Our Views: Big Muddy’s mud pipeline

• Advocate Opinion page staff
• Published: Apr 17, 2009 - Page: 6B

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We’ve got water and sewer pipes; we’ve got oil pipelines and gas pipelines. Now, we’ve got a mud pipeline.

It’s a great idea, surprisingly enough.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges the Mississippi River shipping channel. Instead of discarding the sediment, it will be moved through a pipeline at Bayou Dupont to fill in the gaps in the storm-battered Barataria Landbridge .

The $28.3 million project will be built using federal and state funds — the latter 15 percent of the cost — with oversight from the state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“The Bayou Dupont project breaks new ground for coastal restoration in our state because it is the first time we have carried out a project to transport sediments from the Mississippi River through a pipeline to build wetlands outside the river’s levees,” Gov. Bobby Jindal said.

Typically, restoration projects have used fill dredged from open waters of Barataria Bay. This is a more direct application of river sediment.

“While the levees on the Mississippi River accomplished their goal of preventing flooding and stabilizing the navigation channel that so many states rely upon, they also cut off the river sediment from nourishing and restoring our wetlands,” noted Garrett Graves, head of the state coastal agency. “This project takes the land-building process we learned from Mother Nature and does it much more efficiently.”

It’s a small part of the huge long-term project of restoring Louisiana’s coastline, but Jindal and others are right to welcome this effort. About 2.3 million cubic yards of sediment will be moved, beginning this summer. Maybe it’s only part of the whole in terms of Louisiana’s coast, but every bit helps.