Katrina Debris-Filled Waterways Coming Clean

[Ixolib]

CLEARING AWAY
By RYAN LaFONTAINE
rlafontaine@sunherald.com

GULFPORT -- The state Department of Marine Resources expects to have most of South Mississippi's waterways cleaned up by the end of the year, officials said last week.
So far, workers have pulled more than 213,000 cubic yards of Katrina rubble from Coast waters, according to DMR. About 90,000 cubic yards of debris was removed from Hancock County and 70,000 cubic yards from Harrison County.

After the storm, boaters had to navigate through underwater gauntlets of debris, and shrimp boats that had sought shelter in the Industrial Canal were smashed and sunk.

Irwin Jackson, manager of the derelict-vessel program for the Department of Marine Resources, said nearly a dozen sunken shrimp boats were broken up and hauled out of the Industrial Canal.

DMR pulled three steel-hull shrimp boats from the canal and used them to help restore inshore fishing reefs. Jackson said two sunken boats remain in the canal, visible from the Cowan-Lorraine Road bridge.

Most sunken vessels are broken into small pieces before they are hauled away. Luckily for DMR, the steel hulls were beached on nearby banks.

"We had to pay out of a different pot of state money to have the hulls cleaned," Jackson said, "to make sure they were environmentally safe before we could use them for fishing reefs."

There is another sunken shrimp boat in the canal, but Jackson said it sank after the storm. There also are several boats tied off and floating in the canal. DMR has not given an exact date for their removal, but Jackson expects to have the canal cleaned by year's end.

Two Vietnamese shrimpers are living on one shrimp boat with engine trouble in the canal and they said the U.S. Coast Guard is pushing them to get out of the waterway.

Soon after the storm, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers removed some debris from the major channels, but untold amounts of submerged rubble remained a potential danger to boaters.

DMR and the Coast Guard launched the massive effort in April to clean coastal waters. DMR used side-scan sonar to map clear paths through the underwater labyrinths of rubble.

FEMA obligated about $177 million to help clean Mississippi's coastal and inland waterways.

More than 365 square miles of water has been cleaned. The FEMA-funded debris-removal project began in the three Coast counties with DMR targeting some of the most cluttered waterways.

"We still have a good bit of work to do, but we've made a lot of progress," Jackson said.

The Bay of St. Louis was one of the first areas cleaned and DMR is currently working in Biloxi's Back Bay. Most of Jackson County has been cleaned and Harrison County is almost finished. Hancock County's waterways were crammed full of rubble.

"We are still working in Hancock County and we will be until the end of the year, but we're almost done," Jackson said. "We have not signed (Hancock) off as being cleaned, yet, and before we do that there will probably be some side scanning done to make sure we got everything."

FEMA and the Coast Guard are planning a media tour Tuesday through some of the major debris-removal sites in Back Bay and the Bay of St. Louis.