For port, attention turns to Bayou Chene

For the Morgan City Harbor & Terminal District board, Monday was another occasion to feel good about the Port of Morgan City’s clearest channel in nearly seven years.
But board members got a reminder that there’s more dredging to do.
Beryl Gomez and Carol Aucoin of Pierre Part-Belle River Community Advocates asked board members about the next big dredging project: clearing Bayou Chene for the first time since 2009, along with bayous Boeuf and Black.
Dredging doesn’t mean only easier passage for commercial vessels. It means that more water will remain within the bayous’ banks and move out more quickly.
The concern for Gomez and Aucoin is the threat flooding poses to lives, property and business.
Aucoin, owner of one of four Belle River bed and breakfasts, said it’s tough to attract tourists with a foot of water in the front yard.
“To a rather poor parish,” Aucoin said, “it’s rather significant.”
The word from Tim Connell of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who joined Monday’s meeting at the Emergency Operations Center by phone, and port Executive Director Raymond “Mac” Wade is that dredging will begin in late summer.
The total dredging project for the bayous, including a miles-long piece of Bayou Chene, is expected to top $20 million, Wade said.
Bids will go out early in the summer.
“If the river stays low and dredges are available, we’ll get them out there as soon as the contract is awarded,” Connell said.
Elsewhere, Wade said, the dredging of the Atchafalaya between Morgan City and Berwick has eliminated most of a sandbar that once stretched parallel to the Morgan City side from near the city wharf to Conrad.
Now the sandbar is confined to an area near the wharf.
The dredging in recent months by four vessels has opened the channel from the port to sea buoy to something like the authorized dimensions of 20 feet deep by 400 feet wide.
This year marks the first time since 2015 when that could be said.
Outside the port board’s meeting room hangs a copy of a 2015 article in the Waterways Journal. The trade publication announced that the Port of Morgan City was open for business.
The story quoted Wade, who said 17 large cargo vessels had used the port in the previous six months.
But nearly all that business had been lost to a series of floods lasting until 2019. Those floods dumped sediment all along the channel, reducing the usable depth.
The last year’s dredging reopened the channel, officials said.
The flooding that matters to the port occurs along the Mississippi. Officials from the Corps of Engineers, the Coast Guard, the National Weather Service and other agencies are preparing to meet for a forecast of the flood potential for this spring.