Efforts under way to save Bayou Teche
ARNAUDVILLE -- Legend has it Bayou Teche was named from a Chitimacha Tribe myth that touches on the waterway’s serpentine course through four south Louisiana parishes.
In that myth, warriors battle and defeat a monstrous, venomous snake — “teche” in the tribal language. As the snake lay writhing and dying, its body carved out the waterway, spanning nearly 130 miles.
Today, the bayou still has warriors.
For the past few years, momentum to revitalize the waterway has grown from a cleanup initiated by a new homeowner into a movement that includes the development of a paddle trail and an educational outreach to promote the waterway.
Volunteers have collected about 40 tons of trash from the bayou during the group’s cleanup activities over the past four years in St. Landry and St. Martin parishes, said Blake Couvillion, the effort’s founder.
Couvillion moved to Arnaudville about four years ago and built a house along the Teche’s banks. A boat ride out on the water provided an unexpected scene: Trash littered the banks and water.
Couvillion asked members of his Mardi Gras krewe to adopt the bayou cleanup as its service project. At the end of the day, there was still plenty of trash left in the bayou.
“It was to the point where we could have pulled for two or three days solid and not put a dent in it,” he said.
In 2009, the group officially organized as a nonprofit, the Teche Ecology, Culture, and History Education Project — or TECHE Project. Its cleanup efforts are under the umbrella group Cajuns for Bayou Teche.
“There’s still work left to do. By no means is it finished,” Couvillion said. “We’d like to start moving south. As you start moving south, there’s less and less trash, but other issues down there, hydrilla and lilies that can be taken care of.”
Other local efforts
Across Louisiana, other communities also are fighting to take back their waterways.
“We’re pretty much feeling like if we want something done, we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” said Jonathan Scott, interim chair of the Bayou Manchac Group.
Bayou Manchac forms a boundary between East Baton Rouge and Ascension parishes.
The Bayou Manchac Group started unofficially in 1998 through emails among neighbors concerned about flood waters and litter, Scott said, but the group organized as “full time” earlier this year to make a transition from a reactive mode to a proactive one.
The group is now focused on litter floating into the bayou from East Baton Rouge and has appealed for litter traps — or booms — to be placed along the waterway to collect the debris.
“If you’re at LSU and you drop a cup on the ground or at the Mall of Louisiana and a receipt falls out of your bag … eventually it will find its way into the Bayou Manchac,” Scott said.
He said the group’s appeals for local government to step in and help clean up the waterway have not been heeded, so the group is now contacting homeowners for permission to set up traps.
The group is also seeking connections with similar organizations.
“The general frustration is there’s no model for what we’re doing,” Scott said. “We know that these issues are not unique to Bayou Manchac. They’re the same issues for water bodies across the state. We’d like to hear from like-minded people who are going through this process. We want to hopefully benefit from each other’s experiences.”
In 2009, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality created a watershed coordinator program to capitalize on existing grass-root efforts.
“We have these local organizations that are pretty much opening the door for DEQ to say, ‘How can we help you?’ ” said Christy Rando, an environmental scientist supervisor for the DEQ non-point source program. “These grass-root efforts have helped us get to know the local people.”
There are five nonprofit groups included in the DEQ watershed coordinator program. The state agency is in the process of awarding a contract for an Acadiana area watershed coordinator, Rando said.
The coordinators develop a watershed implementation plan that identifies major problems and involves community members in the plan’s development, said Jan Boydston, a senior scientist who works with DEQ’s non-point source program. Then, DEQ helps in the search for grants to implement the plans.
People living in the communities know firsthand what the issues are, Boydston said. The program seeks to supplement that local knowledge with DEQ’s resources, she said.
Wastewater and runoff from construction sites are two primary sources of non-point pollution in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin, said Andrea Bourgeois-Calvin, director of water quality for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.
The foundation was created in 1989 to join the efforts of several groups interested in saving Lake Pontchartrain from the “brown mess” it had become, Bourgeois-Calvin said. The foundation now has eight full-time employees, Bourgeois-Calvin said.
In 2001, the foundation began intensive weekly water quality monitoring of Lake Pontchartrain.
The results prompted the group to expand its outreach to neighboring waterways like the Abita, Tchefuncte and Bogue Falaya rivers. With the assistance of state and local agencies, the Bogue Falaya and Tchefuncte rivers were removed from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s impaired waterway list for fecal coliform levels in 2008, Bourgeois-Calvin said.
Efforts are focused on education and helping people see the connection between their community and their local waterway, Bourgeois-Calvin said.
“People don’t understand where the drains go to,” she said. “If people understand where their drains go to, they may not dump their oil there, knowing that your garbage and wastewater don’t just go away.”
The DEQ watershed coordinator program began as the Bayou Teche efforts ramped up. The group worked with then-regional watershed coordinator Kristen Kordecki, who continues to work with the group as a volunteer.
The bayou is on EPA’s list of impaired waterways for levels of phosphorus, nitrogen and low dissolved oxygen, Kordecki said. The source of the pollutants is primarily agricultural and contributes to the low-dissolved oxygen levels, she said.
Kordecki has assisted the group with workshops on native plants and water quality issues. In the spring, baseline data for Bayou Teche will be gathered as part of a grant received by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Institute for Coastal Ecology and Engineering, Kordecki said.
Some mayors along the bayou have also committed to support water-quality testing, she said.
“People are starting to make that link between the economy, water quality and quality of life,” Kordecki said.
The Bayou Teche group is “switching gears” in the coming year to focus more on educational outreach — such as more native plant workshops to encourage homeowners along the bayou to use native plants to help stop bank erosion, Couvillion said. The group is also working to improve fishing and recreational launches along the waterway.
“Now that we have the bayou looking halfway decent, we want to promote the bayou and recreation,” Couvillion said.
Economic benefits
The Bayou Teche group supports a canoe race — the 135-mile Tour du Teche — by providing pre-race cleanups and is involved in the planning of a paddle trail with the assistance of the U.S. National Park Service.
The Tour du Teche, founded last year by St. Martin Parish businessmen Ken Grissom and Ray Pellerin, has brought paddlers from across the country to the bayou.
Last year, 59 teams participated in the inaugural race. This year, 84 teams from across the country competed. Paddlers were treated to live music and food at planned stops along the course.
The race and the commitment of the Cajuns for Bayou Teche to the waterway attracted a new business to the bayou’s banks in Breaux Bridge. The Bayou Experience, a paddle excursion outfitter shop, will open there in January, said owner Ingo Werk. The community support of the bayou attracted his business, he said.
“The whole cleanup effort, the whole clean water issue of the Teche, I think all played into the equation that we ultimately decided to start a business there because we feel that if you don’t have the community support – you shouldn’t do it,” Werk said.
With towns and cities along its banks offering shops, restaurants and bed-and-breakfast inns, the bayou offers a “unique blend of a natural wilderness setting and all the amenities,” said Grissom, publisher of The Teche News.
The U.S. National Park Service is providing technical assistance on the development, and the group is awaiting word on possible funding to implement the plan.
The planning for the paddle trail is a lengthy process — at least a year, said Trey Snyder, a Bayou Teche resident who lives outside of St. Martinville and who has taken the lead for the group on the paddle trail plan.
Snyder said part of the plan includes an inventory of assets along the route that paddlers would need or be interested in: places to launch, camping sites, shops, restaurants or other places to drop in for food, and historic or cultural sites.
“The vision would be when they’re on the bayou itself, they could get on their iPhone and find the amenities that they want,” he said.
The effort also includes improving signs along the bayou and improving access points and boat launches. The more than 30 bridges over the Teche are missing signage, and the group also wants coordinates to accompany the new signs so those unfamiliar with the area can pinpoint their location.
The plan has been developed with technical assistance from the U.S. National Park Service and community input from the four parishes that share the waterway.
The community meetings have been well-attended with residents interested in the impacts — both positive and negative — that a trail may bring, Snyder said.
“They’re obviously wanting to see how it affects them directly,” Snyder said. “If their place is along the bayou, they want to make sure they’re not inconvenienced by paddlers. Most are excited that there’s something going on that will show Bayou Teche in a positive light.”
By early next year, Snyder said, the group’s draft of the trail plan should be finished.
Existing maps of the waterway serve as a guide but aren’t accurate, said Donovan Garcia, a resident of Jeanerette and a paddle guide in St. Mary Parish.
The trail also provides other benefits for the communities.
“I think the biggest impact is going to be that it’s going to tie all the little communities together — with one common thing, the Bayou Teche,” Garcia said.
In the 1800s, the waterway attracted settlers because it was a freight route, he said.
“Now, people are coming back for the same reason — the waterway,” Garcia said. “If these communities work together, they’ll have one common main street: the Bayou Teche.”
ä ON THE INTERNET
Cajuns for Bayou Teche
http://www.techeproject.com
Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation
http://www.saveourlake.org
Bayou Manchac Group
http://www.bayoumanchac.org
Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality Watershed Coordinator program
http://www.deq.state.la.us