Recovery efforts are underway after roughly 50 homes in a Breaux Bridge neighborhood flooded last week.
The parish built a coulee after 2016 to alleviate flooding, but neighbors say more work needs to be done.
“If this isn’t fixed, we don’t know if we can continue to live here. We might have to sell our home, and it’s more or less selling a dream to us because what we have with our neighbors in this area. It’s just that; it’s a dream,” said George Sittig
Sittig lives in the Bridge Towne Subdivision in Breaux Bridge. He’s now one of several others in the neighborhood that are gutting their homes after last Thursday’s flooding.
“Somehow, between 7:00 [a.m.] and 9:30 [a.m.], I ended up with 68 inches of water in my house.”
Sittig says after the 2016 flood, the parish assured him he and neighbors wouldn’t run into that problem again.
“This neighborhood flooded three years ago.What was said to be a freakish flood, a 500-year flood that would never happen again, and here we are three years later, in a non-flood zone, and it happens again,” said Sittig.
Parish President Chester Cedars says they completed phase one of what they’re calling the “Breaux Bridge Manor Project” about a year ago. It’s a four-million-dollar project that addresses drainage issues in the Bridge Towne Subdivision and other areas in the parish. Already, $800,000 has gone toward improving drainage infrastructure.
“I think what happened on June 6, 2019, reflects that additional work must be done to address drainage not only there but in other areas of our parish as well,” said Cedars.
However, Cedars says last week’s flooding isn’t a result of parish infrastructure.
“The drainage laterals that service the area which Bridge Towne is located receives water from as far a north as Rapides Parish through a series of bayous and canals.”
The parish is now in phase two of the project where they’re surveying the nearby channels to see what they need moving forward to improve drainage.
