DONALDSONVILLE, La. (AP) – Louisiana officials have broken ground for a critically needed $96 million pump station that could help revive the marshes and barrier islands that protect a large area of south Louisiana from hurricanes and sea level rise.
The project, celebrated Friday, caps a larger $220 million effort to reconnect the Mississippi River to the 106-mile-long bayou, which flows from Donaldsonville and empties into the Gulf of Mexico at Port Fourchon.
“This is tremendous for the entire state,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said during the ceremony. “The lack of freshwater flowing into the bayou has endangered wetlands and drinking water supplies for 300,000 people. And it robbed this region of one of its most scenic waterways for too long.”
Bayou Lafourche was sealed off from the Mississippi, its main source of freshwater, more than a century ago, triggering a series of environmental problems, including the loss of wetlands south of Houma and New Orleans.
The new station will be built on the river levee in downtown Donaldsonville alongside a nearly 70-year-old pump. The added pumping capacity will triple the river’s flow into the bayou and protect the drinking water supply for Ascension, Assumption, Lafourche and Terrebonne parishes as well as combat saltwater intrusion in the Lafourche and Terrebonne estuaries, which experience some of the highest land loss rates in the world.
“The importance of this project to the Bayou Region and to our state can’t be overstated,” Edwards said. “The pump station will protect nearly 10 percent of Louisiana’s drinking water supply while nourishing over 85,000 acres of marsh in some of the country’s most land starved areas. We’re investing more than ever before into protection and restoration projects across our coast, and it’s clear these efforts will continue to benefit Louisiana for decades to come.”
Work to restore Bayou Lafourche and build the pump station has been ongoing since Hurricane Gustav in 2008. The storm churned up muck and debris that blocked the mouth of the bayou, contaminating it.
“After Gustav, that water was stagnant and disgusting,” U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, said at the event, which drew about 75 people. “You could smell the bayou for miles.”
The Bayou Lafourche Fresh Water District spent the past 11 years preparing the bayou for the pump station’s increased flows, The Advocate reported. The district widened and deepened several miles of the bayou, raised a Donaldsonville railroad crossing, installed water control gates and removed a small dam in Thibodaux.
The district has been trying to get the new pump station approved since 2016. Progress slowed after a range of concerns, including noise, aesthetics and historic preservation, were raised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Donaldsonville leaders.
The new pump station will have a minimum pumping capacity of 1,000 cubic feet per second and be constructed beside the existing 450 cfs pump station which will remain in service. It is anticipated to be completed and in operation by June 2025.
Photo: The southwestern end of West Grand Terre Island in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay is shown on July 21, 2022; the ruins of Fort Livingston are at the bottom left. (AP Photo/Janet McConnaughey)
Topics Louisiana
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