Posted on November 10, 2016
By Sean Ellis, houmatoday.com
Terrebonne Parish is closer to getting a permit to begin seeking bids for the Falgout Canal Floodgate in Dularge.
Parish President Gordy Dove said the draft permits from the state have been received and the project is now waiting on approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“We should be looking at the permitting so we can go to bid for construction in about 30 days, beginning sometime in December,” he said. “That’s four years working on that permit.”
“We’re moving forward with Morganza. We haven’t forgotten about Morganza,” he added, referring to the Morganza-to-the-Gulf levee system.
Permitting was delayed mostly by issues dealing with plans to replace marsh damaged by the project. When marshes are damaged by projects, they must be replaced in a process called mitigation.
The parish and levee district are plugging the last gap in the 35 miles of levees and floodgates along the Morganza-to-the-Gulf levee system from Bayou Dularge to Pointe-aux-Chenes by this year or early 2017, officials said.
The 195-foot floodgate has been called the “last linchpin” in the system.
About $16.8 million in federal Community Development Block Grant money was moved from a Dularge levee project to help pay for construction of the floodgate. The parish has another $14 million from the state for it. The floodgate lessens the need for the levee, officials said.
A $380 million lock complex near the Bubba Dove Floodgate will allow the parish to control the flow of water even during extraordinary tidal events in the canal, again lessening the need for the levee and making it redundant, officials said.
Construction of the south Lafourche reaches of the Morganza system from Pointe-aux-Chenes to the south Lafourche levees is also underway.
Source: houmatoday.com
