Hurricane Isaac storm surge probable cause.
Hurricane Isaac’s storm surge pushed water into Lake Pontchartrain, swamped Manchac, raised the level of Lake Maurepas and finally flooded the Bonnet Carre Spillway.
Now fish are turning up dead, a LouisianaSportsman.com user has documented.
Scott Walker texted Louisiana Sportsman photos and a video from the spillway that showed bass and bream floating in shallow water, and he said there were other species that also died.“There are flounder and some fish that looks like a cross between a speckled trout and croaker,” said Walker, aka nightfisher. “I think they’re called whiting.”
And Walker said he believed there would be many more fish turn belly up.
“It’s only the beginning,” he said. “There are a lot of perch gasping for air.”
The reason the fish are dying appears to be that they simply were stranded by falling water.
“They’re in the shallows,” Walker said. “They just got trapped.”
However, Walker and Rodney Curry (aka Kingfisher83) found a lot of big crabs up in the grass where the fish kills seem most prevalent.
“We’re just dipping them up in a dip net,” Walker said. “We’ve got probably six dozen, and we’re missing a bunch of them because we’re in a surface drive and trying to dip them as we run by.”
The “crabbing” was so good that at 2:30 p.m. the two returned to the landing to pick up LouisianaSportsman.com moderator Todd Foster, aka meauxjeauxx2.
