Press Releases

Congressman Garret Graves (South Louisiana) today announced the historic groundbreaking of “Reach A” in Dularge, Louisiana, of the Morganza-to-the-Gulf (MTG) hurricane protection project alongside project partners Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District (TLCD), the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).

“Construction of Reach A plugs a vulnerability gap that otherwise exposes Dularge, Houma, and surrounding communities,” Graves said. “Getting Morganza started and funded has been a top priority. Despite decades of federal inaction, in our short time in Congress we’ve pushed urgently to establish momentum to get the project funded and built as quickly as possible. This project will protect the lives and communities of the Bayou Region who feed and fuel our nation, and we could not leave the field without ensuring Morganza’s path to completion.”

Reach A of the system was identified by the TLCD as a key vulnerability gap that left Houma and surrounding communities exposed to flood risk and storm surge. Reach A construction will occur over several phases, beginning with levee features to protect the Dularge community.

“I want to remind you: local folks didn’t wait for the federal government and we didn’t either,” Graves added. “Dating back to 2008 (while serving as the Chair of CPRA) we worked with our parishes and levee districts to pull together hundreds of millions in state funding in addition to the half a billion we set aside from the Deepwater Horizon settlement. Our early and persistent protection measures have saved the American taxpayer billions in disaster recovery costs, while at the same time providing a major service to our nation’s energy security.”

Morganza background

Although the project became authorized for federal participation in the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2007 (with amendments made to the project in WRDA 2014), at a cost of $15 billion, the 98-mile levee was widely seen as too expensive for the federal government to start investing in.

That changed in November of 2018, when Graves requested the Army Corps revise the original federal role of the project by taking into account investments already made by state and local partners. Within the year, the Corps presented Graves with an Adaptive Criteria Assessment Report (ACAR) which brought the project’s cost down by more than two-thirds of the original estimate. Graves’s intention in officially blessing the work already done by the local levee boards was to increase the project’s benefit-cost ratio (BCR) and make it impossible for the federal government to not invest in the project.

With a positive BCR secured, Graves correctly identified another hurdle: the annual bill which funds the federal government’s flood control investments not only sets limits on how many “new start” projects could be funded annually, but traditionally included language which limited these new starts to projects authorized within the Corps’ Construction account, while Morganza was part of the Mississippi Rivers and Tributaries (MR&T) account. Graves ensured that the House of Representatives’ funding bill included language which made MR&T eligible to receive a new start designation, and heavily lobbied the Senate to allow the change. The Senate relented and, after years of discussions with the White House Office of Management and Budget, Graves announced that the federal government would begin investing in the project in January of 2021.

That year coincided with the return of congressional earmarks, and Graves has successfully secured $78.3 million in dedicated funding for the project to date through that process, $376 million in emergency supplemental funding, and another $93 million awaiting approval in the current funding cycle.

According to the USACE, the MTG project would reduce the risk of flooding due to storm surge to more than 52,000 structures and over 200,000 people in an area.  Deterioration of coastal marshes due to saltwater intrusion, land subsidence and the lack of interchanges from the Mississippi River and Tributaries system have steadily increased storm surge inundation over time.  Flooding of homes occurred in Lafourche Parish with Hurricane Ida, near the proposed alignment that may be alleviated with the Project.

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