Rain helps protect rice farms
ABBEVILLE — Heavy rains over the past two months seem to have helped push out salt water that had been creeping north and threatening the salt-sensitive rice crop in coastal southwest Louisiana, where many farmers depend on surface water from canals to irrigate their fields.
“Things are looking a lot better than they were,” Vermilion Parish Police Juror Wayne Touchet said.
“It has made a tremendous difference.”
Figures from salinity gauges monitored by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers show that the level of saltwater in many Vermilion Parish canals has dropped from historical highs at the end of last year to near normal levels.
The rain “was a big help in flushing out that basin,” Touchet said.
The drop in salt levels comes as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is finishing repairs to the damaged Leland Bowman Lock near Intracoastal City.
The lock was built to keep salt water from flowing inland in the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, a major shipping channel, but more salt water than usual has been passing through because the lock was damaged when a barge struck it in September.
The corps, which maintains the lock, has removed and repaired the damaged section, Touchet said, and the repaired section is expected to be back in place by next month.
The repairs cost about $1 million, he said.
A few dozen farmers filed a federal lawsuit last week against the company that owns the barge that struck the lock, seeking damages for saltwater intrusion problems that they blame largely on the damaged water-control structure.
The plaintiffs include ranchers, crawfish farmers and rice farmers who depend on fresh water from coastal canals.
“Technically, you have saltwater pollution,” said Lafayette attorney Joseph Joy, whose firm filed the lawsuit. “Some people have reduced planting, and some people couldn’t plant.”
The Police Jury still has a pending request for an emergency state appropriation of about $330,000 to repair a breach where salt water is overflowing into agricultural land out of a large canal that connects to the Gulf of Mexico.
Touchet said that more rain, along with repairing the damaged lock and fixing the levee breach, will go a long way toward addressing the saltwater concerns this year, but he and others have called for a long-term solution to an issue that farmers have struggled with annually.