Communities along the freshwater Mississippi River are facing a growing threat from an intrusion of saltwater moving the wrong way up the river from the Gulf of Mexico. It has wreaked havoc on public drinking water infrastructure for thousands of people, decimated a once-thriving local seafood industry, and has raised concerns about the future safety of New Orleans’ drinking water.
“This is our main water source,” said Mitch Jurisich, a third-generation oysterman and a local councilman in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana’s southernmost parish located an hour’s drive outside New Orleans, where he says damage from saltwater is a daily problem.
“It’s wiped out our public oyster grounds east of the river and put a lot of people in poverty,” Jurisich said.
Jurisich says saltwater intrusion issues used to only happen once a decade, but he says it’s occurred the last three summers in a row, and now the parish is gearing up for it to potentially happen again.
As a result of the last three salty summers, Plaquemines Parish’s fresh water supply for approximately 23,000 of its residents has been compromised, and even though saltwater levels have been low for in the parish the last few months, Jurisich says the salt has left behind lasting and frustrating damage.
The salt is corroding the parish’s water supply pipes, causing them to rust and burst underground — creating frequent muddy messes for parish workers to fix and reducing water pressure for residents in various neighborhoods across the parish. Jurisich says sometimes it’s difficult to even shower, because there’s only a slow drip out of the tap.
Another concern is the potential for lead pipes to corrode and leach dangerous lead levels into the water supplies of homes in the parish that have lead pipe connections. It’s something Jurisich says the parish continues to monitor.
Fixing broken pipes and building stronger infrastructure to make this tiny parish more resilient to the problem would cost an estimated $200 million dollars, Jurisich says.
The parish has become an unfortunate case study of just how serious the issue of saltwater intrusion can be. Other coastal cities around the world and the U.S. are currently facing the threat of what Plaquemines Parish has been subject to over the last few summers, including most recently in Philadelphia.
Asked what his advice would be to other cities, Jurisich said, “You’re not ready till you get hit, you know, it’s just like some people don’t worry about a snake until it bites them … don’t wait to get prepared if you’re starting to see this trend. They need to start preparing for this.”
He says Plaquemines Parish has drafted a 10-year upgrade plan to address the saltwater problem, but acquiring grant money to pay for all of the projects has been difficult, especially at a time when the federal government has made significant spending cuts, including a freeze on promised grant money across the country.
“Power is a luxury. Water is a need,” Jurisch said.
Various studies from researchers around the world, including experts at the University of Arizona and Tulane University say drought, sea level rise, severe storms and dredging are partly to blame for the increase in frequency and swatch of saltwater intrusion.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says saltwater intrusion began happening regularly in the 1980s in southern Louisiana about once every decade following a dredging project of the Mississippi River to make the port of New Orleans more accessible to trade ships.
In 2023, saltwater in the Mississippi River advanced dangerously close to New Orleans, threatening the city’s water supply and sending the city into a state of emergency. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the saltwater intrusion along with severe drought was “an unprecedented double water crisis.”
The Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for managing the river, built an underwater barrier called a “sill” that year to stop the saltwater from flowing further north.
“And that prevents the water from getting up to the water intakes for the major metropolitan areas New Orleans, Saint Bernard,” Corps of Engineers spokesperson Ricky Boyett said.
However, Boyett says the sill wears down over time, leading the Corps to rebuild the sill in the fall of 2024 to prevent another water scare in New Orleans.
For New Orleans, the threat is serious. In public comments to the federal agency, city leaders stressed how the Big Easy’s already fragile, aging drinking water infrastructure would have trouble withstanding the impacts if the 2024 sill were to breach.
Just a week before tens of thousands of Super Bowl visitors flocked to the city for football’s biggest night, neighborhoods across downtown New Orleans experienced yet another boil water notice due to frequent water treatment energy surges and outages.
A spokesperson for the city of New Orleans wrote the following comment in part to the Corps: “There is an urgent need for data collection and model development to develop a risk assessment for drinking water resilience … we know that this threat will continue in the future and it would be extremely disruptive. We request that you study solutions to protect our municipal water supply including a desalination facility that could serve the greater New Orleans region.”
With an estimated $9 billion in annual tourist spending that pours into the Big Easy, Louisiana Lt. Governor Billy Nungesser says the city’s water and infrastructure must be protected with a more permanent solution.
“It washes away in six months. We need to build land ridges and islands out there and give the coast a chance to survive, because we know these hurricanes are getting worse every year,” Nungesser said.
Nungesser added that if saltwater levels were to hit New Orleans as high as they have hit Plaquemines Parish, “it would be a catastrophe, it would shut down the city.”
Another issue with the sill, Nungesser said, is that it’s located higher up the river, where the river is narrower, thus leaving Plaquemines Parish vulnerable and exposed to saltwater whenever the intrusion occurs.
That’s why Boyett says the Corps helped provide special reverse osmosis water filtration systems for Plaquemines Parish’s water supply.
Jurisich says because the filtration systems are remarkably expensive, his community desperately needs money to pay for long-term infrastructure upgrades.
“It’s very costly, very expensive, and also high maintenance. You have to have specialized people ready to clean the filters and be on hand when something may not be working properly,” Jurisich said.
But Nungesser argues a better option is to strengthen the Mississippi River’s flow by filling crevasses along the river’s edge that have widened over the years. He says state and local officials have been pushing the Corps to do that for more than decade.
Just this month, the Corps announced it plans to fill one of the crevasses, because they have found that it has grown so large that it started pulling trade ships as they head towards the port of New Orleans.
When asked what was the turning point for the Corps to take action, Boyett said: “We looked at it as soon as it started impacting navigation, that’s where our authority comes in.”
In a statement to CBS News, Boyett explained more about the proposal, which is set to start construction this summer: “in short, we will return (Neptune Pass) to the flow of 2018, before it began rapidly expanding in 2019.
A satellite image comparison of Neptune Pass by NASA showed how the it had widened overtime between 2019 and 2023.
With 40 million metric tons of exports from New Orleans traveling down the Mississippi River each year, Boyett says the region is the largest shipping channel in the U.S., which requires a careful balance of addressing the saltwater threat and drinking water needs, while also ensuring the river is accessible to ships.
That’s why Boyett says the Corps is investing $20 million on a five-year study that has three years to go to analyze the entire Mississippi River from top to bottom. One significant section of the Lower Mississippi River Comprehensive Management Study will examine the best long-term solutions to the saltwater intrusion phenomenon.
“Today, we are evaluating the large suite of alternatives to determine which to carry forward in the study or which may need their own study to determine feasibility,” Boyett said.
But Lt. Governor Nungesser says southern Louisiana doesn’t have time to wait for researchers to finish the study.
“People ought to be outraged,” Nungesser said of the corps’ response thus far.
Byron Marinovich, the owner of Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill, a local restaurant in Plaquemines Parish, said he won’t be waiting around. He says the salt has corroded his restaurant appliances, killed his plants, and led to rips his clothing, among other issues.
“We’re looking to move,” Marinovich said. “Not having clean water is really like at the top of the list.”
Marinovich said he recently had to buy a new ice machine for a third time in 15 years, with the latest one costing him about $5,600.
But unlike the restaurateur, Jurisch said he’s staying put.
“I’m not moving, this is my home,” he said.
Kati Weis is a Murrow Award-winning reporter for CBS News based in New Orleans, covering the Southeast. She previously worked as an investigative reporter at CBS News Colorado in their Denver newsroom.
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