[StBernard] Corps of Engineers awards $5.3 million floodgate contract in St. Bernard Parish

[Westley Annis]

Corps of Engineers awards $5.3 million floodgate contract in St. Bernard
Parish
By Chris Kirkham, The Times-Picayune 
March 24, 2010, 5:29PM
The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded a $5.3 million contract to build a
floodgate across Louisiana 46 in the eastern end of St. Bernard Parish,
which will tie together two large stretches of concrete-topped levees that
will eventually ring most populated areas of the parish.

The Louisiana 46 floodgate project was awarded to Integrated Pro Services
LLC of New Orleans, which is expected to begin construction before summer
and complete work within eight months. The gates would be closed in the
event of an oncoming storm, but would remain open at all other times. There
will be an emergency access road built to allow drivers to get around the
gate in the event it is closed.

Louisiana 46 is one of the final floodgate projects in the so-called
Chalmette Loop levee system to be contracted out. Contracts have already
been awarded for floodgates at Bayou Bienvenue and Bayou Dupre.

There is a floodgate component of the Caernarvon Floodwall, which will tie
the entire Chalmette Loop system into the Mississippi River levee near the
border of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. But that entire project -
which consists of a 26-foot floodwall, a sector gate across the Caernarvon
Canal and gates across Louisiana 39 - will be bid as one package.

The Chalmette Loop system consists of a series of large sector gates and
levees topped with concrete T-walls. It forms a ring from the surge barrier
at the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, down along the shoreline of the
Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet to Verret and then back west to meet the
Mississippi River levee at Caernarvon.

Aside from the Caernarvon Floodwall project, which should be awarded by late
spring, the corps is still facing issues with the contract for the stretch
of levees between Louisiana 46 and Caernarvon.

The contract was awarded in late February to Cajun Constructors of Baton
Rouge, which had protested an earlier award of the project to a joint
venture of Odebrecht Construction of Florida and Baker Concrete of Houston.
Earlier this month Odebrecht-Baker filed another protest of the award to
Cajun Constructors, again delaying the project.

In total, the bid protests have pushed back construction timelines on that
stretch of levee by at least five months.