Posted on August 24, 2026
In a much anticipated meeting, just a week after the ten year anniversary of the destructive 2016 floods, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it will clear debris and trash along the Vermilion but provided no clear path forward for fully dredging the silted river.
For the Corps, dredging the river has always been primarily a navigation project, in accordance with its role, but locals have rallied around dredging as a central fix for drainage problems in Lafayette Parish after the 2016 flood.
Since then, the plan has received congressional approval and $50 million in federal funding, but questions surrounding its overall efficacy, and whether money could be better spent elsewhere, led to the project being shelved.
On Tuesday, the Corps told Lafayette councils that it will dedicate $800,000 of its operations and maintenance budget towards cleaning more than 900 “obstacles” throughout the river, said Col. Scotty Autin, commander of the Corps’ New Orleans Division. That work is projected to start sometime in October.
“That is action that we are prepared to start today,” Autin told the council Tuesday.
But after nearly a decade of conversations between Lafayette Consolidated Government and the Corps over dredging the river, there were few details on a roadmap for dredging the river, with Autin telling the council that he “commit(s) to working with the parish directly on what dredging solution makes sense.”
What that is likely to look like is spot dredging along the river, rather than a full dredge to the Vermilion Bay.
But where those spots are, how much sediment would be removed, where it can go, and when the work can start is unknown. Autin said any projects would require continued dialogue with Lafayette officials and additional assessments.
“We want to enter this conversation of dredging alongside you. If we identify specific spots, absolutely, let’s look at that,” Autin said.
But even getting to this point with the Corps is a milestone.
“A month ago it was: We are not touching that river and dredging anything,” LCG Chief Administrative Officer Rachel Godeaux tells The Current. Still, she urges, the Corps needs to take some action, considering the funds already allocated to the project.
The Corps’ inaction has frustrated some local leaders, most prominently U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, who secured $50 million for the USACE to dredge the river in 2021.
Years later, none of that money has been spent, prompting Higgins to go on social media in October, calling for the agency’s dissolution and for projects to be handed over to the states. At the time, the Corps said it planned on beginning dredging operations sometime in 2026.
In a letter issued Monday to the Trump administration, Higgins pushed the president to demand that the Corps begin spot-dredging on the river immediately. Separately, UL Lafayette President Ramesh Kolluru urged coordinated action based on the findings of university reserachers. The Lafayette councils also passed a resolution urging the Corps to begin dredging work.
How much good any level of dredging will do, however, is the question.
The Corps has periodically dredged following an unnamed 1940 hurricane that passed through the region and dumped 38 inches of rain over a 10-day period.
The Corps first dredged it 1941, with the last such effort completed on a one-mile stretch in the 1990s. The last full dredge took place in 1957, deepening the river to a minimum depth of 9 feet. Since then, sedimentation and silt have accumulated again, leaving parts of the river only a few feet deep.
Renewed calls for dredging came shortly after the 2016 flood, when historic storms dumped over 20 inches of rain throughout South Louisiana, damaging thousands of structures throughout Acadiana.
The Vermilion River crested at 17.62 feet, the second-highest recorded level since the flood of 1940. What followed was an outpouring of state and federal dollars, and local transfers, to improve drainage in the parish, although most of it focused on projects outside the Vermilion.
Since then, multiple assessments have concluded that fully dredging the Vermilion to the Vermilion Bay would cost around $150 million and provide little relief to show for it.
On Tuesday, the Corps presented a new model from UL that shows that full dredging would reduce river levels by 4 inches during a storm event in some areas of the river, but increase water levels in other areas by up to 2.4 inches.
Those reductions would not significantly affect properties away from the river, according to the study. While properties along the river flooded during 2016, most of the damage occurred in low-lying areas in the parish, far from the Vermilion.
Still, a previous assessment did estimate that 175 structures would have been saved from flooding in 2016, had the river been dredged.
Another study in 2021, co-authored by UL professor Emad Habib and director of the university’s Watershed Flood Center, found that flood management would be better assessed at a larger system level and that local dredging benefits could come at the expense of downstream residents.
Even Higgins, in response to the 2020 assessment, has acknowledged dredging’s limited impact, saying the project wasn’t the “silver bullet that we thought it was,” and calling the assessment objective.
“The river needs to be maintained and should be cleaned,” Boulet says. But, “what their data shows is that it does not help drainage,” Boulet said.
Habib’s team produced the latest modeling too, this time with updated surveying by the Corps. The findings roughly match the earlier study.
Dredge the Vermilion, a nonprofit organization formed in response to the 2016 flood, has remained the driving force for dredging efforts. The group has questioned the Corps’ cost estimates and argued that dredging could accelerate drainage by 30-35%.
The group attended Tuesday’s meeting to challenge the Corps study, arguing that inaction has led to increased flooding along the river and put Lafayette Parish at greater risk.
“I don’t think we heard anything that really said they were going to dredge,” Patrick Herrington, a DTV board member, tells The Current. “I think he said we’ll take out all the mattress and furniture all up the river and that will make the flow better.”
“They can take every bit of Lafayette trash out of there, and it won’t have that appreciable effect on how the river acts,” he adds.
Even local dollars dedicated to the effort have moved slowly.
In 2019, Lafayette Consolidated Government allocated $5 million to begin dredging the Vermilion, despite continued questions about its benefits, which ultimately put the project on the back burner.
That money was reallocated again in 2021 for spot dredging through a larger $20 million emergency spending package for stormwater projects in response to another, less dramatic flooding event that year. That funding so far has led to the minor spot-dredging at Rotary Point, with the majority of work being debris cleanup, says Godeaux.
Boulet, while acknowledging the importance of cleaning the river, tells The Current she doesn’t consider it a drainage solution. “I’m not going to get up here and tell people we’re solving your drainage problem,” Boulet says of the dredging effort.
Instead, her administration has so far focused on road vitalization projects that include drainage improvements, for example along Johnston Street, and regulation aimed at reducing flood risk and damages.
Lafayette Parish’s population has only grown since 1940, from 43,941 people to around a quarter million. Most of that growth has occurred outside Lafayette city limits, in historically agricultural land prone to flooding, putting more properties into the line of fire. Between 2001 and 2021, nearly half of new developments occurred within Lafayette Parish’s 500-year floodplain, converting around 5,600 acres of land into residential neighborhoods.
But with development also comes more concrete, which leads more water to drain into the Vermilion, making it more likely for the river to surge, according to a 1998 study by Gary Kinsland, a professor in UL’s School of Geosciences.
Flood events, meaning the river swells above 10 feet, have exponentially grown alongside the rapid buildout of the parish. In the 1980s, five flood events were recorded along the river compared to 23 events within the 2010s, according to data collected by the National Weather Service.
Boulet has tried to rein in unchecked development by requiring new homes to be built a foot above the roadway for better flood protection. LCG has also changed its approach to stormwater management after the 2016 flood by constructing Coulee Ile des Cannes and Homewood detention ponds that store stormwater and slowly release it into the Vermilion River.
