By ROBIN SHANNON

Staff Reporter

HAHNVILLE – Officials in St. Charles announced this week that work to repair and restore an important east-west route between parish towns has finally gotten under way after various weather delays pushed the project back almost a month.

The Bonnet Carre Spillway Road, located between Airline Highway and the Mississippi River, has been in disrepair since officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided to open several gates on the flood control system back in April. The onslaught of water from the river into Lake Pontchartrain washed out entire sections of the low-lying road. The road has since been shut down to vehicle traffic.

St. Charles Public Information Officer Renee Allemand said the parish hoped to have the road repaired before school started since several parish school buses rely on the road during the morning commute instead of the busier Airline Highway. The St. Charles School Board had passed a resolution in July urging the Corps of Engineers to get the work done, but the amount of time needed to advertise the project pushed the deadline back.

The work was delayed again in early August after river levels rose a second time due to massive flooding in Iowa.

Finally on August 29, just three days before Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Southeast Louisiana, the parish council unanimously approved a $489,700 contract with Boh Bros. Construction of New Orleans to conduct the repairs on the project, but the back-to-back landfall of Gustav and Hurricane Ike delayed work on the project even further.

Allemand said Boh Bros. is now completing installation of 72 new box culverts in seven areas of the road to improve drainage. The culverts will be put in place over a compacted layer of limestone, and then covered with an asphalt paving.

“We are hoping this will help the longevity of the road in the event that the spillway is opened again,” Allemand said. “But there is no guarantee how high the water level would get. We had entire chunks of the road washed away when it was opened in April.”

Allemand said the culvert installation should be done by October 3 and crews would then begin work on patching and resurfacing 28 substandard areas of the road. Parish President V.J. St. Pierre said a complete resurfacing of the road is a future option, but it depends on the availability of grant funding.

Allemand said the parish received a $250,000 appropriation from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development to help fund the project. She said the remaining $239,700 is coming from the parish’s general fund.

Allemand said the parish is responsible for maintenance on the road even though it runs through land owned by the federal government. She said that although the Corps is not helping to foot the bill, they did, however, donate some of the materials needed to do the work including all of the 32-foot-long culverts.

Barring any further weather-related delays, the parish hopes to have work completed by the end of October. The road will remain closed throughout construction and officials from the St. Charles Sheriff’s Office said anyone caught driving on the road would be ticketed for failure to obey a traffic sign.