BURAS, La. — The lunch rush was over, and Byron Marinovich ambled through the storage room of the Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill, perched on the bank of the Mississippi River roughly 60 miles south of New Orleans.
As he flushed out the building’s water heater into a plastic bucket, he pulled out bits of white sediment, a few nearly as immense as a fingernail.
“Salt,” he said, sighing with a frustration palpable throughout this part of rural Plaquemines Parish.
As a mass of salt water from the Gulf of Mexico has forced its way nearly 70 miles up the drought-stricken Mississippi, the problem has drawn national attention, triggered a presidential emergency declaration and ignited a feverish effort to protect the drinking water supply for roughly a million people around greater New Orleans.
The saltwater wedge is not projected to reach New Orleans until Nov. 23.
Saltwater wedge extent as of Oct. 2
The saltwater wedge may reach Belle Chasse by Oct. 13.
Residents in this area have been under drinking water advisories since June.
Veronica Penney/The Washington Post
The saltwater wedge is not projected to reach New Orleans until Nov. 23, if it arrives at all.
Saltwater wedge extent as of Oct. 2
The saltwater wedge may reach Belle Chasse by Oct. 13.
Residents in this area have been under drinking water advisories since June.
Veronica Penney/The Washington Post
The saltwater wedge is not projected to reach New Orleans until Nov. 23, if it arrives at all.
Saltwater wedge extent as of Oct. 2
The saltwater wedge may reach Belle Chasse by Oct. 13.
Pointe à la Hache issued a drinking water advisory on Sept. 21.
Residents in this area have been under drinking water advisories since June.
Veronica Penney/
The Washington Post
The saltwater wedge is not projected to reach New Orleans until Nov. 23, if it arrives at all.
The saltwater wedge may reach Belle Chasse by Oct. 13.
Saltwater wedge extent as of Oct. 2
Pointe à la Hache issued a drinking water advisory on Sept. 21.
Residents in this area have been under drinking water advisories since June.
Projected timeline as of Oct. 5.
Veronica Penney/The Washington Post
Good news arrived Thursday, when the Army Corps of Engineers released updated projections showing that a saltwater wedge once estimated to arrive in Jefferson and Orleans parishes later this month will now probably not arrive until slow November, if at all.
That’s partly due to an underwater levee project the Corps undertook to leisurely the salty water’s advance, as well as data showing the river’s flow has remained higher than anticipated. Officials are now talking about finding lasting solutions for a problem that once seemed remote but now seems destined to happen again.
Even so, there has been no respite in Plaquemines Parish, a fishing and oil and gas hub where the once-mighty river meets the Gulf, where many residents have endured months of salt-laden water.
Many remain under drinking water advisories that began in June, when levels of salinity surged well beyond what the Environmental Protection Agency considers sheltered — though some residents insist the salt water infiltrated their taps much earlier.
To talk with people here is to hear tales of worry, exasperation and weariness — and to see glimpses of the challenges that could await those in more populated areas upriver, should the salt water intrude that far.
Locals complain of hair and skin problems caused by showering in salty water, and of appliances that have corroded. They talk of gardens that wilted, pets that got unwell, of the smell of rotten eggs from the tap. Mothers describe the stress of seeing their children’s eczema grow worse, of constantly reminding them to exploit bottled water to drink and brush teeth. Restaurant owners have grown tired of trucking in ice each day and cooking meals with bottled water.
“They feel like the forgotten people,” said Mark “Hobbo” Cognevich, a Plaquemines Parish Council member who represents the areas most affected.
Local leaders promise that solutions are imminent — multiple reverse osmosis systems were being installed at treatment plants in Plaquemines over the past week, and the Army Corps has been barging in hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh water to facilitate dilute the salty water from the river. Even so, a sense of resentment and fatigue remains over how long the trial has lasted and whether future droughts will mean repeating it in coming years.
“I don’t know how much more of it I can take,” said Casey Ancalade, 42, who frets about making sure her two children don’t ingest the tap water.
Marinovich, a former councilman, grew up here. He and his wife opened their restaurant from the rubble of Hurricane Katrina. But the aging infrastructure, the devastating storms and now the angst over water have left him exhausted — he says they would “leave today” if someone bought out the restaurant.
“It’s kind of hard to get up and leave — but it’s getting harder and harder to live here in the long run,” he said. “When you can’t get basic amenities like clean water, it’s bad.”
‘We want to waste no time’
The race to protect that basic amenity brought Cynthia Lee Sheng to the west bank of the Mississippi River on a balmy afternoon this week.
“A lot of emergencies are on our radar, and this just wasn’t,” said Sheng, the president of Jefferson Parish, home to about 430,000 people. “We want to waste no time.”
Hours earlier, the Army Corps had given its blessing to an audacious plan that would allow the parish to begin construction of a transient pipeline it hopes could eventually stretch 15 miles up the river, allowing Jefferson to keep drawing fresh water even if the mass of salt water were to reach the parish.
“The goal is just to always stay ahead of the saltwater wedge,” Sheng said.
Nearby, contractors were unfurling the first long stretches of piping that would soon stretch upriver, costing the parish roughly $12 million to $15 million per month, but providing what Sheng sees as an invaluable peace of mind.
In nearby Orleans Parish, a similar and even more costly plan was unfolding. In concert with state and federal officials, leaders there also were planning an upriver pipeline — at an estimated cost of $150 million to $250 million.
The 48-inch pipeline would be constructed several miles at a time, with pumps installed along the way to move fresh water back to New Orleans.
Smaller water treatment plants in the area could rely on reverse osmosis systems to remove salt or also mix in fresh water from Army Corps barges to lower salinity — options not feasible for the larger facilities in Jefferson and Orleans.
Those projects were part of a massive, regionwide effort to mobilize for the unusual threat of a massive blob of salt water moving toward a major American city. School districts, hospitals and businesses announced detailed plans in recent days to keep tidy water flowing — or at worst, to have enough bottled water on hand to keep their doors open.
Even before news came that the area would have more time to prepare, and that the salt water might not reach New Orleans at all if the current drought eases, officials had urged peaceful.
“Not thinking about closing down the city, none of that,” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell told reporters this week. “Time is on our side, and we are using it wisely.”
And for the most part, peaceful prevailed.
In and around New Orleans this week, bottled water was copious at corner bodegas and massive retailers alike. Tourists strolled the narrow streets of the French Quarter, where music poured from bars and the wrought iron balconies were already decorated for Halloween. Beignets flowed at the Café du Monde. Streetcars clanged down St. Charles Avenue.
Psychics sat at their tables in Jackson Square, promising to foretell all that lay ahead.
‘It’s going to happen again’
Plaquemines Parish President Keith Hinkley is well aware of the complaints from residents in the southern part of the parish. He sympathizes with how long the water problems have dragged on.
But it is not, he insists, because elected officials don’t care.
“That’s so far from the truth,” Hinkley said on a recent evening in Belle Chasse, where the salt water is still predicted to arrive as soon as Friday.
He noted that the parish had also struggled this summer with regular pipe breaks and falling water pressure caused by drought and heat. But now, he said, the Army Corps had begun barging in fresh water, contractors were working to hook up reverse osmosis units and chloride levels have been falling.
“It just doesn’t happen overnight,” Hinkley said, noting that units at a petite water plant in Boothville alone will cost roughly a half-million dollars a month. “It’s a lot of prep work before you process that first gallon of water.”
Soon, he said, the parish should be able to lift remaining drinking water advisories.
Until that happens, assurances ring hollow for people such as Monique Plaisance, who lives in Buras with her husband and two children, and is pregnant. In particular, she worries about a rash on her 6-year-old daughter’s neck that flared up in recent months. Twice they have seen doctors, but the problem persists.
“They’ve taken so long to do something about it,” Plaisance, 36 and a lifelong resident, said of the water issues. “All I want is for it to go away.”
Like others here, she believes that only when the salt water began to threaten more populated areas upriver did the struggles in Plaquemines attract wider attention.
“A storm comes through, blows over everything, and we clean up and move on,” said Bobbie Turner, 49, during her shift at the Lighthouse Lodge & Villas in Venice. “This is something we can’t clean up and move on … We need a permanent fix.”
On that much, Hinkley agrees. After the immediate crisis fades, he said, he will push to fund a lasting reverse osmosis system in the lower part of the parish. Because the next drought will come.
“It’s going to happen again,” he said.
Up and down the river, there is a sense that the threat of recent weeks will resurface sooner than later.
Collin Arnold, New Orleans’s homeland security chief, said the Army Corps’ updated projections Thursday were “clearly a relief,” but hardly reason to cease planning for a problem that can pose risks to agriculture, wreak havoc on industrial machinery, and threaten the health of people with high blood pressure or kidney disease and infants or those who are pregnant.
“Our job in emergency management is to prepare for the worst,” Arnold said. “I think we all believe we will face this again at some point.”
Two years in a row now, crippling drought has severely weakened the flow of the Mississippi, which in more normal times is powerful enough to prevent salt water from intruding very far upstream.
It isn’t unprecedented. Salt water has intruded far up the river in 1936 and 1988, when the river’s flow dwindled to 120,000 cubic feet per second, the lowest on record. The saltwater that year stretched as far as Kenner, La., but soon retreated.
Four times in the past — 1988, 1999, 2012 and 2022 — the Army Corps has constructed an underwater levee, or sill, to try to leisurely the salt water from moving along the river bottom. This year, the Corps undertook a similar effort in July, only to have to expand it as the drought wore on.
The bottom of the river, which has been heavily engineered and dredged over the years, also lies lower than sea level until around Natchez, Miss. — a topography that makes it easier for salt water to flow.
The weakening of the Mississippi’s flow has multiple causes, including shifting precipitation patterns, depletion of soil moisture during heat waves, land exploit changes upriver and below-average snowfall farther north. But researchers also say the influence of rising seas and a warming atmosphere can’t be overlooked.
“This underscores the importance of staying vigilant and identifying early indicators that may help us anticipate similar situations moving forward.”
‘It has taken a toll’
Plaquemines Parish has weathered more than its share of disasters. This is where Hurricane Katrina leveled nearly everything in its path, where the 2010 BP oil spill caused lasting devastation and where a litany of other storms has forced residents to bounce back again and again.
The saltwater intrusion is a different kind of trial — less dramatic, perhaps, but seemingly endless.
“You have to realize, we’ve been dealing with this for five or six months now,” said Pastor Gaynel Baham, of Trinity Christian Community Church in Buras. “It has taken its toll.”
Justine A. DeMolle, 62, owner of Changes Restaurant in Venice, wishes lower Plaquemines had received facilitate sooner — “You have not a lot of people here, but we are people” — but it is hardly enough to drive her from her home of more than a half century.
“They will have to pull me out of here,” she said.
Baham understands. In better times, it is peaceful here where the Mississippi meets the Gulf, a brief drive but a world away from the bustle of New Orleans.
“People will say, ‘why don’t you just leave?’” she said. “But it’s home, too.”
