The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District and St. Bernard Parish officials yesterday signed a design agreement for the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) Beneficial Use of Dredged Material Program (BUDMAT) project in St. Bernard Parish.
Commenting the latest news, New Orleans District Commander Col. Michael Clancy , said: “The BUDMAT program allows the Corps to make better use of dredged material when it is feasible to do so.”
Dredged material for the project will come from the routine maintenance dredging of the New Orleans Port Crossings. The project is located in St. Bernard Parish east of the Mississippi River, south of the Violet Canal in the vicinity of Lake Lery.
The total design cost is estimated at $1.15 million under a 75-percent federal/25-percent non-federal cost-sharing agreement.
St. Bernard Parish President, Guy McInnis , added that the project is something that the parish wanted to do, saying “to move sand from the river to the basin by the way of dredging is St. Bernard’s priority, and we appreciate the opportunity to do something that we’ve been wanting to do for some time.”
According to USACE, the project is part of the overall LCA BUDMAT program, which aims to restore and create coastal landscape features such as, but not limited to, marshes, ridges and islands that provide wildlife and fisheries habitat, reduce the loss of existing coastal landscape features and provide risk reduction to Louisiana’s coastal infrastructure.