Jim Bradshaw: Marshland was too soggy for one man's levee idea

One of the things President Joe Biden talked about when he recently visited Lake Charles was the need to protect our coastline against rising tides generally and storm surges in particular.
It’s not a new idea. Folks in coastal Louisiana have been talking for more than a century about building a protection levee to block the storm surges that are usually more destructive than storm winds. A hurricane levee was part of a failed marsh reclamation project begun in the 1880s by dreamer and entrepreneur Jabez B. Watkins, and may have been discussed earlier than that.
Watkins was the agent for the North American Land and Timber Co. that bought up more than a million acres of land in southwest Louisiana, paying 12 cents an acre for marshland and as little as 75 cents an acre for prairie. 
The banker-turned-land-promoter thought the wetland soil could be used to grow rice if the south Louisiana marsh could be drained to uncover a “rich, black vegetable mold, six feet deep, possessing a fertility unsurpassed in the world,” according to one of his promotional pieces.  He planned to bring experts from Holland to build levees and dikes that would allow the wetlands to be pumped dry and create a Garden of Eden for rice growers.
He had trouble finding backers in the United States, so he went to England to get the money that he used to buy huge tracts of what others considered wasteland. He also had trouble luring experts from Holland, so he brought in his brother-in-law, Alexander Thomson, a professor of mechanical engineering at Ames College in Iowa, and put him in charge of reclaiming a large piece of the marsh.
Thomson said that the plan would create valuable rice farms, but also that “in less than ten years Cameron Parish will be walled in from the Gulf by a ten-foot levee.”
On higher ground, where the rice was irrigated with fresh water, the results were hugely successful and made a fortune for Watkins and his business partners. But there were problems in the marsh.
Thomson built his levees by piling marsh mud on top of marsh mud, and it turned out that the whole thing was just too soggy to work. The soil was lush enough, but salt water seeped beneath or through the levees, poisoning the rice crop. The levees that were built were not nearly high enough to block a storm surge and eventually washed away or just sank back into the marsh.
Protection levees were also part of the plan when the Louisiana Intracoastal Seaway Association (LISA) began lobbying to enlarge the Intracoastal Waterway in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but that plan also proved too ambitious.
There was more talk after Rita in 2005 and Ike in 2008, when everyone agreed there was an urgent need. A Cameron-Creole levee system was built, but it was designed mainly to block salt water intrusion, not storm surges. There was still little but a pile of paperwork to stop the surge when last year’s devastating storms struck the Cameron coast.
As is usual when we near another hurricane season, the president is not the only one to talk again about seawalls and levees and such, there’s even some money allocated for them. But, also as usual, practically all of it is for projects east of the Atchafalaya River.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.