Brazilier Island

Brazilier Island’s 2,027 acres offer a serene marshland for wildlife while safeguarding the New Orleans area against flood damage from frequent hurricanes. The area brims with bottomland hardwoods, freshwater and brackish marshes, lagoons, and bayous. Wading birds and ducks and a nursery for fisheries rely on the island habitat.

The island is a thin stretch of land between Lake Pontchartrain and Lake St. Catherine and is just 30 minutes northeast of New Orleans’s French Quarter. Yet this unassuming land offers critical protection against the kinds of storm surges and flooding seen during Hurricane Katrina.

“The New Orleans Land Bridge [Brazilier Island] is one of the most important defensive lines for the whole region surrounding the lake because it limits that water that might flow into the lake from the Gulf of Mexico,” says John Lopez, a spokesman for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation.

Brazilier Island is also the largest addition to the 23,000-acre Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge—the nation’s largest urban wildlife refuge. In 2008, Trust for Public Land purchased Brazilier Island and then resold it to Bayou Sauvage Urban NWR. The Fish and Wildlife Service is currently restoring the land bridge to strengthen its ability to limit damage from storms and hurricanes.

“Moving the property into public ownership also reduces the chance of future objections to decisions about hurricane-protection improvements or wetlands-restoration projects on or adjacent to the island,” Lopez says. “Putting such important wetlands into public hands prevents future conflicts with individual landowners,” he says.