WaterMarks Interview with Ancil Taylor

Mr. Taylor is vice president of the Louisiana-based C.F. Bean Corporation. In operation since 1941, the company is recognized internationally as a leader in the marine business. It has been involved all over the world in virtually all phases of sediment dredging and transport and in the construction of land through reclamation of soils from both inland and offshore sites.

WATERMARKS: As a businessman working in coastal Louisiana for nearly 30 years, you’ve witnessed marshes converting to open water at an alarming rate. Given the extent of Louisiana’s land loss, are the current techniques of marsh creation practical?

TAYLOR: We’re facing a huge challenge in Louisiana, and we need to see the big view. To rebuild Louisiana’s coast quickly and on a meaningful scale, I believe we need to do two things: transfer large quantities of sediment — millions of cubic yards — into the wetlands system, and then allow nature to shape it into marsh habitats. We’re spending a lot of time, effort and resources right now and achieving relatively little. We’re moving only a few hundred thousand cubic yards of sediment into small areas, then spending significant amounts of money pushing the material to achieve elevations that it doesn’t naturally make.

In many cases we use rock dikes to contain the sediment and protect the particular elevation of a created marsh. These rocks, completely unnatural in the Louisiana landscape, are going to subside quickly and disappear. Instead of defining project boundaries with rock, I suggest we pump massive amounts of material — millions of cubic yards — into an area and let the material form its own edge according to the slope that it naturally takes.

WATERMARKS: But can this degree of slope give us the elevation we need for the desired habitat?

TAYLOR: I’m suggesting we use the material we have available and let nature determine the elevation. Instead of saying we’re going to build marsh at a certain elevation to create fish habitat requiring vegetation that grows only at this height, we should be saying the material we have will build a marsh this high and nature will populate it appropriately

Let’s imagine we undertake a project spanning thousands of acres in open water. Let’s say we have available a silty sand material that’s conducive to building ridges and terraces, so we’d build a terrace out through the water to an elevation of maybe six or eight feet. The sediment would take the shape of a wide finger with very long, very gradual slopes on both sides. A few hundred feet over we’d build another finger, and then another. Instead of the difficulty and expense of trying to shape this silty sand into an elevation right at or near the water surface, we’d let the character of the material shape our fingers and allow the sediment to settle as it wants to do naturally.

Initially our fingers would only be mounds of sediment rising out of water, but with only a little help from us, nature will turn them into marsh. And because the habitat you find at seven or eight feet elevation is different from the habitat you find at the water’s edge, our fingers will create a diversity of habitat as opposed to a single habitat over a large area. Ultimately, nature will achieve the final, ideal elevation.

WATERMARKS: So you envision bringing in more sediment and letting it fall out over a bigger area. What about property rights in “sediment-flooded” areas?

TAYLOR: That’s a complicated issue to deal with no matter what the size of our restoration area. But remember that even without a hard structure the project area will have an edge. The material won’t migrate significantly. We should be able to accommodate property limits in our project design.

WATERMARKS: How would we create marsh where we don’t have large expanses of open water to build long fingers?

TAYLOR: The Louisiana landscape holds a broad spectrum of sediment that, by its nature, can be shaped differently. A very sandy silt is going to allow itself to be shaped differently than silty sand. Creating a flat pancake with this material is easier than making fingers because sandy silt does not stack up. We can create a large area with it that will, over time, subside and settle in, achieving an elevation that matches other healthy marshes in the vicinity. But right now contractors are required to impose tolerances on materials that don’t behave the way we’re asking them to. I see it as a great waste when we spend money trying to meet precise elevation specifications instead of transferring significant quantities of sediment — tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of cubic yards a day — into the wetland system and leaving the work of arriving at appropriate conditions to nature.

WATERMARKS: Are sufficient quantities of sediment available to pump millions of cubic yards into Louisiana’s marshes?

TAYLOR: Absolutely. And this is new sediment, sediment not already within the system, that we’d be introducing. The two most well-known sources are the Mississippi River and Ship Shoal. Ship Shoal is a massive site of sand deposited thousands of years ago seven miles off shore. According to studies, even if we completely exhausted the Ship Shoal deposit — which we would never have to do — the effect on wave patterns reaching the coastline would be negligible. The benefits of rebuilding our barrier islands with the beach-quality sand we take from there far outweigh any detrimental effect that we can foresee.

The Mississippi River is an enormous, renewable source of sediment. Year after year we let tens of millions of cubic yards escape down the river. By dredging sumps, or catch basins, in the river, we can remove three to four million cubic yards of material and transport it into the marshes. Material carried down the river will refill the catch basins. Not only would this get needed sediment into the wetlands, it would reduce the amount of maintenance dredging required in the navigation channel.

But presently we’re not even maximizing the use of the sediment we’re already recovering from the river. In my 30 years in the dredging business, I’ve been party to carrying 16-20 million cubic yards a year out of the federal navigation channel, carting it off shore and dumping it off the continental shelf. That’s just unacceptable. We’ve got to stop that practice.

WATERMARKS: How can we be throwing away material that our wetlands need so desperately?

TAYLOR: We’re failing to see the big view. Each agency working in coastal restoration has its own mission, its own agenda. For the agency charged with developing fish habitat, a 300-acre marsh-building project at a certain elevation makes sense; it is — according to their mission — successful. The agency responsible for navigational dredging in the river isn’t focused on wetland repair but on disposal of this material in the least costly fashion.

There’s a cost to utilizing dredged material in the marshes, and someone has to come up with the funds. We’re already spending federal money to maintain navigable waterways; all we need to pay for is the difference between placing the material in the marsh and dumping it off the continental shelf.

In the past we did not have the money to step up and pay for placing dredged material in the wetlands. Now we have money promised to us. The science, technology and equipment exist; now it’s a matter of will, of shifting our paradigm and recognizing that we can no longer afford not to maximize our resources. And to make the most of our resources we need to use the economy of scale and let nature do the work.