$205M in BP spill money for Louisiana coastal restoration

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana is getting another $205 million in BP oil spill money to restore its coast.

Most of that — $176 million — will use sediment dredged from the Mississippi River to build 1,200 acres (485 hectares) of marsh in Jefferson Parish.

“This project continues the process of using restoration funding to restore wetlands, coastal, and nearshore habitats in the Barataria Basin, where the greatest oiling impacts from the Deepwater Horizon spill occurred,” a news release stated Wednesday.

More than $25 million will go to oyster projects and $3 million will be spent on improving the system that finds injured or dead dolphins and whales.

The BP well that blew wild in April 2010 killed 11 offshore oil workers and spewed 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, fouling beaches from Louisiana to Florida, killing thousands of birds, fish and marine animals, leaving lasting harm to creatures as diverse as dolphins and deepwater coral, and devastating the region’s tourist economy.

The marsh creation project is the largest approved so far by a group created to oversee Louisiana projects funded by BP's Clean Water Act penalties, Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a news release. A group with Gulf-wide oversight approved $130 million from such penalties in February to link the state's second-largest coastal swamp back up to the Mississippi River. And $18.7 million rebuilt one of the state's most important pelican rookeries.

Edwards said the allocation made earlier in August also “distributes almost the entirety of Louisiana’s oyster settlement allocation” from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The marsh project will expand marsh created below the Jean Lafitte area known as The Pen. Previous projects by the state Coastal Protection and...