Posted on August 23, 2018
The 18-mile, $760 million West Shore Lake Pontchartrain hurricane levee could be under construction by early 2021 and could be completed by mid-2023, in time for that year’s hurricane season, the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District office said Monday.
“It’s very common for projects to get just a small trickle of funding year after year and to take a very long time to build,” said Col. Michael Clancy during a news conference held at the St. John the Baptist Parish community center in LaPlace to formally announce the levee project.
“I’m excited because we no longer need any action from Congress, from the White House. From here on out, we have the money, we have the project,” he said.
The levee was authorized by Congress in a 2014 water resources bill, the first step of what can often be a decades-long process for approval and funding of new levee projects. Earlier this year, Congress included the full cost of the levee project in an emergency supplemental appropriation tied to recent hurricanes and floods.
That fast-track Congressional approval and funding is unheard of, said U.S. Rep. Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge.
But he said it should become the rule, rather than the exception, for Congressional approval and funding of similar projects nationwide.
Graves pointed out that the West Shore levee project represents only 1 percent of the $100 billion in projects that would be built by the corps that are still awaiting funding by Congress.
The West Shore Lake Pontchartrain project includes separate ring levees that would protect the Lutcher-Gramercy community, outlined in green, and the Grand Point North community, in pink. Potential environmental mitigation projects would be located in the areas outlined in blue. (Army Corps of Engineers)
Addressing that backlog, he said, would begin to reverse the nation’s history of paying billions of dollars to restore homes and businesses and infrastructure lost to flooding, such as occurred in St. John in 2012 during Hurricane Isaac, when it could have avoided much of the damage by spending “only millions” on flood protection projects.
“This project pays for itself,” Graves said. “Think about the cumulative money spent picking up the pieces from Hurricane Isaac,” he said. “We cannot continue to spend billions in the aftermath of disasters. We have to spend millions in advance.”
St. John Parish President Natalie Robottom, said she was so excited to be announcing the beginning of the project that “my legs are actually shaking.”
But she said the announcement isn’t just a successful end to a 50-year effort by parish officials to gain greater hurricane storm protection.
“It’s only the beginning,” Robottom said. “It is incumbent upon us as leaders to make the necessary improvements to our internal drainage system and our water infrastructure to tie into this project.
“It is also our responsibility to develop a plan to provide the opportunity to as many of our residents and business owners as possible to participate in this $760 million project,” she said. “Keeping some of those dollars here in our parish.”
Clancy said design of the 18-mile levee, which will separate populated areas of the parish west of Interstate 10 from storm surges moving inland from Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas and adjacent wetlands, should be completed by late 2019 or early 2020.
The project will then be divided into what he expects will be 11 smaller projects that will be the subject of construction contracts, with the work to be completed by mid-2023.
He estimated that the earthen levee portion of the project would require 9 million cubic yards of clay to elevate it to protect from surges created by hurricanes with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year, a so-called 100-year storm.
The project also includes separate ring levees that would protect the Lutcher-Gramercy community and the Grand Point North community in St. James Parish.
Clancy said the corps is working with the state and Pontchartrain Levee District officials to determine who will identify and purchase the right-of-way needed for the project. Under corps rules, the “local sponsor” is responsible for the cost of land acquisition.
The state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is the official local sponsor, although the Pontchartrain district will eventually control and operate the levees.
Under federal law, the local sponsor also will be required to pay 35 percent of construction costs. However, Congress also authorized the corps to pay for construction costs upfront and be repaid over 30 years, once levee system is accepted as complete.
Source: nola
