Weekly News Summary For April 3-9, 2006:
Nola Levee Work On Target, Gen. Riley Says
Maj. Gen. Don Riley proclaimed the many levee restoration projects in the New Orleans area on schedule for the upcoming hurricane season which officially begins June 1 and said the work of the many prime contractors was “absolutely superb.”
Gen. Riley, director of civil works of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, toured the area in a Louisiana National Guard Black Hawk helicopter along with Col. Lewis Setliff, commander of Task Force Guardian, and parish presidents Aaron Broussard of Jefferson and Henry “Junior” Rodriguez of St. Bernard.
After boarding the helicopter at the National Guard’s Jackson Barracks, the group overflew the repair work along the 17th Street Canal, which borders Jefferson and Orleans parishes. It then landed at a St. Bernard Parish construction site where the entourage met with representatives of Granite Construction, a prime contractor.
A short hop later, the helicopter landed at a site in Eastern New Orleans where they met with workers of Manson Gulf Construction, another prime contractor.
The final flight brought the group to the Boh Bros. Construction site on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW) in New Orleans East, where a press conference was held with the massive floodgate structures for the 17th Street Canal serving as backdrop. Boh Bros. won the contract to build the flood gates….
A group of towing industry veterans started a new venture, South-Sea Environmental and Construction LLC, Mobile, Ala., to fill the void for Gulf Coast marine salvage, wreck removal and coastal construction.
All too often, Bob Gardner said, he and his colleagues—Bill Haney, Billy Haney, Mark Oliver, Wendell Spencer and Dominic Walker—would receive phone calls from someone needing salvage, wreck removal, coastal construction and/or environmental services. Now with South-Sea, Gardner said he can recommend a company with combined assets, what he calls “one-stop shopping.”
“The things that South-Sea can do are the same things we have known individually,” Gardner said. “Now we have a broad-based knowledge on salvage and wreck removal. If you are in this business, you know a little when it comes to salvage, but in the aftermath of the storms, you know that there are a lot of needs out there. Environmental services are very important when it comes to salvage, and we have experts to help out. We all have a tremendous amount of experience in the various parts of this business, and that really compliments what we are doing.”…
More than six months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Louisiana/Mississippi border, storm-related problems are still rearing their ugly heads.
When new flood gates, designed to protect the metropolitan area from storm-surge flooding, are closed, it will significantly lessen the pumping stations’ ability to drain rain water from the city because of a reduced capacity at two of the three major outfall drainage canals.
The flood gates will only be closed to protect against storm-surge waters and not be a factor when left open during normal heavy rains in a non-tropical-storm event. Corps of Engineers officials are still reviewing options to increase the cubic-feet-per-second flow of rainwater through the flood gates when they are closed.
Meanwhile, a controversy between two of the pilot associations who guide deep-draft vessels on the Lower Mississippi River has ended up in state district court.
At issue is where the Bar Pilots will board and leave the ships. After their Pilottown facility was damaged beyond repair during Katrina, they land upriver in Venice, La., for a new facility.
The Associated Branch Pilots (Bar Pilots) had facilities at Southwest Pass, the main channel of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, and at Pilottown, where their pilotage ended and Crescent River Port Pilots took over for the voyage to New Orleans. Pilottown is near Mile Marker 2….
A large limestone deposit, a willing workforce and, perhaps most importantly, a connection to the Mississippi River were factors in the decision to build what will be the largest cement plant in the United States in Ste. Genevieve County, Mo.
Executives with Holcim (US) Inc., transportation officials and politicians from the national, state and local levels gathered at the site March 24 to officially break ground for the billion-dollar cement plant project. The ceremony marked more than the ceremonial beginning of construction; it also marked the end of almost five years of wrangling over environmental issues that held up the permitting of the plant.
A key feature of the plant will be the slackwater harbor at Mile 139 of the Upper Mississippi River. Now under construction, the harbor is scheduled to be completed by the end of next year. Currently the “dry” excavation is nearly finished for the harbor, and dredging will soon begin to take it to enough depth to handle barges during the low-water season on the Mississippi. The harbor is designed to handle about a 60-foot variance in river levels.
Once the slackwater harbor is finished, it will be put right to work, with much of the equipment for building the cement plant scheduled to be delivered by barge.
Completion of the overall project is slated for 2009….
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