Author: Imported Author 1983537

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Louisiana will get $130 million in BP oil spill money to link its second-largest coastal swamp back up to the Mississippi River, and Alabama will receive funds to add up to 12,000 acres (4,800 hectares) to a wildlife management area.

The RESTORE Council, made up of officials from the five Gulf states and several federal agencies, voted for the projects on Wednesday. The group was created to allocate money from Clean Water Act fines paid by BP and others after the catastrophic 2010 spill.

The amount approved for Alabama’s project was not immediately available.

Louisiana’s grant will go toward a system designed to deliver fresh water and sediment from the Mississippi River into the Maurepas Swamp about 30 miles (49 kilometers) west-northwest of New Orleans. Because levees cut it off from the Mississippi River and salt sometimes gets in through canals and nearby Lake Pontchartrain, the baldcypress and tupelo gum trees that make it a swamp have been dying for decades. Marsh grasses have taken over some areas and others have become open water.

“The Maurepas Swamp is not just an amazing and beautiful swamp and Wildlife Management Area, but it is also a crucial, natural buffer between hurricane winds and storm surge,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said at a news conference livestreamed from Baton Rouge. “If we let this swamp continue to die off we would be putting many large communities in this region at increased risk.”

The money will be available once all engineering, design, and permitting requirements are met, according to news releases.

“This is the first time we have ever attempted to connect a coastal forest to the river,” said Chip Kline, chairman of Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

The Restore the Mississippi Delta coalition praised the action. “Louisiana, once known for its abundant swamps, has increasingly become known for ‘ghost swamps’ devoid of life and productivity. We must act with urgency to protect what remaining swamp habitat exists for the benefit of wildlife and people in our state and across the nation,” the coalition said in a news release.

The council also voted to support Alabama’s Perdido River Land Conservation and Habitat Enhancements Project, said Lauren C. Bourg, spokeswoman for Restore the Mississippi Delta.

That project would add 10,000 to 12,000 acres (4,000 to 4,800 hectares) to the Perdido Wildlife Management Area, and could be used for longleaf pine restoration, benefiting species including gopher tortoises, according to Alabama’s proposal.

Money is coming from a trust fund set up by the RESTORE Act for 80% of the water pollution penalties paid after July 2012 by companies involved in the 2010 spill.

A well that BP PLC was drilling from the Deepwater Horizon rig blew in April 2010, killing 11 men. It took nearly three months to cap the well, which spewed an estimated 134 million gallons (507 million liters) of oil during the nation’s worst offshore oil spill.

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A blaze inside a Louisiana refinery that turned the night sky a shade of orange and sent a large plume of smoke into the air over Baton Rouge has been extinguished, ExxonMobil officials say.

The fire erupted at the facility in Baton Rouge around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, Baton Rouge Fire Department spokesman Curt Monte told reporters. No injuries were reported, he said.

“We’ve seen reports of people saying explosion. I can tell you there was no explosion,” Monte told reporters at an early morning news conference Wednesday.

“We want the people to know that there has not been any off-site impact and we’re going to continue to be out here as long as it takes to make sure that that doesn’t happen,” he added.

ExxonMobil has been working with the fire department’s hazardous materials unit to monitor air quality in the area, company spokeswoman Megan Manchester told reporters shortly after dawn Wednesday. Results so far have been “below detectable limits,” she said.

The fire was contained to the location where it started, Monte said. The glow of the fire could be seen from miles away, news outlets reported.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the fire.

“Once deemed safe, our teams will go in to conduct a thorough investigation to determine the root cause of this incident and how we can learn from it,” Manchester said.

“Our response teams did exactly what they’re highly trained to do. They responded, they responded very quickly, so we’re very thankful for that,” she added.

ExxonMobil is the largest manufacturing employer in Louisiana and its Baton Rouge refinery is the fifth largest in the country, WAFB-TV reported. It produces gasoline, jet fuel and more, as well as items such as paint and adhesives at the chemical plant.

The company said in a tweet that it was responding the situation, including monitoring air quality at the fence line. The air outside the plant “bore no particular odor,” The Advocate reported.

Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s state capital, is about 80 miles (129 kilometers) northwest of New Orleans.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A lawsuit seeking to return federal protection to the real bears that inspired teddy bears has been thrown out by a federal judge.

The people and environmental groups who sued in 2018 didn’t provide any evidence to back up their claims that they would be hurt by the decision to remove Louisiana black bears from the “threatened” list, wrote District Judge John Bates of Washington, D.C.

Bates didn’t rule on the merits of the case itself, only on whether the plaintiffs had legal standing to sue, attorney Paula Dinerstein of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said Tuesday.

That group, the Sierra Club, the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper organization, Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West and individual plaintiffs are considering their next step, Dinerstein said.

Louisiana black bears are the largest and rarest of 16 American black bear subspecies. President Teddy Roosevelt’s refusal to shoot one that had been caught and tied to a tree during an unsuccessful hunting trip in 1902 inspired the first “teddy’s bears.”

The subspecies once roamed Texas and Mississippi but now is found only in a few areas in Louisiana. It was put on the “threatened” list in 1992 and removed from it in 2016.

The lawsuit accused the U.S. Interior secretary and the acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of basing their decision on “faulty scientific assumptions” rather than the best available data. The bear’s removal from protection under the Endangered Species Act would reduce the population and open its habitat to development, damaging the plaintiffs’ “aesthetic, scientific and recreational interests,” the lawsuit said.

“Mere allegations” do not meet the standard for showing likely injury, Bates wrote in the 19-page opinion handed down Friday. For instance, he said plaintiff Ronald Nowak, a scientist who has studied the bear for years, said removal from the list would lead to fewer bears or to their being found in fewer places, making them harder to observe and study.

However, Bates wrote, “plaintiffs have not provided … any evidence whatsoever demonstrating that delisting will lead inexorably” to fewer bears or make it harder to watch them in the wild.

Three other possible injuries were also not backed up, he said.

Conversely, he said, members of Safari Club International, an international hunting group that intervened on the federal government’s side, have said they plan to hunt the bears as soon as the first season is opened. If protections are resumed, there would be no chance of a hunting season, and the state has said it might authorize hunting at some point if it wouldn’t damage the population, he wrote.

The hunting group was jubilant.

“SCI is honored and excited to have successfully defended science-based decision-making and played a key role in keeping the ESA from being further weaponized as a tool for anti-hunters,” it said in a news release Tuesday.

Dinerstein said the plaintiffs’ options include appealing Bates’ decision or re-filing the lawsuit with additional information, either in Washington or elsewhere.

“We think it’s a pretty weak decision on standing,” she said. “We’re still in the process of analyzing it and talking with our clients.”

___

This story has been corrected to show that the judge’s last name is spelled Bates.