Officials: Levee improvements paid off

While frequent comparisons have been made between Hurricane Laura and Hurricane Rita, for St. Mary Parish, it was Rita along with Hurricane Ike that provided the bench mark for the current level of protection from storm surge.
Since those two storms, the St. Mary Parish Levee District has installed floodgates on the western end of the parish on the Yellow Bayou and Hanson and Franklin canals and is working on a floodgate on Bayou Teche to protect other areas of Franklin. That project is scheduled to be complete later in 2020, and will protect the Eastwood Subdivision, among other areas.
The floodgates com-pleted since Ike worked as projected during Laura.
“Some of the investments that have been made in the levee system over the last few years are certainly paying off in those particular areas,” levee district Executive Director Tim Matte said.
While there was success, there still is a disconnect with the numbers the state gives the parish for projected storm surge, St. Mary Parish Office of Emergency Preparedness Director David Naquin said.
He said the storm surge numbers the parish receives don’t factor in all current protection improvements.
“It makes a difference,” he said, noting that projections for inundation in some areas don’t materialize because the parish has levees in place to protect those areas.
Therefore, the local levee district has to convert the projected storm surge totals given to them to factor in the additional protections, Naquin said,
Naquin said the parish will be looking to get the state updated on the levee protections in the parish as soon as possible so the parish receives accurate num-bers in the future.
While the protected flood structures worked as planned, Matte cautioned that they only are built to meet a certain level of protection and may not provide relief from every storm.
“For example, if in fact Laura had hit Vermilion Bay or hit more directly on the west end of the parish, those same structures that I’m saying protected us, might not have been sufficient to protect us to these higher levels, so there’s always that storm that’s bigger than the levees you have,” he said.
As for updates since Rita and Ike, the Yellow Bayou and Hanson Canal floodgates installed since Ike kept water from the Centerville area where U.S. 90 was underwater in previous storms.
The Franklin Canal floodgate also has kept water from flooding the Pecan Acres area in Franklin, an area that flooded in Rita and Ike.
Since Hurricane Barry, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has raised levees near Cabot Corp. in Franklin. The facility flooded during Barry, but it didn’t flood during Laura.
The parish also has raised the Yokley Levee, which extends from the pump station in Franklin to the Charenton Canal.
“I don’t know if they would have been topped in this event, but there again, we’ve added some protection there,” Matte said.