Posted on May 18, 2025
ABOARD THE HURLEY — Mayo Broussard is back at a familiar bend in the Mississippi River, looking over its deep, muddy currents, helping solve a problem.
The world is depending on it.
The 78-year-old, with a bushy white beard and a pack of Marlboros in his pocket, is maneuvering across the deck of an Army Corps of Engineers dredge ship downriver from Baton Rouge. Barges and tugboats are lined up nearby like an armada of commerce. Louisiana’s state capitol building shimmers in the far-off distance.
Broussard has been up and down this stretch of the Mississippi, watching it and measuring it, clearing out the muck buried deep below its surface so the giant vessels stacked with freight from across the globe can pass safely. For him, the calculation is simple: The goods must flow.
“Bottom line — and whatever it takes, we do it,” Broussard says.
But along the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to the Gulf, that vital mission is colliding with new realities on the river that hold profound consequences for everyone living beside it. And as the new era emerges, Louisiana and the nation are struggling to contend with it.
Broussard recalls his early years in the industry, doing the dirty work of managing the mud being dug up from the depths. There were goods to be shipped and money to be made, and the river, despite all its twists and turns, provided a direct path to prosperity.
That’s even more true now, and underneath the ship, the Hurley, is one of a dozen curves in the river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that stack up with mini-mountains of mud, threatening navigation.
Mayo Broussard with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers takes a break on the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge on Tuesday, July 9, 2024. He has spent his life in the dredging business and calls the Mississippi “the lifeblood of this country.”
It can take more than a month to finish the job here, even for the Hurley, the largest dredge of its type in North America. A giant dustpan-like machine drops down from the ship, vacuuming sediment and spitting it back out from a long pipe to be swept downriver with the currents.
When it’s deep enough for vessels the size of three football fields to pass, the work is done. For now.
Few see or understand the world that exists along the river. But Broussard, from the tiny town of Coteau Holmes near the Atchafalaya Basin, knows its high-stakes implications. He also senses the ultimate futility of the work he has spent his life performing.
“The river’s constantly trying to change itself. We’re trying to control it,” he said. “One day, Mother Nature’s going to prevail. She’s going to have the final say-so, no matter what we do.”
‘The river is different’
The Mississippi River built south Louisiana with its sediment. It is the reason New Orleans was founded. It supplies the region with drinking water, provides jobs for its people and serves as one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.
But it has always made for an uneasy bargain.
Louisiana’s reliance on the Mississippi means the mighty river can take away as much as it gives — and both the state and the nation are reaching a moment of reckoning.
Decades of human interference with the river’s course fusing with the power of its natural fluctuations have left south Louisiana vulnerable in myriad ways. Drinking water and infrastructure are increasingly threatened, the rapid disappearance of the land near its mouth poses risks to communities and shipping, and the battle to keep the river from shifting course is an ever-present challenge.
These are not far-off, theoretical problems. But public awareness of their serious, urgent challenges is scant.
New Orleans and its suburbs have already had to scramble to find ways to deal with the threat of salt water moving up the river and corroding drinking water systems. Sea level rise, combined with the dredging of the river for shipping and breaks in its lower banks, is worsening the problem to the point that hundreds of millions of dollars may have to be spent to deal with it.
The Bird Foot Delta, the gangly splotches of land at the river’s mouth resembling its name, providing protection for shipping routes and communities farther inland, is sinking at an astonishing rate of about a half-foot per decade, and projected sea level rise will worsen it.
The delta has already lost more than half of its wetlands over the last century. As it gradually withers in the decades ahead, the nation may have to decide how to maintain a reliable shipping route to enter and leave the Mississippi — at a potentially high cost and with significant implications for global commerce.
Louisiana’s shipping interests are also fighting to adapt in other ways. Growth in vessel size has led to the deepening of the river channel, and the Port of New Orleans is warning that it must build a new, expansive terminal and related infrastructure farther downriver in St. Bernard Parish in the face of opposition from residents.
The principal reason: Ships have become so large, with containers stacked so high, they cannot fit under the 165-foot-high Crescent City Connection bridge crossing the river in New Orleans.
Underlying it all is the river’s course itself. It is constantly seeking to break through in its search for the fastest way to the Gulf, necessitating the elaborate Old River Control structure north of Angola, keeping it from jumping course to the Atchafalaya River. Its operations are currently being reassessed.
Below New Orleans, after the levees end, the river has broken through in spots more recently. There are benefits to this in terms of land building in a state fast losing its coast, but shipping interests are worried, and scientific modeling indicates it is worsening saltwater intrusion.
All of these issues are quietly intensifying in the background of south Louisiana’s daily existence, adding to the question facing coastal communities additionally threatened by land loss, storms and skyrocketing insurance rates: How long into the future can they remain viably livable, and at what cost?
It’s already preoccupying scientists, shipping leaders and the Corps of Engineers. Two far-reaching studies are underway, and the results may serve as a test of whether the nation is prepared to address the concerns they identify.
The two studies, both lasting five years and designed to complement each other, are delving into a wide spectrum of concerns along the lower Mississippi basin across parts of seven states.
In Louisiana, that means everything from the Old River complex to saltwater intrusion and underwater mudslides that endanger oil and gas infrastructure. Incorporated into them will be the changing river’s effects on the communities that rely upon it.
The Trump administration’s cost-cutting and rejection of the science surrounding climate change, meanwhile, may further complicate the challenge. One example on the horizon: The Corps’ study is not yet fully funded, not to mention solutions to the problems it identifies.
It has been nearly a century since the lower river’s modern shape took form with the construction of the vast levee system and control structures that hold it in place — paradoxically protecting Louisiana from flooding while setting its land loss crisis in motion. Decisions taken in the near future in response to a new set of challenges will determine the river’s next era.
“Thomas Jefferson thought this was the most important place in North America,” said Donald Boesch, a respected coastal scientist and New Orleans native who was instrumental in securing $22 million from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for one of those sweeping studies, focusing particularly on the delta.
“That’s not changed. It’s really very important in terms of the national commerce in and out of the river to the world. That makes it strategically important for the nation. And then, with that, of course, is that the decisions we make also affect where and how long you can live.”
Sam Bentley, an LSU geologist co-leading the National Academy-sponsored study, said “none of these things are unconnected” while seeking to convey the importance of the moment. He noted that a century has passed since the last sweeping plan to manage the river.
“The river is different. The Gulf of Mexico is different,” said Bentley, whose research on underwater mudslides around the Bird Foot has shed new light on the problem. “And so we need to have a new set of tools to manage it.”
‘A generational impact’
The giant blue cranes tower above the New Orleans riverbank, hovering next to a container ship stretching nearly three football fields long. Blue, red and yellow metal boxes rise atop its deck, stacked like mismatched Legos.
Before arriving here, at the terminal at the end of Napoleon Avenue, the MSC Agrigento had been to ports in Mexico and Houston. It would later cross the Atlantic and make its way into the Mediterranean, with stops in Spain and Italy.
Ronald Wendel stands nearby, aboard a Port of New Orleans fire boat bobbing on the river currents, talking about the past, present and future of the shipping industry in the city where he grew up.
“New Orleans was founded to have a port at the bottom of the Mississippi River,” said Wendel, the port’s acting CEO at the time, who recently left for the private sector. “So everything about New Orleans started by being a port.”
The Port of New Orleans container terminal from the Mississippi River on Friday, June 14, 2024. Vessels have become so large with containers stacked so high that the port says it must build a new terminal downriver in St. Bernard Parish.
At its heart, New Orleans has always been a port city, the main reason such a motley collection of cultures collided here, from the haunting history of enslaved African Americans to the arrival of Europeans with varying motivations.
The first steamboat to work the river, beginning in 1811, was called the “New Orleans,” and at one point in the 19th century, the city was considered the world’s fourth-largest port, Tulane geographer Richard Campanella noted. But it has never been steady sailing, with fortunes fluctuating like the river stages themselves.
The modern river took shape after the great flood of 1927, whose biblical proportions left a permanent mark on Louisiana. Business interests played a major role in decision-making then, advocating for the river levee to be blown up south of New Orleans to protect the city — eventually carried out, inundating St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. It was later determined that the dynamiting essentially had no effect on New Orleans’ fortunes, as author John Barry explains in his monumental book “Rising Tide.”
In the flood’s aftermath, the nation embarked upon a project so large and consequential that it changed American history. The Mississippi River and Tributaries Project built the levee system as it is known today, keeping the communities next to it safe from flooding while providing a reliable shipping lane.
Since that time, shipping along the river itself from Minneapolis on down has exploded from around 19 million tons in 1934 to 480 million in 2022 — an increase of nearly 2,500%. Four Louisiana ports between Baton Rouge and the Gulf, including the Port of New Orleans, have regularly ranked among the top 15 in the nation.
More than half of the nation’s grain exports pass through the Port of South Louisiana, situated between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
But keeping up with the changing industry has always been a challenge. A litany of strategies have been contemplated over the years, including grand plans abandoned to history.
They included “Centroport, USA,” an ambitious idea to relocate Port of New Orleans facilities to the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and Almonaster area, with a lock built in St. Bernard Parish. It was canceled in the 1980s, and the lock, opposed by St. Bernard, was never built. The MRGO, responsible for widespread wetlands destruction and blamed for funneling storm surge into the city during Hurricane Katrina, is now shut off with a dam.
A movement also took shape, spurred in part by planning for the 1984 World’s Fair, to redevelop New Orleans’ riverfront for tourism, conventions and other public uses instead of the wharves for shipped goods.
That movement eventually won out, helping lay the groundwork for projects like the Convention Center and the Warehouse District, definitively setting New Orleans on a tourism-dependent course. Port business was also well on its way to being transformed through the growing use of container shipping.
Another turning point has arrived. The Port of New Orleans is banking on growth in container shipping for its business model, but the expanding size of vessels and what they carry poses a dilemma.
Ports like Mobile and Houston threaten to steal away more of New Orleans’ business if the larger ships cannot pass beneath the Crescent City Connection to the Napoleon Avenue terminal throughout the year, they say.
Shipping interests have sought two ways of dealing with growing vessel sizes. One is a plan to build a new terminal downriver in St. Bernard and associated roads and infrastructure, eliminating the need for the larger ships to navigate the bridge.
Those plans are moving forward, though St. Bernard officials, again seeing themselves as being bullied by New Orleans, are firmly opposed, and Plaquemines Parish is proposing an alternative. It is unclear whether St. Bernard can derail the project.
Hundreds of millions in federal and state money have already been committed to it. One Port of New Orleans official said recently the port would be reduced to a “niche” role in the industry without the project, expected to cost at least $1.8 billion, though opponents contend it will be far higher.
Wendel says the port has spent many hours listening to St. Bernard residents and making changes to bring them on board.
“I’m a native New Orleanian. This is important to me. This is generational impact,” he said as the boat meandered upriver from the Crescent City Connection and the city skyline. “I really want my grandchildren to be telling their grandchildren one day that ‘oh, my grandfather was a big part in helping keep the port growing.’”
‘To feed the world’
The other strategy is not as immediately noticeable to residents, but so far has been more impactful, both because of shipping and its unintended effects. That has been to deepen the river itself.
The bigger ships have deeper drafts, causing larger vessels to lighten their loads during certain times of the year to travel upriver, adding costs to the journey — another threat to port business.
Congress responded in the 1980s by providing the Corps with the authority to deepen the lower river channel from 40 feet to 55 feet. The Corps proceeded in stages, first going to 45, then to 50, now completed to Donaldsonville. Digging down to 55 feet is not currently on the books.
But there was a catch. Saltwater intrusion up the Mississippi had occasionally been a problem during low-water periods, even as far back as the 1930s, but the Corps acknowledged the deepening project would worsen it.
It is not a minor issue. More than a million people in south Louisiana depend on the river for drinking water. High salt content can pose risks for people with kidney disease or high blood pressure, as well as infants and pregnant women. But that is only part of the concern.
The region’s water infrastructure includes an unknown — though certainly large — number of lead pipes threaded throughout their systems that salt water dangerously corrodes.
In New Orleans alone, the number has been estimated at over 50,000 — though 100,000 service lines have been classified as unknown. One estimate shows Louisiana with nearly 267,000 service lines containing lead.
“It will increase the corrosion of the pipe, and that will also cause chemicals like lead from the pipe material to leach into our drinking water,” said Tiong Gim Aw, an expert in environmental health sciences at Tulane University.
Because of that, the Corps spelled out a plan to “mitigate” the effects — not solve it completely, but reduce it to the level it was before the deepening of the river. The plan included building an underwater barrier, or sill, in the Mississippi when necessary to block the salt water’s advance, though it would be constructed above lower Plaquemines Parish, leaving those coastal communities to cope with the problem in other ways.
But evidence is emerging that the saltwater problem is worsening more severely than envisioned because of the river deepening combined with other factors, particularly breaks in the lower Mississippi’s banks bleeding out water flow. The barrier, or sill, has now had to be built three years in a row after having previously been necessary about once a decade.
The sill was also shown to be insufficient in 2023. With river levels especially low, the sill slowed the salt water’s advance, but it was eventually overtopped, requiring the Corps to heighten it.
A notch was left in the middle of the sill to allow enough space for ships to pass, limiting traffic to one way in that location. The disruption to shipping was minimal, said Sean Duffy, executive director of the Big River Coalition, which advocates for commercial navigation interests.
It also set off panic in the New Orleans region, leaving officials to figure out how the metro area would be supplied with drinking water should the salt water reach treatment plants, as was being predicted. The White House declared a federal emergency.
For a solution for that year alone, New Orleans planned to build a temporary pipeline stretching farther upriver, at a cost of up to a quarter of a billion dollars. It turned out not to be necessary, but it is widely acknowledged now that sea level rise may help worsen the problem as it gains pace.
Permanently upgrading treatment plants to deal with salt water would be an extreme cost. Replacing lead pipes also comes with a hefty price tag.
New Orleans would have to spend $1 billion to replace all of the city’s lead service lines by 2037, a deadline that had been set under the Biden administration, the Sewerage and Water Board estimates.
The EPA says no level of lead should be considered safe in drinking water.
‘Threat to the health of populations’
There are other related problems.
In lower Plaquemines, unprotected by the sill, the high salt content appears to have reacted with disinfectants normally used for drinking water. That seems to have produced an unusually high level of disinfectant byproducts — collectively known as DBPs — that can be harmful to health in cases of long-term exposure.
The parish’s Port Sulphur water system was hit with a violation by state authorities in part because of that. It was graded an F by the state Department of Health in 2023, also partly for that reason.
Aw, the environmental health expert, said high levels of DBPs in drinking water over many years can cause problems with the liver, kidneys or central nervous system. There may be an increased cancer risk, but there is currently no conclusive evidence, he said.
Plaquemines was better prepared in 2024, installing advanced filtration machines using reverse osmosis technology at three plants in the lower parish. But it is a costly, temporary solution, running an estimated $1 million per month to rent the machinery last year.
Purchasing them and ensuring upkeep would be far more. On the front lines of the problem, Plaquemines is instead planning other solutions, mainly expanding the capacity of its infrastructure to be able to pump more water from farther upriver. But if those upriver plants were also affected, the parish would be back to relying on water brought in on barges and the filtration machines, parish officials say.
In Orleans and Jefferson parishes, the filtration machines are inadequate to deal with the far larger amounts of water consumed there.
A report compiled by FEMA following the 2023 saltwater intrusion, obtained by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate, warns of the need to prepare for future occurrences and dire consequences.
“It was clear that a saltwater intrusion could precipitate a significant if not severe threat to the health of populations involved and to the immediate- and long-term viability of the infrastructure and water systems themselves,” it said.
Modeling by both the Corps and academics has been delving into the challenge, including how best to build or position a sill to deal with it. Ehab Meselhe, a Tulane professor who has conducted a range of modeling independently and for the state, said the threat may become more severe if seas rise as predicted toward the end of the century.
Some modeling, while rudimentary, has shown that around 5 inches of sea level rise could move the saltwater wedge a couple miles farther upriver, Meselhe said, though there’s also lots of uncertainty related to breaks in the lower Mississippi’s banks.
Projections for sea level rise along Louisiana’s coast by 2100 range far higher — from around 3.5 feet to roughly 9 feet above 2000 levels.
Analysis by the Corps of Engineers, also approximate, shows that around 3 feet of sea rise would see the wedge move 4 to 8 miles farther upriver, reaching a given location three to six days sooner than it does today.
Meselhe and his colleagues also ran modeling comparing 2023 conditions to 1994 data. The rudimentary results found that if no sill would have been built, the saltwater wedge would have advanced about 20 miles farther upriver in 2023.
Asked about the problem while out on the river, Wendel asserted that the port would always take the community’s interests in mind, but that saltwater intrusion has long been an issue, even before the recent deepening. As for the models showing it worsening, he says experts at the Corps would have to answer those questions.
“We need this to feed the world,” he said of shipping along the river, specifically naming grain exports from the Midwest. “The whole Mississippi River is not just the Port of New Orleans. There are ports all up and down this river bringing in deep-draft vessels all the way to Baton Rouge.”
‘One of the most dangerous stretches’
Indeed, new modeling is showing that three key factors are worsening saltwater intrusion when the river is low. They include the deepening of the river for shipping, but also sea level rise and breaks in the lower river bank, weakening the Mississippi’s flow.
The biggest factor in the most recent academic modeling has been the breaks in the river bank far down in Plaquemines Parish, commonly referred to as crevasses, Meselhe says. One in particular, called Neptune Pass, has been taking as much as 16% of the river’s flow since it drastically widened when the Mississippi was exceptionally high and powerful in 2019, notes coastal scientist Alex Kolker, who has closely studied the channel.
In total, only 20% of the river’s water at New Orleans was making its way down through the three main channels in the Bird Foot to the Gulf, one study analyzing 2022 data determined.
Corps modeling so far also suggests the crevasses may be the most significant factor in the recent worsening.
The crevasses’ effects on saltwater intrusion involve how they slow the river. The weakened currents make it more difficult for the river to push back the saltwater moving up from the Gulf in the shape of a wedge along the bottom when the Mississippi is low.
A crevasse as large as Neptune Pass can also be a problem for navigation. The slower currents allow sediment to drop out and build up along the bottom, creating a hazard for vessels, leading the Corps to dredge in areas it hasn’t had to before. Its strong pull also produces a countercurrent posing dangers for ships.
Finally, Corps modeling illustrates how sea level rise combined with the crevasses and land subsidence could be problematic, effectively deepening the breaks in the river and potentially creating new ones.
The good news concerning the crevasses is that partial solutions may exist. The Corps is currently planning to construct a sill to reduce the flow of Neptune Pass while still allowing it to build land with sediment flowing through it.
That plan has come as somewhat of a relief to coastal advocates who do not want it shut off completely. For them, the crevasses are acting as natural river diversions, building land the way the Mississippi did before the levees were built.
But that does not address sea level rise or the other existing and future crevasses. Reducing emissions and heading off the worst effects of climate change may be the only true solution when it comes to limiting rising seas.
The issue is in such flux and poses so many risks that the Corps is planning to build a physical model on a section of the river to study saltwater intrusion and sill dynamics.
Mead Allison, a Tulane University geologist co-leading the National Academies study on the lower river, points out the range of emerging challenges, but says he nonetheless sees hope. He notes the gargantuan task of creating New Orleans in the first place in what was essentially a swamp whose land was “jello.”
“And we managed a way to create a navigation channel through one of the most dangerous stretches for shipping in the world, through the mouths of the Mississippi River, and New Orleans would have not flourished,” he said over lunch on Tulane’s campus recently, not far from where the Mississippi begins its half-circle cradling the Crescent City.
“There are a whole series of those kinds of emergencies that you would have said threaten the future of New Orleans. And I have to feel like we’re going to come up with a solution to this one, right? There is a solution to this, and there are a lot of smart people working on it, and so we’re going to get there.”
‘We’re still people’
Justine DeMolle, wearing a blue fishing shirt with her name embroidered above the pocket, hustles between her kitchen and the dining room at her restaurant, perched near the spot where Louisiana reaches its end.
She is not the type to make excuses or dwell on challenges, instead leaving her fate in God’s hands. Family pictures adorn the dining room along with a painting of the Last Supper and a cross with the words “Amazing Grace.”
The restaurant in Venice, almost as far south as you can go in Plaquemines Parish, is called “Changes,” and painted on the peach-colored outside wall is the motto: “One season at a time.”
But it hasn’t been easy for the 63-year-old since she bought the restaurant over six years ago. Business has fluctuated. Fishing lodges nearby now provide their own food for guests, she says. The oil companies that use the area for a base often do the same, and few residents from farther up the parish make the drive down to dine.
The saltwater intrusion that hit lower Plaquemines hard for a couple years in a row certainly didn’t help, though DeMolle is hesitant to make too much of it. She had to get rid of her fountain drink machine and sell bottles, and she could no longer serve tap water to customers, causing an increase in prices.
She stopped selling her homemade sweet tea, and “that was a real big thing,” she said. Later, she said the water had a chemical-like taste.
But she has not yet had to replace any corroding equipment, unlike others in the parish who have spent huge amounts of money doing so. She understands Venice is particularly vulnerable — and mentions she does not want to sound “selfish” — but wishes those in charge of dealing with the problem would explain “why you can’t protect me like you’re doing up the road.”
“I know it has a lot to do with New Orleans and all of those places, but we’re still people. We’re people and we live here,” said DeMolle, a mother of three who grew up in Buras about 20 minutes upriver. “I feel like, if you’re going to do it, just do it. Take care of where you have your people.”
Others have seen far more damage.
That includes Dylan Butler, whose family owns the popular Venice Marina a short drive away, where a sign reading “Fishing Capital of the World” may not be much of an exaggeration. It serves as an ideal launching point for both inland and offshore fishing, from freshwater species like largemouth bass to the red snapper that weave their way through the legs of Gulf oil platforms.
Butler, a 32-year-old former University of Louisiana-Lafayette baseball player, said he could not venture to guess how much it all cost his family’s business and the wider fishing industry in lower Plaquemines, but that it was likely in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Commercial docks had to replace expensive ice machines. Water pumps corroded. Supplying water to the restaurant, bar, rental camps and houseboat slips owned by his family’s marina was endlessly complicated.
“It takes over every aspect of what you have going business-wise and life-wise,” he said. “What you drink from how you get up to brush your teeth in the morning, to the water that is sent to your refrigerator.”
Residents dealt with similar issues.
Relaxing on his porch in Venice with his wife and great-grandson, his shrimp boat on a trailer out front, Johnny Bourgeois says he had to replace two hot water heaters in 2023, spending about $1,200. They corroded and busted due to the salt water.
He spent months that year picking up bottled water from the nearby fire station provided by the parish. He was grateful for it and says it was sufficient, but getting through the day without a reliable drinking water supply was complicated.
It was better in 2024, but there were still periods when the water seemed to taste salty or like chemicals, he and other residents said.
“That’s the first couple years that I’ve seen it that bad,” said the 68-year-old retired shrimper and lifelong resident of the area, referring to 2022 and 2023. “Plenty people had to change their hot water heater, their washer and dryer.”
‘Is this for society?’
Not far from Changes, the marina and Bourgeois’ house, the river reaches its end — and the root of many of Louisiana’s problems related to the mythic waterway reveals itself.
It is here, at what is known as the Bird Foot Delta, that the Mississippi completes its 2,350-mile journey and tumbles into the Gulf, the work of draining more than 40% of the contiguous United States complete. What remains of its muddy flow splinters off into three principal directions, the wisps of land encasing it simultaneously sinking and being washed away.
It can feel like the end of the world past these withering wetlands, once so labyrinth that European explorers had trouble finding the river’s mouth. Beyond them, the turbid, green waters of the Gulf are wide open, oil and gas structures like space stations in the distance.
Signs of the sinking and disappearing land are everywhere. The rusty Pass a Loutre lighthouse, moved here in 1855, stands on a narrow, shifting sandbar. Its door has sunken beneath the sands, the flight of steps inside of it drowning in the Gulf’s waters.
Farther inland, along South Pass, where James Eads’ construction of jetties transformed river shipping in the late 19th century, there is more of the same. The steps leading down from the door of South Pass Light at Port Eads plunge into the water, illustrating how far the rusted, white landmark has sunk into the subsiding ground.
Later, by around 1910, shipping companies had already needed a deeper channel and concentrated on the adjacent Southwest Pass, which now ushers towering tankers and container ships from across the globe into the river and back out again.
The Corps’ dredging budget for the Mississippi from Baton Rouge to the Gulf for the 2024 fiscal year was $228 million — by far the largest dredging program in the country, including Red Eye Crossing, where Mayo Broussard helped stand watch.
It removes roughly 46 million cubic yards a year of sediment from that stretch, enough to fill 10 Superdomes. Nearly half of it comes from Southwest Pass alone.
The funding is not always enough, particularly if the river runs unusually high and more extensive dredging is necessary. Corps spokesman Ricky Boyett says the agency works with whatever it gets and makes do, sometimes delaying less urgent projects if needed.
There is a benefit to all of that digging beyond shipping. The Corps reuses a large portion of the mud dredged from Southwest Pass to build land along the 22-mile channel in the vanishing Bird’s Foot, though much of it eventually disappears again.
Taking into account land loss, the Corps has built roughly 750 net acres per year since 2010 through what is officially known as “beneficial use.”
“We’ve done enough of that activity in the last 15-20 years that we’re actually seeing a net land gain in areas serviced by Southwest Pass or areas adjacent to Southwest Pass,” said Jeff Corbino, an environmental specialist with the Corps. “So we have the setting where everything’s sinking around us, but we’re outpacing the rate of subsidence.”
The Corps does not do it as a charitable contribution. Building up the surrounding land helps allow it to keep the riverine highway into the nation’s heartland open.
“It’d be extremely difficult for us to maintain a 50-foot-deep channel for 30 miles of open gulf before we hit deep water,” Corbino, 50, said while aboard the Hurley after watching its dustpan dredge descend into the river’s depths. “If we let that marshland subside and disappear, we would have a tremendous problem maintaining that channel.”
Duffy, of the Big River Coalition, said the importance of maintaining Southwest Pass cannot be overstated. He dismissed talk of seeking to reposition the river’s main entry and exit, calling it simply unrealistic, though a range of academics and others have said the possibility must be studied considering future projections.
When the river was deepened to 50 feet, the Corps spelled out a compelling economic case. Its cost-benefit analysis was 7.2 to 1 — meaning the economic benefits outnumbered the costs by that much, and that was prior to the huge liquefied natural gas plant being built in Plaquemines Parish.
But when it comes to the Bird Foot, it is a race against time, and time may eventually win. The state is also pursuing its own plan to restore part of the delta, but with sea level rise driven by climate change projected to further gain pace toward the end of this century, how long before it risks overwhelming these already fragile wetlands?
Down off the Bird Foot, Richie Blink navigates his skiff among the jetties, lighthouses and oil and gas installations. The 38-year-old, a former Plaquemines Parish council member, oil industry boat operator and son of a shrimper, now conducts tours to draw attention to Louisiana’s severe land loss crisis.
His boat is named after an area lost to erosion, Dry Cypress. He says the Corps should think more creatively and work to build land, even if it means narrowing shipping lanes, and laments what he sees as industry’s overwhelming influence.
“We’re still operating like it’s the 1880s and we can’t afford to do that,” he says after having motored his skiff into South Pass behind a shrimp trawler, its green nets splayed out to the sides like a bat’s wings. “Who are we doing this for? Is this for the tugboat company, or is this for society?”
Mayo Broussard pulls out a cigarette as he exits the boat bringing him back to dry land, joking with other Corps workers familiar with his rascally persona. He is nearing retirement, and he mentions he’d like to tell his story while he still remembers it.
His life and career stand as a symbol of the intertwined existence of Louisiana and the Mississippi. The Atchafalaya Basin, where the Mississippi once ran, was his backyard as a kid, and he recalls drifting in a pirogue, taking in the sounds of the swamp and little else.
He followed his father and other family members into the dredging profession, beginning in the summers when he was a kid as a dishwasher and all-around helper, sometimes sleeping on the quarterboats that housed workers.
“It was a family atmosphere,” Broussard said, unspooling his long experience in his raspy voice. “A lot of that intrigued me.”
His early jobs were with private companies wherever they’d send him, from the river to the Gulf and beyond, as far away as Asia. But he was given a tragic reminder of the hazards of the job when his dad was severely hurt and permanently disabled in a work accident aboard a dredge off Beaumont, Texas.
He says he wished he had “half the toughness” of his father, who lived into his 90s despite the accident. Broussard went to work in the industry full time when he turned 18.
An old timer informed him of the basics: “It ain’t pretty, it don’t smell good, but you got to have it,” he said. “I’m thinking, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’ And he started explaining about, when you’re moving volume, the cheapest way to do it is by water.”
The Vietnam veteran admits to having had a hard time balancing the demanding schedule requiring him to be away from home for long stretches, recalling some choice words an ex-wife had for him. He jokes that at times the job has been his “mistress.”
“Basically, the doctor told me that if I didn’t change my lifestyle, that I probably wouldn’t make it to 45,” Broussard said.
With that in mind, he made the jump to the Corps in 1988, inspecting work sites and informing his superiors that he did not want a desk job.
He became a senior construction representative, overseeing inspectors and quality assurance, “making sure the taxpayer gets his bang for the buck.”
He’s set to retire later this year. He wants to spend his time afterward on a houseboat and move anytime anybody gets close, though he also enjoys being around his 16 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
He’s grateful to the Corps, which has provided him with a good, steady living, and, by extension, to the river itself. His existence, like Louisiana’s, has depended upon it.
“It’s the lifeblood of this country, man — the Mississippi,” Broussard says. “Always has and always will be.”
