LA - Drought, dredging, sea level rise. A salty Mississippi River mouth is a wakeup for New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS — The heating element removed from Monique Plaisance’s water heater in September was disintegrating, streaked with rust and covered in a dry crust. She blamed the corrosion on the water piped in from the area’s longtime drinking water source: the Mississippi River.
It was a similar story not far away at the Black Velvet Oyster Bar and Grill.
“We’re draining the hot water heater every few days to get most, or a good bit, of the salt out of that,” owner Byron Marinovich said. “The ice machine has been off since the third week of April.”
Plaisance’s home and Marinovich’s restaurant are in the Buras community of rural Plaquemines Parish, roughly 60 miles southeast of New Orleans and 20 to 30 miles upriver from where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. As in New Orleans, drinking water in the parish is drawn from the river.
But this year, the gulf pushed back. A wedge of saltwater slipped up along the river bottom, beginning in the spring.
By early October, water intakes at towns such as Boothville, Port Sulphur and Pointe a la Hache had been inundated.
Plaquemines officials list a variety of measures to provide drinkable water to residents in the southeastern part of the parish, which juts into the gulf. Trucks of bottled water for drinking and barges full of freshwater to dilute the saltwater before it goes into intakes are among the solutions.
Advisories against drinking tap water were lifted Oct. 18.
Plaisance and Marinovich are among residents who think remedial efforts began too late. They blame parish officials for not taking action until the water began posing a threat to more populated areas including the city of Belle Chasse, which is at the parish’s northernmost end and home to more than 10,000 people, roughly half the population of the mostly rural parish.
“We’ve been working on this since June the 19th,” Parish President Keith Hinkley said in a telephone interview. “We have not drug our feet. We moved as fast as we could in getting these projects up and running. We made a decision to get a water station, water plant, back up and running that had been down for two years. We got it back up in a position to start producing water in somewhere between six to eight weeks.”
