Matte: Levee district projects are working

The Franklin chapter of the Rotary Club received an update this week on a recent high-water event in the region and the efforts to protect people and property from flooding damage.
Tim Matte, with the St. Mary Parish Levee District, was on hand Tuesday at the group’s weekly meeting and had a message about the work being done to prevent water from flooding upriver from becoming a problem here. Matte’s message: the efforts are working.
“A lot of these projects have done a good job of protecting our citizens,” Matte said. “This was unprecedented in a couple of ways. It was unprecedented in that that kind of high water never happens in January. One of the challenges when you set out to do something like this is it’s very expensive to do all of the things that need to be done.”
Matte laid out a detailed presentation about the various projects including building a temporary levee on Avoca Island near Morgan City as well as other measures on Bayou Chene. The work on Bayou Chene includes the use of a submersible barge as well as driving sheets of metal into the ground stretching across waterway.
Matte said one of the main differences between the work being done now and previous efforts to curb flooding is the sheer size of the waterway.
“In 1973, the same thing was done with a barge across Bayou Chene,” Matte said. “But, in 1973, they used a barge that was somewhere in the 200 to 300 foot length and it went from bank to bank. Today, that same bayou is a thousand feet across.”
Matte concluded the presentation by telling Rotary members that, while the projects appeared to be doing what the levee district wants them to do, work continues to monitor the conditions in the area. Matte said the barge project will be monitored 24 hours a day by remote video cameras and is visited in person twice a day to make sure the massive structure doesn’t need to be adjusted.
“We will install cameras to help us with surveillance,” Matte said. “It’s a cost effective solution to the problem. We have to monitor every day whether the barge has moved and we don’t need to re-ballast.”
Matte also mentioned the work done by the National Guard who constructed the levee system on Avoca Island to prevent water from moving into the bayou.
“Logistically, this was a major project,” Matte said. “There were very muddy and sloppy conditions.”