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Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office has granted the Baldwin Volunteer Fire Department 20 vials of Naloxone, a prescription medication that counteracts the effects of opioids to restore breathing during an overdose. The life-saving drugs were made available through a $1 million legal settlement between General Landry and Pfizer.
“The abuse and misuse of opioid throughout Louisiana is a public safety crisis that has unfortunately taken the lives of many of our state’s people,” Landry said. “I appreciate the pro-active work done by our first responders to fig back against this epidemic, and lam glad we are able to give them Naloxone at no cost to the Baldwin Volunteer Fire Department.”
Drug overdoses now surpass automobile accidents as the leading cause for injury-related death for Americans between1 ages 25 and 64. Louisiana is one of the top ten states for these drug overdoses, with approximately 780 Louisiana residents dying from prescription overdoses each year.
“It’s these kinds of partnerships that enhance the abilities for us to better serve the communities and areas we serve,” Fire Chief Lance Mire said. “I congratulate and applaud General Landry for the continued fight for the state’s first responders”
Naloxone has a shelf life of approximately 16 to 24 months; and, at this time, there is no limit on how much product or how often the Baldwin Volunteer Fire Department may request and obtain the medicine through Landry’s program.

By CASEY COLLIER
For eight years, there has been a concerted effort on behalf of several federal, state and local agencies, using the technique of vegetative planting, to combat the St. Mary Parish Conservation District’s coastline erosion, and this year was no exception.
Tuesday morning, 32 volunteers, students and specialists met at Burns Point Recreation Area to plant 2,853 California Bulrush seedlings in the bay.
According to Andrea Dumesnil of the office of St. Mary Parish Soil and Water Conservation, eight agencies were in attendance. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, St. Mary Parish Soil and Water Conservation, St. Mary Sheriff‘s Department, Franklin Fire Department, Enlink Midstream, Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Gulf Coast Association of Soil and Conservation and St. Mary Parish 4-H all participated in apportioning the bulrush plants to their new homes at the bay of Burns Point.
GCASC District Vegetative Technician Andrea Gorum said of the choice of plant species, “I needed a plant that would tolerate varying water depths and salinity. Since this is a bay, the wave energy is a big factor. The plant must establish relatively quickly or the waves will out-compete it. This plant was chosen because it grows in predominately fresh water but will tolerate short increases in saline water. It will also grow in deeper water than most other plants, up to 36 inches.”
In total, five boats of people were at work planting in the bay on Tuesday, and 4,265 linear feet of shoreline were covered with swaths of bulrush, which will be monitored by the GCASC once in 30 days, and again next year, for success rates.
Yet, simply stating it as “erosion of the Gulf Coast,” is not a fair assessment of the totality of the problem of Gulf Coastline recession. It is the turning back of hundreds of years of manipulation caused by commercialization—that is the endeavor at hand.
At least, that is the view of coastal restoration project volunteer Donovan Garcia, a view which, according to the Natural Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicines, is of fair merit.
In a study published in 1990 called, Managing Coastal Erosion, the NASEM cited as “human-induced changes” to coastlines to include “construction or modification of inlets for navigational purposes, construction of breakwaters built in nearshore regions, construction of dams on rivers with steep gradients, sand mining from riverbeds in the near coastal area and extraction of ground fluids resulting in subsidence (the sinking of land relative to the coastal water level).”
“This land is washing away and we don’t have the sediment coming in to rebuild this land anymore,” Garcia said. “We’ve impacted the land so much. When we moved all our coastal reefs, dug them up and moved them to build roads, we didn’t know what it was going to do. Oil and gas has impacted us. Digging canals has impacted us. Cutting the cypress trees down and cutting right-of-ways through the woods, all of this was impactful, and we didn’t know it at the time. We’ve been doing it for a couple of hundred years, and we’re trying to turn it around in a short period of time.”
The fact is that worldwide, coastal erosion is a natural phenomenon. Coasts are affected by tidal fluctuations, weather, and tectonic composition everywhere there is a coastline. Though it is unclear to what extent, the effects of man on those coastlines, necessarily compounds erosion rates of beaches, shores and coasts.
In a 2008 symposium presented by Rice Research Station, LSU AgCenter and the NRCS, it was reported that Louisiana coastal marsh loss “occurs at the estimated rates of 65-91 km2 annually, representing 80 percent of the entire coastal wetland loss in the United States,” and those rates of loss are likely to have increased, since then.
Regarding man’s effect on the Louisiana coast, Steven Carmichael’s Coastal Restoration and Conservation in Louisiana (Past, Present, and Future) does not offer quantifiable evidence, (as little to none exists) but it does say, “Man’s intervention, including efforts to maintain navigable channels, infrastructure protection from flood and storms, and gas exploration have undoubtedly impacted the dynamic natural processes that exist related to the building, natural subsidence, and erosion of the deltaic lands.”
The effects of civilization and commerce on the Louisiana coastline have for decades been recognized as detrimental. Federal, state and local governments have been hard at work during that time to combat the long-term impact of coastal erosion. In 1990, Congress passed the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA), which Carmichael says, “is expected over the next 50 plus years to infuse needed financial resources into restoration projects.”
Signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush, the CWPPRA “is designed to identify, prepare, and fund construction of coastal wetlands restoration projects,” according to the CWPPRA website: lacoast.gov/new/About/.Default.aspx.
According to CWPPRA’s website, the reasons for protecting the coastal wetlands of Louisiana range from their acting as a buffer from storms and hurricanes, to their holding excess rains during periods of high rainfall, as well as that of their vegetation acting as a filter to purify water. All of which, provides a habitat, migratory and breeding grounds, and nurseries for thousands of species of wildlife, including the bald eagle, our national symbol.
Without the Louisiana’s coastal lands, the state would forfeit an estimated 55,000 jobs, as well as billions of dollars in state revenues, not to mention the value of coastal lands as resources for recreation and ecotourism.
As for the bulrush planted Tuesday, and its utility as a hurricane buffer, Gorum said, “One mile of marsh grass decreases one foot of storm surge during a hurricane.”
So, as far as short term benefits, that ratio is quantitative enough to singularly bear-out the importance of the restoration efforts in the bay. However, of long term solutions to coastal erosion, it can be said that there is much more work to be done in understanding and mitigating the negative impacts Louisianans have made on our own coastline.
Donovan Garcia’s take on the process is, “Everybody knows we have a lot to lose, and the landscape is changing quite rapidly. Anything we can do to help, may seem like a drop in a bucket, but to me, it’s worth a try.”

State Rep. Beryl Amedee, R-Houma, will be hosting "Town Hall Meetings" on the dates and at the locations listed below:

Morgan City/Amelia: Morgan City Municipal Auditorium, 728 Myrtle St.-August 17, 6:30 p.m.

Dularge: Dularge Recreation Center, 1330 Dr. Beatrous Road - August 22, 6:30 p.m.

Thibodaux/Labadieville: Labadieville KC Home, Brule Road - August 24, 6:30 p.m.

Bayou L’Ourse: Bayou L’Ourse Recreation Center, 1213 Hwy. 662 - August 29, 6:30 p.m.

Schriever/Gray: Schriever Gym, 102 Kelsey Drive - August 31, 6:30 p.m.

Bayou Black/Donner/Gibson: Donner Recreation Center, 361 Azalea Drive - September 7, 6:30 p.m.

Houma/Dulac: Anchor Four Square Church, 6741 Grand Caillou Road (former Grand Caillou Elementary School) - September 12, 6:30 p.m.

Amand Broussard, the son of Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard and Agnes Thibodeau, was just 11 years old when his father led a band of Acadian exiles to south Louisiana. He’d seen much trouble even at that youthful age, and was going to see much more.

His father and his uncle Alexandre and their families managed to escape into the forests of old Acadie at the time of the exile in 1755. They launched a guerrilla campaign in which Joseph, a sharpshooter and militia captain, “took a heavy toll of English soldiers sent into the area to capture refugees,” according to Acadian historian Bona Arsenault.

But Joseph and his family also paid a heavy toll. More than 600 of the Acadians hiding in the Miramichi River area died of starvation and a “horrible contagion” in the winter of 1757.

They were reduced to eating “the leather of shoes, carrion, and some even the excrement of animals.” Even the strong-willed Joseph and Alexandre began to give up hope as they faced the lack of food, threat of Indian attack, and English assaults against their little strongholds.

In desperation, Joseph and Alexandre, along with Jean Basque, Simon Martin, Jean Bourg and Michel Bourg, took their families to the British Fort Cumberland. They hoped to cut a deal with the English rather than die of hunger. There was no deal to be made. The Acadians were imprisoned at Halifax until 1763, when the Treaty of Paris ended the war between France and England.

The shooting stopped, but the Acadians remained without a homeland. Young Amand and his parents were among hundreds of Acadians who wearily boarded boats in 1764 to go to the French West Indies.

They were disappointed again; they could not stay in those humid islands. It was too hot for people accustomed to the Canadian climate. They sailed again, this time for Louisiana, where Joseph led his family and friends to new homes in the Attakapas district.

Just months after settling on Bayou Teche, both Joseph and Agnes, and many other new settlers who had survived so much, were felled by an epidemic that swept through their struggling settlement. The orphaned Amand lived with his 17-year-old brother Claude until, at the age of 16, he married Helene Landry. There was more sorrow and trouble. She died in childbirth the following year, leaving young Amand with a son, Joseph.

Amand persevered. By 1792 he’d become an affluent cattleman and planter, owning land on both sides of the Teche. He built a roomy Acadian-style house on the east side of the bayou near Loreauville, where he and his second wife, Anne Benoit, reared Joseph and 13 children of their own.

That house, built about 1790, still stands. In the late 1970s it was barged down the bayou to a site on East Main Street in New Iberia, then was later moved to the recreated village of Vermilionville in Lafayette.

Amand fought twice for the American cause. He took part in a campaign by Gov. Bernado de Galvez in 1779 in support of the American Revolution, and continued to be active in the militia afterward. Then, at age 58, he served as a private in Baker’s Regiment of the Louisiana Militia
in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.

When he died in January 1818 at the age of 64, his succession showed that Amand had moved from penniless orphan to a man of substance. He owned six substantial tracts of land and his main plantation included not only his house but a separate kitchen, at least two barns, a schoolhouse and schoolmaster’s residence, a cotton mill, and a blacksmith shop.

Amand’s widow, Anne Benoit, lived in the old family home until her death in September 1830.
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.