Mardi Gras Pass

How did Mardi Gras Pass get Such a Name?

Strange things happen on Mardi Gras day. People transform. Hair suddenly grows, turns blue or pink, and trumpets blare. Wild sides bust loose from places that we never knew existed.

 

On a chilly Mardi Gras day two years ago, the Mississippi River was the one to bust loose and show its wild side. Pressure had been mounting at Bohemia Spillway, about 35 miles south of New Orleans, with months of overtopping from the record high waters of the 2011 flood. Across the banks, the water began scouring a channel across a road and through the wetlands beyond. The channel grew progressively deeper until the only thing that separated the river from the wetlands was a spit of willow-topped mud. Water pushed, and the mud grew more and more narrow, until the tiny divider sloughed off and joined the mud of the rest of the continent. It’s the first time in several decades that the Mississippi River has created a new distributary channel to the sea, according to advocates with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

 

 

Coastal advocates see Mardi Gras Pass, as it’s come to be known, as a natural way to reconnect the river to its estranged marshes. Since the dawn of our modern levee system in the 30’s, more and more salt water has crept into those marshes. It’s thrown off the delicate brackish balance, killed off vegetation, and carried off roughly 1900 square miles of Louisiana’s coast. That’s the size of the state of Delaware.

 

 

Like most of Louisiana’s freshwater-starved wetlands, the wetlands area beyond Mardi Grass Pass, called Bohemia Spillway, needs the Mississippi River to stay alive. Scientists with the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation had been monitoring the spillway for years, and they’ve already seen new shoals of land forming in the wetlands beyond the pass. They’ve called the break “exceptionally rare and highly valuable,” because, with the river all leveed-up, scientists almost never have the opportunity to document the river as its wild-flowing self.

But even in this remote, unpopulated area of the Louisiana, humans have taken issue with a wild-flowing river. The Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation (LPBF) has had to fight to keep Mardi Gras Pass flowing. When the water washed away the bank, it also washed out a road, and the oil company that uses the road wants it back. Shortly after the crevasse formed, the company filed a permit to have it closed.

 

 

In addition, the State is wary of a rogue river channel that might keep growing and eventually alter navigation routes or hinder flood control operations. They had already spent millions figuring out how to walk a thin line that balances our own needs and the needs of the river. After analyzing hydrological regimes, sediment transport capacities, salinity patterns, water level fluctuations, vegetation changes, fisheries impacts, and other variables, the master plan for the coast has settled on a strategic series of diversion structures that attempt to reestablish deltaic processes along the river. One such structure was planned for a place only miles from Mardi Gras Pass.

Coastal Advocates argued the river had done for free what the state planned to do for $220,000,000. And eventually, the LPBF, the state’s coastal czar, and the oil company eventually found compromise, not so surprisingly, in a bridge. If all goes as planned, fresh river water will keep flowing beneath it.

In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) coastal survey office announced that 31 place names in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, would be wiped from the map. Bigger bodies of water have washed away the strips of marshy land that once bounded these places, turning them into blobs of salt water, and NOAA will no longer publish the names on new surveys. They’re elegant, even romantic names like Bay Pomme d’Or and Bayou Auguste: gone to the archives.  Gone, too, are the stories of how these places got their names. What beast was killed and how great a flock of birds were feeding on it for a place to get a name like Grand Bayou Carrion Crow?

 

Mardi Gras Pass is different. In real time, we get to watch its name unfold before our eyes.

Fishermen have made good use of the pass, and the name has caught on. (“Where yall headed?” “Back through Mardi Gras.”) And the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development just announced it will propose “Mardi Gras Pass” to the US Board of Geographical Names as a new Louisiana Geographic feature proposal.  One name at a time, the coast can still grow.

 

 

Chris Staudinger is the 1 Mississippi Outreach Assistant for Louisiana. Chris has great local knowledge and passion for the Big River. Chris has worked as a canoe guide and boat builder for the Quapaw Canoe Company and continues his River stewardship at the Lower Mississippi River Foundation, his Regional Host. He hopes to nourish the local wetlands and a community of artists, fishers, philosophers and river rats. Chris’s appreciation for the River, experience as a river guide and understanding of the unique culture in Louisiana makes him an ideal 1 Mississippi Outreach Assistant.