Posted on June 1, 2021
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers budgeted $50 million to spot dredge the Vermilion River, Congressman Clay Higgins (R-Lafayette) announced Friday.
Higgins’ announcement comes on the heels of an emergency approval of $5 million by Lafayette’s City Council for spot dredging along the river following intense rain in Lafayette last week that prompted isolated flooding.
The May 17 storm dumped more than 6 inches of rain on Lafayette in the span of just a few hours, pushing the Vermilion River to its highest levels since the 2016 floods.
“We’ve worked with the Corps to prioritize federal investments for spot dredging. Deepening the river at key points will provide greater water retention capacity for the region and help mitigate flood threats,” Higgins said in a statement Friday. “This funding, if fully realized in the Corps’ Work Plan, would be a major win.”
Lafayette City Councilwoman Nanette Cook, who led the push to set aside funds for a partial dredge of the river in 2019, said she was told by Higgin’s congressional office that the $50 million in new funding would be part of the Corps’ upcoming budget cycle, which begins in October.
“That would include all the removing of whatever they pull out of the river and account for where to where to put that,” Cook said.
“For $50 million, they’re they’re looking to actually do an extensive spot dredge to the point of trying to restore it pretty close to what was its intended depth and width,” she added.
Last spring, Higgins pumped the brakes on calls to fully dredge the river back to its original, navigable depth after a study conducted by the Corps and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Watershed Flood Center modeled the potential impact of a full dredge and found limited benefits, even in a storm scenario similar to the August 2016 flood.
Clay Higgins: Study shows dredging Vermilion would cost $150 million, save only 175 homes
At the time, Higgins said the study found that a full dredge would cost as much as $150 million and save an estimated 250 homes across Lafayette and Vermilion parishes during a 2016 flood recreation, making it a poor investment of taxpayer funds.
“Dredging the Vermilion to its intended parameters is not the silver bullet that we thought it would be,” Higgins said in February 2020.
The study also determined that a partial dredging of the river would cost roughly $75 million and save less than 100 buildings in an event similar to the August 2016 flood.
Both dredging plans were anticipated to remove massive amounts of riverbed sediment that would have to be disposed of, with a full dredge pulling up enough dirt from the river to fill the Cajundome five times, according to Mark Wingate, deputy district engineer for Programs and Project Management for the Corps’ New Orleans division.
In his announcement, Higgins acknowledged the study’s determination that dredging the river would not help storm water flow and drain faster from the area, but he said it will allow the river to hold more water during storms.
“We sought to move forward based on objective truth and grounded in extensive scientific modeling,” he said. “The (dredging) analysis showed that dredging the Vermilion River would not have a major impact on water flow, but it would allow the river to retain more water.”
Lafayette Mayor-President Josh Guillory, who pushed the emergency plan to spend $5 million in city funds on spot dredging the river onto Lafayette’s City Council last week, praised Higgins’ announcement Friday, saying the funds are the result of “hard work” by Higgins and his staff.
“I know a lot of science, preliminary engineering, models, costs, and the environment were considered in this decision,” Guillory said in a statement.
“We want to be good neighbors to our friends in Vermilion Parish and continue to work together with them in order to find ways to improve drainage of our parishes and safely increase the capacity of the Vermilion River in order to achieve effective benefit without harming any of the surrounding parishes.”
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