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Likewise, some of the approximately 8,000 cubic feet of sediment now being dredged to deepen the channel mouth was dumped there when the Orleans Levee District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers thought it best to practically plug the bayou by building a grade-level roadway. The Urban Water Plan report describes how the thinking has changed: “The Urban Water Plan proposes the restoration of the city’s canals to prominence as historic water corridors, each of which provides the city’s residents with access to new water-based amenities in the form of blueways, greenways, water plazas, and parklands.” “The bayou is our best case in point as a feature that helps to hold water and control interior flooding, and at the same time is an economic amenity,” said Michael Hecht, the chief executive officer of Greater New Orleans Inc. (GNO Inc.), the nonprofit economic development group that is promoting the Urban Water Plan.
many miles of outfall canals. Their failure during Katrina contributed to the devastation. Toppling them, now that the canal mouths have been gated against storm surge, will have an equally dramatic but positive impact, according to the plan: “With floodwalls removed, the primary canals are significant public assets, with parks, trails, docks, and waterfront development in place of the ditches and barren concrete structures that carry storm water today. “Restoring a more natural flow to the city’s interior waterways will also alleviate a major threat to the city: subsidence, which results when the water table drops in a city built on silt rather than bedrock.” The report notes that “the region’s current water-management paradigm, captured by the phrase ‘pave, pipe and pump,’ removes water from the landscape and throws off the water and soils out of balance.”
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Perhaps the most startling of the plan’s proposals is removal of the floodwalls that top the levees along many miles of outfall canals. Their failure during Katrina contributed to the devastation.
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“The enduring quality of Bayou St. John,” he said, “is a testament to the wisdom of having open water and circulation,” a concept central to the plan. “It’s a prime example of what we can do when we manage water right,” Schexnayder said. The Urban Water Plan proposes seven demonstration projects stretching from Jefferson to St. Bernard parishes that aim to reduce flooding and subsidence, and enhance the local economy and quality of life. Among them is the “Lafitte Blueway,” a canal running down the center of the Lafitte Corridor, the three-mile stretch of green space connecting City Park to Armstrong Park. It would be an important beneficiary of a healthier bayou. Bayou St. John is the linchpin of those projects, according to David Waggonner, a local architect and designer who has worked with Dutch officials on the Urban Water Plan. “It’s the key to the New Orleans area because it’s the source of water to the other canals,” he said. His firm, Waggonner & Ball, created the Urban Water Plan in collaboration with GNO Inc. Perhaps the most startling of the plan’s proposals is removal of the floodwalls that top the levees along
During dry periods, Bayou St. John will keep the city’s waterways filled and thus mitigate subsidence, Waggonner said. Efforts to restore the bayou’s natural flow from the lake will proceed cautiously to make sure engineers have not overestimated the friendliness of the lake. It currently feeds the bayou through small sluice gates, controlled by valves that are opened a few times a year and are covered with a mesh that prevents larger fish from entering. The plan is to see whether those gates can be opened more often, allowing water, fish and crabs to move between the lake and the bayou. The much larger gates at the mouth of the bayou, a storm-protection feature, have remained closed much of the time since their installation in 1992. These, too, are being readied for more frequent openings. The ongoing effort to restore the health of the bayou includes a complex but increasingly communal partnership between individuals, research institutes, public entities, and private groups and businesses. “It’s really been a community effort,” said New Orleans City Councilwoman Susan Guidry. She was president of the Parkview Neighborhood Association, a part of the Bayou St. John Conservation