Bar Channel to be dredged

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is set to start dredging the Atchafalaya River Bar Channel within a month, which should allow more vessels to travel to the Port of Morgan City, port officials say.
The Morgan City Harbor and Terminal District Commission met Monday at the Port of Morgan City.
Corps officials awarded a contract Monday to dredge the Atchafalaya River Bar Channel at a cost of $13 million, Anh Nguyen of the Corps of Engineers said during the meeting. The funds will dredge the channel to 20 feet deep and 300 feet wide, Nguyen said.
The channel is congressionally authorized to be 20 feet deep and 400 feet wide. The Corps of Engineers only has funding to dredge the waterway once a year. The Bar Channel is about 22 miles long and begins about 20 miles south of the Port of Morgan City dock.
It is currently about 14 feet to 15 feet deep, but hasn’t gotten shallower in the past month, Nick Cox of Moffat & Nichol said.
No import-export ships are able to get through the Bar Channel right now, and a rice ship recently had to cancel its trip to the port, Wade said.
Dredging should begin in mid-October and last three to four months, Port Executive Director Raymond “Mac” Wade said. However, sediment quickly builds up in the channel after it’s dredged, Wade said.
Therefore, port officials are working to build their own sidecaster dredge so they can keep the channel at 20 feet deep year round at less cost than the corps use to dredge the channel, Wade said. A sidecaster dredge involves using a vessel to agitate the sediment that builds up in the channel and casting it to the side.
Getting a sidecaster dredge ready to dredge the Bar Channel will probably take a year to a year and a half, Wade said.
During Monday’s meeting, Port Special Projects Coordinator Mike Knobloch said port officials received notification Friday from the U.S. Department of Transportation that the port received $209,000 in 2015 port security grant funds to maintain its physical oceanographic real-time systems in the Bar Channel, maintain cameras on the port’s property, maintain its touch assisted command and control system, and to provide for computer aided dispatching.
Computer aided dispatching will help with the touch assisted command and control system that law enforcement agencies use to coordinate incident responses with one another, Knobloch said.
The port is required to provide $69,700 in matching funds for the port security projects, Knobloch said.
The Port of Morgan City’s $11 million Government Emergency and Operations Center is set to be complete by mid-October. The 35,000-square-foot, two-story facility can serve as an emergency command center during hurricanes in addition to housing government tenants, such as the U.S. Coast Guard, on a daily basis. The command center will occupy the second floor, while everyday tenants will use the first floor.
As of Monday, construction was 80 percent complete on the building, which will be able to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, project manager Walt Adams said. The building should have permanent electricity by the end of September, Adams said.
In other business, the commission:
—Approved spending funds relating to the Government Emergency and Operations Center.
—Authorized submission of its Louisiana Compliance Questionnaire.

This story was written by Zachary Fitzgerald of The Daily Review staff. Reach him at zfitzgerald@daily-review.com.