A roughly 1-mile stretch of Barnett Road west of Baker and Zachary will be closed permanently starting Monday to make way for the future Comite River Diversion Canal, a long-awaited flood reduction waterway, federal authorities said Friday.
The permanently closed stretch of Barnett will extend from U.S. 61 north to Carney Road, officials said.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officials said crews will be starting construction of a 1.33-mile canal section, extending from U.S. 61 to Bayou Ïã¸ÛÁùºÍ¿ª½±ÀúÊ·¼Ç¼, which will cut through the soon-to-be-closed section of Barnett.
Corps and state highway officials have broken up the 12-mile canal into canal digging segments; construction phases for new bridges, levees, and bayou and other control structures; and waterway clearing and snagging.
While Barnett Road is being closed, new road and rail bridges have been or will be built for major routes, as has been nearly finished for U.S. 61 and the Kansas City Southern line. Highways and railroads that once ran over land need new bridges to span the canal as it is dug out from solid earth.
Rock-lined "chutes" are also being built to slow the flow of natural bayous that will drain into the man-made canal.
Planned for decades but not fully funded until after the 2016 floods, the now $908 million diversion canal is projected to reduce flooding risk by redirecting Comite River water to the Mississippi River before the flow can reach the Amite River.
That river basin is the Ïã¸ÛÁùºÍ¿ª½±ÀúÊ·¼Ç¼ region's main drainage outlet east of the Mississippi but suffers from chronic flooding and sedimentation and continued encroachment by new development.
The diversion will operate continuously and automatically once the Comite waters reach certain levels and, at peak operation, will be able to handle 30,000 cubic feet per second of water, a volume equivalent to some medium-sized rivers.
The work has run into dramatic cost overruns, in part due the past several years of inflation, as well as years of slippage in its schedule as officials struggled to reroute dozens of pipelines and other utilities in the path the canal.
Begun in spring 2019 and with several phases already finished, the entire construction project isn't expected to be completed until late 2025, Corps officials say.
