Robert Meade, a retired U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist charged with peer-reviewing coastal restoration plans of the Army Corps of Engineers, seemed perturbed in a Thursday meeting when corps officials said they needed "more study" to answer a basic question.

Meade had asked how much sediment is carried by the Mississippi River, the main source of mud for rebuilding Louisiana's coast.

When corps officials couldn't answer, Meade pulled out a red, well-thumbed copy of Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi," and read a passage in which Twain quotes a report from the New Orleans Times-Democrat in the 1880s explaining that the river at that time emptied 406 million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico each year: "Which brings to mind Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi -- 'the Great Sewer.' This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high." Basic information on the sediment carried by the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers is produced every year by the Geological Survey -- and has been for more than 100 years, Meade said. Yet corps officials, in the document, seemed to display little understanding of the river's potential and provided no explanation of that and other vital issues in the draft plan to restore the state's eroding coastline.

River sediment is the key resource that will be used to rebuild wetlands and barrier islands, and the amount available in both the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, now and in the future, will determine the success or failure of individual projects, scientists say. Studies show the Mississippi carries much less sediment than 100 years ago, and dividing the remaining sediment between competing projects will be a major problem for planners.

The plan, called the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Plan, was supposed to have been completed last December, but now isn't expected until this December. Congress had requested that it contain a variety of levee, gate and coastal restoration alternatives that could be started quickly to protect south Louisiana from the equivalent of Category 5 hurricanes. Now, Tim Axtman, the senior corps official explaining the study, was saying it "won't include the specific identification of a detailed plan."

Will corps plan work?

Judging from comments Thursday by Meade and his colleagues on a National Academy of Sciences peer review committee, the current draft of the plan also fails to address major engineering questions and properly inform the public of the feasibility of restoring the coast. On Thursday, at the latest in a series of public meetings between the corps and the peer review committee, the question of river sediment arose in the context of the more basic question: Will the current corps strategies to protect and restore coastline work?

"Implicit in your assumption in the report is that you can preserve the wetlands as is," said Robert Dalrymple, Johns Hopkins University civil engineering professor and chairman of the peer review committee. "Our question is, prove it. You've got sea level rising, subsidence and you've got to maintain the wetlands against all of that."

The committee also questioned the basis of the corps strategy: To merely "maintain" wetlands as they exist today, rather than include alternatives to change the location of wetlands, create new land or allow some areas to erode. Corps officials answered only that the strategy made their task easier.

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