Project will take Ouachita back to its origins By Ray Newbold Kelby Ouchley delivered a program at the University of Louisiana, Monroe on the development of the Mollicy Farms tract as a federal fish and wildlife refuge. Billed as "Angioplasty in the Swamp", he described efforts to unclog this Ouachita River bottomland which is reverting from attempts to farm the land back to hardwood stands for wildlife. The history of this portion of the Ouachita River ecosystem dates back to 1804 when President Thomas Jefferson commissioned William Dunbar and Dr. George Hunter to explore this area of the Louisiana Purchase, coinciding with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the West and two other forays to the Rocky Mountains and the Red River. Dunbar and Hunter recorded their descriptions of woods, wildlife and waterfowl in their diaries. In the 1930s, the Theo Terzia Game Preserve was leased by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. In 1965 lands owned by Georgia Pacific were added to the refuge area. Then in 1966 the Mollicy acreage in Morehouse Parish was bought by private interests with the intent of growing soybeans. Seventeen thousand acres, over 25 square miles, were cleared. Almost annual flooding of the Ouachita River convinced the owners that levees were in order. Seventeen miles of thirty foot levees were constructed beginning in the late 1960s to protect the soybean fields. The result was an end to flooding and a new problem with ponding since the levees impeded runoff flowing back into the river. Pumping stations were installed to pump water back over the levees to dry the fields. The production of soybeans proved to be a bad decision, so the next attempt was to grow rice. The land was leveled and water was pumped onto, not off of the land. By the mid-1990s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had developed an interest in adding the acreage to the Upper Ouachita Refuge system. Mercury residue was found on the property with the multiple gas meters suspected of the contamination. A project to remove and replace soil around the meters was implemented. Acquisition was near. Then the property was sold to a German national. A little-known statute was found which prohibited the federal government from buying property from a foreign national. The Germans also went broke in their efforts to farm, so the land was sold back into American ownership. It was then that the federal government closed the deal and acquired the land. It became the Mollicy Unit of the Upper Ouachita National Wildlife Refuge. A major tree planting effort to restore the bottomland hardwood cover was implemented with cooperators such as the National Wild Turkey Federation, the Nature Conservancy, non-governmental groups including Utilitree, a consortium of power companies banking carbon credits, Louisiana Tech University, and others. To date 10,000 acres have been replanted with a variety of hardwood species that are becoming well established. This is the largest known floodplain reforestation effort in one location in the United States. Now for the angioplasty. The trees are now where they can withstand flooding so interest has turned to levee issues. Breaks and leakages are occurring along the levees due to natural deterioration, so to preclude natural catastrophic breaks, plans have been developed to remove the levees altogether. Aware that actions done incorrectly could do more harm than good, hydrologists have been consulted as to the best way to systematically remove the levee blockages. Cutting, scouring, and sedimentation must be minimized and over time the floodwater in the bottomland should rise and fall with the river. The professional investigators armed with flood records have suggested five 1000-foot breaches along the levee system located at points where natural drainage entered the river originally. These sections of levee will be pushed back into the borrow pits from where they were excavated. With time and observation of the land's response, hopefully the levees can be completely removed in the future, restoring the land to a fully functioning bottomland hardwood ecosystem providing a large flood storage area to lessen flood risk downstream while supporting waterfowl, wildlife, and fish spawning areas. |