Morgan City, Patterson students enlisted in fight against coastal erosion

BURNS POINT – Even adults years beyond graduation remember what it’s like to be stuck in a classroom as summer vacation awaits.

But imagine that your classroom is the edge of East Cote Blanche Bay, a boatload crowded with your classmates and a stretch of waist-high water for wading.

Imagine you could do some good for the world, too.

That was the experience Wednesday for about three dozen Morgan City High and Patterson High students, who spent the day planting California bulrush and giant cutgrass to stabilize the coast near Burns Point.

“It also promotes fishing,” said Andrea Dumesnil of the St. Mary Soil and Water Conservation District. “The fish love it, and the shrimp love it.”

The district has run similar programs in the past with 4-H junior leaders. This year, the district reached out to local schools.

The project brings partners into play: the St. Mary Levee District, the St. Mary Parish Sheriff’s Office Marine Unit, the Friends of the Bayou Teche, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the Coast Guard, LSU Sea Grant, the LSU Extension Service, and Morgan City and Patterson high schools.

A Franklin Fire Department truck was standing by to provide any medical aid.

By 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, volunteers were loading sheaves of bulrushes and cutgrass onto boats. Then, after a short tutorial from Dumesnil near the boat launch, 24 Morgan City High students loaded the boats to head for their worksite up the coast.

While they were on their way, Patterson High students learned some lessons about the state of Louisiana’s coast.

As the tourist sign at Burns Point Park tells readers, St. Mary has a pair of deltas, the Atchafalaya and Wax Lake, that are actually building new coastline. But Burns Point continues to lose land.

The two deltas are unique on a Louisiana coastline that loses a football field-sized piece of land every hour, and has seen a chunk of coast as big as Delaware disappear since the 1930s.

The students played games designed to introduce them to the causes of coastal erosion: subsidence, hurricanes, saltwater intrusion into freshwater marsh and the rest. And they used play money to set priorities for limited coastal protection resources.

Thu Bui of Sea Grant brought a friend -- a baby alligator -- and introduced the students to the economics of alligators, from egg collecting to the selling of hides.

So the day was sort of like being in school after all.

But “they can’t wait until they get out there,” Dumesnil said. “A day on a boat is better than a day in a classroom.”

Photos by Bill Decker unless noted.