For decades now, promises to tame the Comite River and its dangerous floods in the Baton Rouge region haven’t come to fruition.
In 1991, the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed a report recommending a 12-mile diversion channel from the Comite to the Mississippi River. In 2016, floods devastated the area, damaging tens of thousands of homes and renewing the project’s urgency.
But even after that destruction, the diversion canal’s end has been delayed repeatedly, and residents are growing weary.
“What can we do but sit here and come to these meetings?” Robert Burns, a member of the Concerned Citizens for Drainage Improvement, said Thursday to the Comite River Diversion Canal Project Task Force, which met at the state Capitol.
“I’ll tell you what we do,” he said. “… Every day we get up and pray, and we hope that Mother Nature doesn’t decide to create another low pressure event like happened in ‘16 and get us again, because we are wide open.”
I know everyone has good intentions, but you cannot wrap good intentions around my house and keep it dry.
– Robert Burns, a member of the Concerned Citizens for Drainage Improvement
The project is an 8-mile engineered channel that will divert water from the Comite into the Mississippi River, said Bobby Duplantier, a senior project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
It has a $907.8 million price tag, nearly double what was initially anticipated. The project is separated into 22 construction contracts; seven are complete, six are ongoing and six still have to be awarded.
Its sweet spot for flood mitigation is for 10- to 50-year events, Corps members explained. Put another way, it would offer protection against a flood that has between a 2% and 10% chance of happening any year. If another 2016 flood happens, it will help but not completely negate it, they said.
But mechanical failure is not a concern. “There are no touchpoints for failure,” Duplantier said, because the river diversion relies on gravity instead of human intervention. Once the water level in the Comite reaches a certain level, it will be diverted into the Mississippi.
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The scale of the project is enormous — the largest in Louisiana and one of the largest in the nation, said state Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Denham Springs, who heads the task force.
The project requires a number of utilities to be relocated, 44 out of 66 of which are complete, said Christina Brignac, critical projects manager for the state Department of Transportation and Development.
Construction is scheduled to finish in the third quarter of 2025, Duplantier said. The federal government is footing the cost for the remainder of the project. But once complete, its maintenance will fall to East Baton Rouge Parish.
Hodges said she and others toured the project last week and reported “a lot of progress” had been made since the task force last met in March.
It’s not the first time the end of the project has been on the horizon, but Hodges is hopeful it’s the last.
“There’s been a lot of disappointment in the past, but I feel certain this project is going to be completed soon,” Hodges said.
Not all are so optimistic.
“If I look at my notes on previous meetings, it gets pretty redundant, quite frankly, with promises, broken promises, deadlines, missed deadlines declared,” Burns said.
He thinks the project being done by the end of 2025 is a “pipedream.”
Hodges prodded Corps representatives on whether the project could be completed sooner and stressed the urgency for residents. For her, the work is personal.
In 2016, she woke up with 3 inches of water under her bed. She thought her roof was leaking for a moment — “then I realized the river was in our house,” she said. The water quickly rose to 4 feet.
“That’s a traumatic thing,” she said.
Though some have remained in the area, waiting and praying for the canal’s finish, many have left, Hodges said, and others are close to leaving if faced with another flood.
“The Comite diversion canal impacts everyone who had water in their home,” she said. “We have to protect hundreds of thousands of people who experience the trauma of losing everything during the flood, everything — baby pictures, wedding pictures, our cars, our homes, our shoes — everything we owned was lost.”
It’s hard for people who didn’t flood to wrap their minds around the impact, resident Noel Hunt, also a member of the citizen group, told the task force.
His sports memorabilia, antiques and belongings collected over 50 years of marriage — “it’s unbelievable to see it piled up on the road,” he said. “ … I would not wish that on anybody.”
Hunt said he was blessed to have insurance, but it was still an incredibly frustrating process. His antiques were just “old furniture” to the insurance company.
Burns said he felt those working on the project meant well, but that’s not enough.
“I know everyone has good intentions, but you cannot wrap good intentions around my house and keep it dry,” he said.
Creative Commons Republished from lailluminator.com
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