Established in 1989, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation faces a daunting task: to restore and preserve the water quality and habitat in the vast, 10,000-square-mile watershed surrounding Lake Pontchartrain, a shallow and brackish 629-square-mile inland bay that sits just north of New Orleans and drains into the Gulf of Mexico.The nonprofit foundation has identified several rivers that empty into the north end of the lake – where residential development has boomed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina – as key sources of pollution. In particular, results from water-quality tests conducted in Tangipahoa Parish revealed extremely high counts of fecal coliform
