-awaited Mississippi River sediment diversion projects in October — worth nearly $5 billion — citing rising costs and potential threats to oyster and shrimp fisheries; the freed-up funds will not go to the land bridge project, Trail said.
- The state's 2027 fiscal year coastal plans include $1.54 billion across 143 restoration projects, excluding the canceled diversions, with the coastal authority redirecting resources toward land-bridge and barrier-island work elsewhere along the coast.
- The project's final phase, scheduled for mid-2029, calls for planting native grasses and roseau cane — a thick-rooted, tall-stalked plant that anchors soil and traps sediment to build new marsh — across the restored acreage.
Why it matters: The $101M project covers just 1,320 of the 29,000 acres Louisiana's master plan says need restoring on the land bridge, and Governor Landry's October cancellation of nearly $5 billion in river sediment diversions has shifted the state's strategy toward smaller-scale projects — even as the U.S. Geological Survey documents Louisiana losing a football field of land every 100 minutes.
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