Into the Wild 
A Charred Life 
Eerie Canal
The Texas portion of the Intracoastal Waterway is a boon to commerce and a bust to the environment: the cases for and against the four-hundred-mile canal.
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The commercial benefit of what the Corps has accomplished is enormous; the entire coastal economy is dependent on this inland waterway. The cost to the environment is less uplifting, however. When parts of the coast have been fouled or degraded, the Corps has either denied responsibility or pleaded that it was only doing what Congress told it to do—keeping the Intracoastal open to navigation. In 1975 the Corps conducted an environmental impact study of the Intracoastal. The subsequent report minimized the effects of open bay disposal, comparing them to “occasional rainstorms and normal wind.” Though this report was probably obsolete before it was published, the Corps has referred to it for more than two decades to validate Corps activities. When information to the contrary has been presented, the Corps has resolutely refused to acknowledge it. In the mid-eighties a group of scientists from various state and federal agencies did its own research and issued a white paper that concluded that open bay disposal caused serious harm to the lower Laguna Madre. A separate study by Chris Onuf, a scientist with the National Biological Service in Corpus Christi and the foremost authority on sea grass in Laguna Madre, reported that 87 square kilometers of sea grass had been destroyed by dredge dumping. The scientist also discovered that spoil disposal traveled up to three kilometers from the disposal site and remained suspended in the water for up to fifteen months, a condition particularly menacing to sea grass beds. The Corps basically ignored both the white paper and Onuf’s report but has begun another study of its own.
When and if the Corps did get around to acknowledging a crisis, its solution was usually another engineering project—another canal, more concrete, a lock, or a floodgate. Nowhere is this more evident than at Sargent Beach, twenty miles southwest of Freeport. A few hundred feet past a swing bridge spanning the Intracoastal, Texas Highway 457 suddenly crumbles into the Gulf of Mexico. An incoming tide washes over a hunk of shell-crusted two-lane blacktop. With no barrier island to protect it, Sargent Beach has been eroding in some areas at a rate of up to 65 feet a year. “We’ve lost five or six streets of cottages and more than one thousand acres,” Matagorda County commissioner George Deshotels told me. “Just written them off the tax roll.” Ed Price, the bridge tender since 1987—his father was the bridge tender before him—said that when he was a kid in the mid-sixties the bridge was a mile from the water. Today you can hit the ocean with a rock.
Nobody is sure why this isolated beach has eroded at such an accelerated rate, but Deshotels and others think it started in the twenties, when the Corps diverted the Brazos River channel to accommodate the Intracoastal traffic as it crossed Matagorda Bay. Today there is a race against time to build an eight-mile-long revetment that will prevent the Gulf from breaching the Intracoastal. “One major storm could put the Gulf into the canal,” said Jack W. Seward of Marble Falls, the construction manager of this $80 million project. The revetment, which should be completed by January 1998, is a sort of underground seawall paralleling the canal. It is being constructed of limestone shipped down the waterway from Missouri, capped by pink granite trucked in from Marble Falls. In three to five years the Gulf will have reached and exposed the revetment, but that’s as far as it will go. In the meantime, though, two hurricane seasons remain.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST CONTROVERSIES ALONG THE CANAL is erosion caused by barges. One day on a visit to San Antonio Bay, north of Corpus Christi, I was standing just beyond a six-foot-high spoil bank and could see the wheelhouse of a tugboat pushing a bargeload of gravel. Rancher John Welder Cliburn shook his head as the wash from the tug’s wake rushed up his boat canal and carried off chunks of his inheritance. The Cliburn Ranch has been in his family since 1908, when his great-grandfather, Victoria banker John J. Welder, bought it from Thomas O’Connor. In the thirties the Corps took a wide strip of the ranch to dredge this leg of the Intracoastal Waterway. Constant erosion caused by passing barges has been taking pieces of it ever since. “The problem is, there’s no accountability,” Cliburn told me. “The barge companies don’t want to address shoreline erosion. The Corps has its own agenda.” We were standing on a part of Cliburn’s ranch known as Welder Flats, at a point on the bay where the Victoria Barge Canal intersects the waterway. This is a busy and dangerous intersection. Two years ago biologists from the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge across the bay rescued the crew of a burning tug that was pushing a bargeload of naphtha.
The 48-year-old fourth-generation rancher has preserved the ranch in much the same condition as it was hundreds of years ago. Rather than the “almost impenetrable swamp” described in the Corps’ 1873 survey, this is incredibly rich marshland and coastal prairie, full of oyster beds and native grasses, where white-tailed deer, turkeys, bobwhites, javelinas, coyotes, alligators, and dozens of other species of mammals, reptiles, and amphibians thrive. It’s also a crossroads and a nesting ground for a variety of migratory waterfowl. As we talk, a formation of five roseate spoonbills soars overhead, their brilliant pink plumage iridescent against the gray winter sky. A dozen or so whooping cranes usually winter on the Cliburn Ranch, rather than with the majority of the cranes on the marshes of the wildlife refuge across the bay.
Because of the whoopers, Cliburn was caught in a battle between environmentalists and federal and state bureaucrats over how to prevent additional erosion to the shoreline of the wildlife ref-uge. Under pressure from the National Audubon Society, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Endangered Species Act, the Corps had decided to install an armoring of concrete mats around the perimeter of the refuge. To John Cli-burn’s dismay, the shoreline of the Cliburn Ranch was included in the work order. Because he had not experienced the same rate of erosion, Cliburn wanted the Corps to construct a breakwater, a solution also favored by the Texas General Land Office. A breakwater would absorb most of the energy from the wakes of passing vessels while allowing water to move in and out, depositing sediment and creating a marsh of several varieties of cord grass. In time, this part of the shoreline could look as it did before the Intracoastal Waterway intruded. This may yet happen. Since my visit, the work order has been changed, and Welder Flats has been spared the Corps’ meddling for now.
The Aransas National Wildlife Refuge has lost 10 percent of its 1,100 acres of marsh since the Intracoastal began operation and continues to lose it at a rate of three feet a year. There is some loss to natural wave action on San Antonio Bay, but J. Brent Giezentanner, the refuge’s manager, believes that most of the erosion is caused by the wake and wave action from boats and tugs. “When a barge goes by,” he said, “you can see the scouring action as the wa ter is sucked up from the channel, then rushes back.” Whooping cranes feed less than a hundred feet from passing barges. “The cranes are literally living fifteen seconds from disaster,” Giezentanner continued. “The question is not if but when a barge loaded with hazardous chemicals is going to wreck and spill.” Barges carrying hazardous cargo are required by law to be double-hulled, but a chemical spill remains the worst nightmare of the biologists at Aransas.
On this one section of the waterway at least, the Corps appears to be cleaning up its image—not that it has a choice as long as the Endangered Species Act remains in force. Instead of allowing contractors to build levees from dredge material and then fill them to overflowing, as was done in the past, the Corps has started a “beneficial uses” program. If it works as planned, the engineers will learn to transform spoil into new habitat for the whoopers. After all, this stuff is not nuclear waste, it’s topsoil—or used to be. Ideally, dredged material could be hauled upriver to the farms and ranches from which it came or dumped in deep water. The problem is the huge cost of transporting the spoil. Port Lavaca dredging magnate King Fisher, who has been in the business for 58 years, said, “Them damn environmentalists who don’t pay one cent are making it so we have to pump this stuff farther and farther away, sometimes three miles or more from the dredge.” Rather than costing 50 cents a yard as it once did, Fisher says, dredging will soon cost up to $4. “There will be a time it’ll cost so much they’ll have to shut down the Houston Ship Channel,” he predicted darkly. One solution is upland disposal sites, which would require that the government buy land near dredging operations or persuade owners to donate it. A few ranchers on the upper coast have permitted some disposal on their property, but these experiments have produced mixed results and there have been no follow-ups. Neither of the two giant ranches that line the mainland side of Laguna Madre—the King Ranch and the Kenedy Ranch—has offered to sell land, much less donate it.
Another solution is to use the dredged material to create new marsh, as Mitchell Energy did recently as a trade-off for being allowed to cut a channel through Bludworth Island. The arrangement produced 22 acres of new marsh, but only time will tell if the whooping cranes will use it.
For the past twenty years the Corps has predicted that new islands would emerge from dredge maintenance material, and these could be shaped into levees to contain future maintenance material. But this hasn’t happened. Instead, the muck has become thinner and thinner, gradually losing its solidity until it is something resembling chocolate pudding. Lloyd Mullins, a biologist with the General Land Office, demonstrated this point during our trip down Laguna Madre. Leaning over the bow of the boat, Mullins pulled up a handful of thin black muck. Hydrogen sulfide bubbled to the surface, along with a rotten-egg stench. We had stopped on the banks of an island that was the site of a mitigation project with Fina Petroleum, which had destroyed a sea grass meadow and pledged to replace it. The problem was, the channel where the sea grass was to be planted was full of muck. “The first thing they’ll have to do is replace this loose stuff with sand,” Mullins said. “Sea grass won’t colonize in this. The wind will just blow it away.”
The Corps labels such muck “maintenance material” to distinguish it from the clay and sand on the crowns of the islands, which was dredged many decades ago. On the Corps’ drawing board at the moment is a plan to create 4,200 acres of wetlands in Galveston Bay, using both old and new material. What benefits Galveston Bay, however, does not necessarily benefit Laguna Madre, where high salinity prevents the growth of marsh grasses. That’s why Laguna Madre has tidal flats instead of marshes and why solutions that work on the upper coast don’t work on the lower coast.
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