Five years after Hurricane Ida, Barataria Preserve begins repairs

JEAN LAFITTE, La. — On a bright March morning, park guide Mary Maggiore led a group of tourists along the levee at Wetland Trace, explaining the stark separation between the swamp and the town that the raised earthen wall protects. She was there because the boardwalk she normally works — at the Barataria Preserve, a unit of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park — has been closed since the start of 2026 for long-deferred repairs.

The preserve, a flat expanse of cypress swamp and marsh just 20 miles south of New Orleans, was battered by Hurricane Ida in August 2021. The Category 4 storm’s surge submerged the predominantly freshwater landscape in saltwater, shattered miles of boardwalk, and flooded the visitor center and maintenance buildings. It was the worst damage the site had suffered since Hurricane Rita in 2005.

“It was kind of sad for me to watch some things fall apart,” Maggiore told Verite News. “I was kind of like, what are they going to do about this? And now they’re finally doing it, but it was kind of either we repair everything at once, or we just don’t repair everything.”

Now the National Park Service is trying to buy the preserve a longer lease against the next hurricane. Meredith Hardy, manager of interpretation and education for the park, said the rebuilding plan uses a 50-year projection of sea level rise, salinity, and water depth to guide where and how to build. More than two miles of old boardwalk will be removed based on updated flooding patterns. New boardwalks will be elevated 1.5 to 2 feet, built of composite materials that resist flood damage, and fitted with safety railings.

Congress allocated disaster funds for the project in 2022, but it took two more years to complete an environmental assessment, sign off on the plan, and run it through public review.

The slow pace of bureaucracy stands in sharp relief against the speed of storm-driven land loss. Louisiana loses nearly 11 square miles of coastal wetlands each year — often expressed as one football field every 100 minutes. But the average masks the wreckage that acute events inflict. Hurricane Ida alone erased more than 100 square miles of marshland, a toll that would require 32 hurricane-free years of ordinary erosion to reach.

“You are not gonna save the coast,” said Ehab Meselhe, who chairs Tulane University’s Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering. “You are going to reduce the amount of loss.”

Meselhe, who previously served as Louisiana’s technical lead for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, said most protection projects are “reactionary” — the country waits for something to happen, then allocates recovery money. Even after funding arrives, he said, the investment often merely returns a site to its pre-hurricane condition rather than improving its resilience. “You’re basically putting out fires rather than to actually improve the resilience of the system,” he said.

The state’s most ambitious resilience project — the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion — was canceled last year by Gov. Jeff Landry. The $3 billion effort aimed to reconnect the Mississippi River to the adjacent wetlands, using sediment to rebuild and maintain 27 square miles of land over 50 years. By Meselhe’s projections, the Barataria area is on track to lose 90% of its wetlands by 2100 without that project. Had the diversion proceeded, the figure would have dropped to 80%.

“You can think about it as really gloomy,” Meselhe said. “You can also flip it. You say you were going to have only 10% remaining, I’m going to double that. So it is significant.”

The harder question, for scientists and policymakers alike, is when to talk about retreat — asking communities that have fished and lived along these bayous for generations to move.

“It’s very delicate to tell somebody you shouldn’t rebuild because you still are very vulnerable, you need to relocate,” Meselhe said. “It’s very delicate to say that to somebody who lived there, they have a cultural connection to that land.”

Dr. Kevin Xu, director of LSU’s Coastal Studies Institute, believes the conversation should have begun three decades ago. “I believe that it’s time to talk about retreat, and it’s time to talk about how the government would subsidize the local community and how they can even pay the relocation fee to the local community,” Xu said. He envisions a future in which fishermen live inland and commute to the coast — but that would require infrastructure investments that do not yet exist. “Without those infrastructures, the fishermen will not leave their home,” he said. “We cannot finish the retreat in just like one year or five years. It will be a gradual, slow back and forth process.”

As the preserve’s repairs proceed, people are already adapting their routines. Trenton Smith, a local mechanic and wildlife breeder who has visited Barataria since their teenage years, has been searching for snakes near the Bonnet Carré Spillway while the preserve remains closed. They said they’re eager for the boardwalk work to finish, noting that repairs have been slow even since Hurricane Katrina. “I’m really looking forward to the repairs they’re doing now,” Smith said.

Maggiore is looking forward to leading tours on the new boardwalks when construction wraps up, and especially to a planned visitor center with a screened wall that will open onto a view of the marshland coastal scientists are fighting to protect. “It’s going to be beautiful,” she said, “but we don’t really have a place to give a tour at the moment.”