In the News

BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) - The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers held a community meeting Monday, March 29, to give updates and answer questions about the project.

After years of countless roadblocks, the long-awaited Comite River Diversion Canal project is starting to pick up speed.

The flood control project will detour flooding around the Central area and beyond by draining water from the Comite River into the Mississippi River.

Officials say they ran into several issues that include buying land and relocating some pipelines that delayed the original December 2021 deadline.

Rep. Valarie Hodges said they expect the project will be finished by December 2022.

"When you wake up at 4 o'clock in the morning and the next day everything that you own, that you've worked for your whole life, is on the road in the garbage pile, you don't know if that's going to happen again. We can't live like this. So, we want the people of DOTD and CORE and the people funding this project to understand the urgency of this," Hodges said.

Construction will begin in the summer of 2021.