West St. Mary farmers grapple with floods

Chad Gianfala, owner and operator of B and B Farms, in partnership with Adeline Planting Company, and chairman of the Consolidated Drainage District 1 speaks about tidal surges and flood conditions in West St. Mary Parish with the ease and authority which only comes from extensive subject knowledge.
He says west St. Mary drainage issues have affected his farming operation for 18 years, and have been getting worse year by year, with last year having been the worst.
“The (St. Mary Parish) Levee District is doing what they’re meant to do,” Gianfala said. “They’re building levees up and blocking off major canals. But, it’s forcing that water more to the west.
“The Calumet Cut needs to be opened back up. The “jaws,” (where Charenton Canal and Jaws Bay empty into West Cote Blanche Bay) that run out of Baldwin, which takes on water all the way north of Alexandria and back to Loreauville, all of that is plugged up. It’s silted up really badly. And I think a lot of that has contributed to the high water events we have been having these last few years on the river (Atchafalaya River). A lot of the sediment can’t get out into the Gulf, so it is headed down the Intracoastal (Intracoastal Waterway) toward the west, and it is silting up all of our drainage canals. So we are having issues almost back to Highway 90.”
Gianfala confided that his farm is having trouble cultivating and fertilizing due to tidal surges, saying, “Even just with regular tides, we get the water in, but we just can’t get it out.”
Pointing to last year’s swollen rivers, he put the estimated time of effect at nine months. “We had two feet of water above regular tides, just with the river being that high,” he reported. And that was before Hurricane Barry added a registered four and a half foot tidal surge.
Gianfala said he and others at the drainage district have tried taking matters into their own hands in order to clear out some of the silt in coastal canals, but their funds are limited.
“There’s a guy we hire who has a mud boat with a front-end loader on it, and we go in and try to open up these outlets all along the Intracoastal canals, trying to solve some of the problem with what little funding we’ve got. But, that’s nowhere near what needs to be done.”
According to Gianfala, an informal committee of local farmers has formed, and they meet every so often to air grievances and discuss possible solutions.
He further stated that he thought it would be helpful for the committee to meet with the levee district, the drainage district, and parish government, if for nothing else than for the farmers to have a venue where their voices may be heard, “and to see if we can get the Jaws opened up and the Calumet Cut, to see if we can get some relief.”
That relief, Gianfala posed, should come in the form of a dredging project, and in the areas he outlined.
Mark Patout, a 40-year sugar cane farmer in west St. Mary, was comprehensive about his opinion of what needs to get done to combat flooding in the area, saying, “Something needs to be done to get the water out in a manner where we can mitigate the water coming down the Intracoastal Canal from east to west, but mitigate it so that the water quality improves where they have commercial fishing outfits, so the headrush of the Intracoastal is not such that it traps water North of the Intracoastal, and you can have a normal cycling in and out of tide water.
“We need an opening up of some areas so that the water can get out quicker; and those things can be modeled. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency can model a bunch of different scenarios to see what could be a proper solution to benefit a large number of people.
“I think that is what the objective should be.”
Patout went on to say that he has met with other farmers as well as governmental agencies, and that the most important thing at these meetings is that everyone land on the same page in regards to defining the problem, and its prospective mitigation benefitting the largest number of people.
“We have a problem,” he said, “and if we don’t all work together to solve this problem, it is going to get worse.
“There is no short-term solution, but if we don’t start addressing it, and make people realize the problem we are having, we will face more flooding issues on a more regular basis in the future.
“We are losing our coasts. Some of our Louisiana coasts have an issue of not enough fresh water. In our situation, where we are located, we have more fresh water than what we need, and it is not being channeled out in the correct manner and it is affecting all of us. It puts us more at risk during hurricanes and big rain events with strong south winds.
“The option to do nothing is not an option.”
St. Mary Parish Levee District Operations Manager Michael Brocato Jr. agrees with Patout, but said that the issue from the levee board’s point of view consists mainly of the $500 million price tag that the proposed solutions would demand.
Of levee systems to mitigate flooding, Brocato said, “It could possibly be done in portions because of cost. There are lots of structures that need to go in, pump stations, things like that, and that’s where you start getting into those much higher costs.”
He said the levee district initiated last week the modeling phase of a project with the Louisiana Watershed Initiative, and reported that, “Everybody else (Louisiana parishes) wants to send their water to us. So, through the Watershed Initiative we will look at how that affects us, and what needs to be done on the bottom end, because they can send it here as fast as they want, but if it can’t get out of here, it’s going to affect us. So, we need to make sure they aren’t going to do things north and west of us that are going to further impact our area with those high waters.
“We are trying to do a bottom up approach.
One of the big pushes through the Watershed Initiative is going to be dredging the Jaws,” because it would give the Charenton Canal an immediate outlet instead of getting mixed up in whatever higher water levels are in the Intracoastal, but we have to have modeling done to show that, to make sure that it is a worthy project to go after.”
Brocato closed by saying, “I want it known that we (the levee district) want to do something. We understand what is going on there (in west St. Mary). We truly do. We understand the impacts on farming, we do. It’s just that we have to be able to come up with funding, and half-a-billion dollars is a lot of money.
“The key is going to be to identify a path to move forward on this protection in a way that will make sense and will serve a purpose from its start… and that’s tough.”
To learn more about the St. Mary Parish Levee District, go to: https://smld.org/.