Posted on January 3, 2019
During a conversation last week with Chris Koehler of Koehler Engineering, Ste. Genevieve County Presiding Commissioner Garry Nelson returned to a topic he had opined on more than once in previous months: the potential of the former Marina de Gabouri.
Nelson asked Koehler for a ballpark estimate of how much it might cost to dredge the inlet at the marina, where the Gabouri creeks flow into the Mississippi River.
Koehler said if the project was performed when a dredge was already nearby — such as now, while one is on hand to dredge the Port of New Bourbon — it would be less expensive. In that scenario, he estimated it would be somewhere around $150,000 to dredge out 15 feet of material.
Nelson made the pitch that the marina site had better potential as a port than the New Bourbon site due to less vulnerability to Mississippi River flooding, “if somebody would step up and organize it.”
“That river’s going to flood and that [New Bourbon Port] road is going to get shut off again and again and again,” Nelson said. “That marina, to my knowledge, has never been flooded. When we were putting the sheriff’s boat in during the New Year’s flood [December 2016 and January 2017] flood, it was probably at least six feet from getting to the top of that marina.”
Source: Ste. Genevieve Herald
