Posted on August 4, 2025
Port of Morgan City Executive Director Raymond “Mac” Wade used the word “millions” frequently during Wednesday’s St. Mary Chamber Business Luncheon, in both positive and negative ways.
On the good side is a phrase Wade has been using often recently: The region’s waterways aren’t doing millions of dollars in business. They’re doing billions.
On the bad side, Wade said at the Petroleum Club of Morgan City event, Hurricane Francine threatened to undo $120 million worth of dredging.
The port, with the help of the dredging, had recovered from a series of floods beginning in 2016. Those high-water events were a costly reminder that a third of the Red River-Mississippi River system’s water flows into the Atchafalaya.
The $120 million in dredging, directed by the Army Corps of Engineers, restored the port’s channel to its authorized dimensions of 20 feet deep and 400 feet wide.
Then came Francine on Sept. 11 last year. The storm was like a “washing machine,” Wade said, churning over the Gulf end, putting 8 million cubic yards of sand in the channel.
“We lost 10 feet [of depth] in 10 hours,” Wade said.
That’s trouble for the shipyards and other businesses that rely on port waterways to move their products. They included Conrad Shipyard, builder of mammoth YRBM vessels for the Navy; Performance Contractors Inc., which builds modules for a liquefied natural gas project in Plaquemines; and LAD Services, which has constructed barges for Space X.
After 75 days and $30 million in dredging costs, the channel is open again, although silting problems remain around Stoute’s Pass and 20 Grand and Tidewater points, Wade said.
He pointed to another hero in his story — a little dredge that could.
It’s the Arulaq, the vessel that uses a suction and agitation process to rid the bar channel of sticky, troublesome fluff mud, pulling it from the channel and putting it back to be floated away by current, tide and wind.
The Arulaq started as an experiment involving the port, Brice Civil Constructors of Alaska, Halimar Shipyard here and, eventually, the Corps of Engineers. After a long break-in period of downtime, repairs and modifications, the Arulaq can now work round the clock and remove mud for 15 cents a cubic yard, a fraction of the cost needed for conventional dredges.
Wade called the dredge’s work in the bar channel, the portion between Eugene Island and the sea buoy, the key to keeping the Port of Morgan City in operation.
