Who's still thinking about Christmas in spring? The New Orleans Department of Sanitation, the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Guard. This generation-long partnership comes together for the annual Christmas tree drop. Christmas trees are picked up curbside after the new year, packaged into bundles, and dropped via helicopter into a local wetlands area to build back land mass. The National Guard uses it as a training exercise, and the nearby wildlife refuge Bayou Sauvage gets a coastal restoration project.
This year the project chose to focus on the Joe Madere unit of the refuge. Hear from the project players:
Check out this video of the National Guard's helicopter team lifting off with the bundle of trees from the staging area:
...and heading to the marsh to get the job done:
