$10M grant will speed port's dock expansion

October has been a good month for the Port of Morgan City.

First, the Weeks Marine cutter-head dredge Capt. Frank made an unexpected appearance Oct. 17. The dredge has been removing sediment from troublesome areas of Berwick Bay.

Then the port office was notified that it will receive a $10 million federal grant to help pay for and speed up a dock expansion project.

“I’m on Cloud 9,” port Executive Director Raymond “Mac” Wade said Wednesday.

U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, R-Lafayette, and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, announced the grant in press releases Wednesday.

After a series of floods dumped silt into the port’s channel to the Gulf beginning in 2015, the port’s once-promising handling of import and export craft all but stopped. Now, after an unprecedented level of dredging over the last year, the channel is open, and the port is expanding its dock in hopes of attracting transshipments again.

The expansion is in two parts — one to the east, one to the west — that will expand the dock’s river frontage from 800 feet to 1,900 feet.

The east expansion, expected to cost $5 million-$5.5 million, has been funded with a grant from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Port Priority Program.

The port had also received a $15 million Port Priority grant for the west expansion, but that portion of the work was expected to cost $25 million-$30 million.

“We were going to start that late next year or early 2024,” Wade said. “We were going to do it in phases. Now we can go ahead with it.”

Mike Knobloch of the port staff prepared the grant application, but “a million people apply for it,” Wade said. “You have a one-in-a-million chance.”

Those odds paid off for the port.

The $10 million grant comes from the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021. The act set aside $17 billion for ports.

Wade said thanked the Louisiana congressional delegation for helping secure the funding.
Cassidy helped negotiate the compromise that resulted in passage of the infrastructure bill. Higgins voted against it in the House, saying in a press release that it was “9% roads and bridges and 91% socialist garbage.”

The dredging also comes at an opportune time.

Low water in the Mississippi River has raised concerns about river transport. A third of the Mississippi’s flow is diverted into the Atchafalaya, which is also low but not enough to affect naviga-tion, Wade said.

The Atchafalaya at Morgan City has been hovering between 1.5 and 3 feet since Oct. 20, dipping below 1 foot Wednesday. Flood stage is 6 feet.