Chris Landry
Bernard speaks to group about Cypress Bayou, Coulee
LaSalle drainage project
– St. Martin Parish Director of Administration Raymond Bernard Jr. represented St. Martin Parish in meetings with Louisiana’s Congressional delegation in the nation’s capital and discussed potential flooding issues along U.S. Highway 90 at U.S. Highway 92 during evacuation of South Louisiana during a hurricane or other disaster, Bernard told the St. Martin Parish Council at its meeting on July 7.
Cypress Bayou and Coulee LaSalle cannot adequately convey storm water routed through those watersheds, Bernard said, and that leads to flooding, property damage and partial closures of U.S. 90 in Lafayette and St. Martin Parishes.
Cypress Bayou runs along the area by the St. Martin Economic Development Authority (SMEDA) Park and Coulee LaSalle goes through Le Triomphe and near Smede Highway industrial park areas.
With potentially hundreds of thousands of people fleeing hurricanes along U.S. 90 from Terrebonne, Lafourche, Assumption, St. Mary and Iberia parishes, and possibly even the New Orleans area and other parishes in some cases, flooding along U.S. 90 could potentially be deadly for a large number of South Louisiana residents. The eight parishes that use the evacuation route, not including those in the New Orleans area, have a total population of greater than 700,000. Parishes to the west could use the evacuation route if a storm were coming from the western Gulf.
Bernard said his mission piggybacked off of a meeting that Parish President Pete Delcambre had earlier this year with representatives of the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development and the parish’s state legislative representatives concerning the evacuation route along U.S. Highway 90 and potential flooding issues.
The project’s goals are to eliminate repetitive flooding and closure of the U.S. 90/I-49 corridor, improve stormwater conveyance capacity within Cypress Bayou and Coulee LaSalle, reduce flooding impact to homes, businesses and roadways in St. Martin and Lafayette parishes, restore drainage functionality within the regional watershed and enhance public safety and resiliency for future storms and floods.
About 15,000 acres of property in the two parishes are affected by the drainage of the two waterways, including two industrial parks in St. Martin Parish.
Representatives of Iberia, Vermilion, St. Landry and Evangeline parishes also made presentations to the legislative representatives on priorities and projects in their regions that they’d like to see funded.
The parish representatives spoke to people in the offices of House Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Bill Cassidy and Sen. John Kennedy as well as Rep. Clay Higgins and Rep. Julia Letlow, the latter two of whom they spoke to in person.
Efforts to speak with representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were unsuccessesful. Bernard did not attend a meeting with representatives of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) because there are no airports in St. Martin Parish.
Bernard said that the proposed improvements include clearing, enlarging and grading Cypress Bayou and Coulee LaSalle to improve water flow conditions and increase the capacity of the waterways; replacing existing bridge and drainage structures at roadway crossings to eliminate hydraulic restrictions and improve transportation routes; and a hydrologic and hydraulic study to ensure the waterways are draining efficiently.
Drainage
The H&H study would cost $250,000 in additional funding to complete. Phase II of the project would be design and construction with an estimated cost of about $39 million. If full funding is not available, an alternative Phase II plan, which would include clearing, snagging and enlarging of the canals only, would cost about $19 million.
Bernard said the parish must continue to make presentations to state and federal representatives and continue drumming up support for projects that affect U.S. 90 and the future I-49 evacuation corridor.
Parish Council Chairman Chris Tauzin asked how many people in St. Martin Parish were affected by the flooding in the U.S. 90 area near Coulee LaSalle. Bernard said he was unsure but would ask.
Councilwoman Carla JeanBatiste said that it may primarily be businesses in the Industrial Park affected by that flooding. She said one such business had lost over a million dollars in equipment to floods and those businesses provide a lot of tax revenue to the parish.
Water has nowhere to drain currently so things like the flood of 2016 affect the businesses in the area, which sit in what is effectively a bowl with no effective drainage out of the area, JeanBatiste said. Flooding there also affects Lafayette Parish, leading to a cooperative effort with that parish to improve the drainage. Youngsville and Broussard and nearby Le Triomphe are affected by the drainage proposal.
“I think that’s the bigger thing with this particular project,” she said.
Bernard said the improvement project would start in that area and go all the way to the Cypress Island community so would impact people all along the way.
Delcambre said that since the waterways affect Lafayette Parish also, cooperating with that parish to get funding from state and federal sources is the best way to get the project done. Tying in the U.S. 90 evacuation route is a way to get backing from all the parishes in South Louisiana that rely on the highway in emergencies for funding the project.
“Eventually, that road, Highway 90 or I-49 in the future will be inundated and in the event of a hurricane or a major disaster, there will not be an evac route from South Louisiana,” Delcambre said. “I know it is a very large project. However, if we divide that up and divvy it up amongst the entirety of South Louisiana, all of a sudden it doesn’t become that large.”
Tauzin suggested having the Acadiana Watershed District, on whose board the parish has a seat, to spearhead the project as a regional issue. Tauzin said he would get the matter put on the agenda for the next AWD meeting.
Public Works
Parish Public Works Director Jason Castille outlined for the council what the department does for the parish.
The department has 43 employees in six divisions and is responsible for 755 named roads totaling 386 miles of roadside ditches.
The department also is responsible for 56 bridges in the parish and over 600 miles of canals, as well as two control structures, the Keystone Locks and the Henderson Control structure.
In 2025, the department took care of almost 4,900 work orders generated from public works personnel, parish council members and constituents and installed over 7,000 feet of culverts.
The department also buried 67 animals ranging from cows, goats, horses and pigs to sheep.
The year’s work consisted of more than 86,000 man hours.
Tauzin brought up the issue of canals that are being dug but stopped at wetlands areas. Delcambre said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stopped a project in the past because there was no permit issued and no mitigation for wetlands as required by the Corps. That set a precedent that the Corps of Engineers requires a permit for any construction of canals through wetlands.
Mitigation is a costly process — $30,000 for two acres of recent work, Delcambre said — so every canal dug through wetlands would cost $10,000 to $15,000 per acre, and the parish could not afford that.
Tauzin said the mitigation for all the canals started in the past has already been done, so clearing those canals should not require new permits or mitigation in his opinion. The work doesn’t call for changing the scope or size of the projects, he said, just putting things back to the original grade they were at.
“At some point in time we need to follow up with the Corps of Engineers and if we don’t have the money, we need to go find it,” Tauzin said. “Because we’re going to flood this parish. You want to talk catastrophic, that’s your catastrophic event. You’re going to flood this parish by building dams and laterals that we have all through the parish that we’ve been maintaining for years and years and all of a sudden we’re no longer doing it in those areas.”
The parish needs to apply for permits if needed, he said, before there is a major flood affected by canals and laterals that are not cleared to their original level.
Delcambre said that all of the projects mentioned such as the Joe Daigre Canal project, were wetlands mitigated as part of the work done.
Tauzin said the main canals were mitigated but not the laterals that collect water from surrounding subdivisions and areas and delivers the water to the main canals, which the parish maintains.
“Y’all are having a hard time identifying laterals and mains,” Tauzin said. “A main is Joe Daigre Canal. Bayou Portage here is a main. Bayou Teche is a main. Bayou Ami’s a main. A lateral is that little coulee that rain in back of Bayou Portage, the one that ran in David’s district (Councilman David Poirier), the one that ran in Chris’s district (Councilman Chris Courville) that we’ve been maintaining for 20 or 30 years with our own equipment with our own people, not an engineered project. It’s a project that drains into the major tributaries. We never did mitigation before. But all of a sudden we’re not digging them anymore and we’re causing problems. That’s what I’m asking. If you’ve got something from the Corps that shows it, please share it with the council. If not, I think we need to back up and look at these projects.”
Courville said he found a statement on the Corps of Engineers website that says the maintenance of existing, currently serviceable drainage ditches is exempted from those permitting requirements. That only applies if the work does not expand the ditch’s original capacity or drain additional wetlands.
That work includes removing silt, vegetation or debris to return the lateral to its original capacity.
