Understanding the Pump to the River Project

Due to the swampy wetland geography surrounding Louisiana, this state is prone to flooding. Couple that with having populous cities, it warrants great efforts in improving water drainage and control, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) addresses with a program under the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project.

The Pump to the River project tackles a monumental challenge in storm water management in New Orleans, and it aims to reduce volume and flow in the Soniat Canal by routing the discharge to the Mississippi River instead of Lake Pontchartrain. Despite its 10,000-ft length, it actually reduces the distance that water has to flow by three miles from the canal to the river.

Construction started in 2011, and was divided in segments which include an intake basin at the base of the canal, a pump station, discharge tubes, and a discharge basin. The drainage system is unique because it uses a siphoning system that uses gravity to pull water up and through 17-ft high 84-inch diameter pipes.

There are many engineering challenges that the corps had to face in building a project of this scale, one of them included dealing with subsurface obstructions near the river, while another was making the pipes cross a major highway.

The Mississippi river is also being uncooperative, as the constantly rising water levels prevented the USACE from working on the discharge basin and other parts of the project. The corps targets the system’s completion by the summer of 2017 so long as weather conditions and water levels permit.