On April 20, 2010, an explosion occurred on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico leading to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. In the aftermath, federal and state agencies came together to form the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustee Council.
Moffatt & Nichol is serving as the engineer of record for a large-scale project funded by Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment. Utilizing the Mississippi River borrow sites previously permitted as part of the Mississippi River Long Distance Sediment Pipeline project, the project will mine an estimated 15 million cubic yards of sediment to restore over 1,200 acres of critically degraded marsh habitat as identified in the Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group Draft Restoration plan. Moffatt & Nichol is providing full restoration planning services for the project.
Because of our experience on the previous Mississippi River Long Distance Sediment Pipeline project, we are able to provide a programmatic approach to marsh restoration along the Barataria Land Bridge. As part of our design process, we developed preliminary project features, marsh placement site location and geometry, sediment budgets and established preliminary project delivery borrow site sequencing scenarios. Restoration planning and engineering services include coastal and geotechnical engineering, dredging engineering, and cost estimating. We also provided 3-D hydrodynamic and morphological modeling of the identified Mississippi River borrow sites (Wills Point and Alliance Anchorage). This enabled our team to develop available sediment budgets for a range of implementation sequencing scenarios, scalable to available funding options. Preliminary analysis has identified a proposed sediment budget of 15 million cubic yards (cut volume) placed at the identified marsh creation areas, located approximately 13 miles from the proposed borrow site(s).
Moffatt & Nichol is providing permitting and environmental compliance documentation for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the project implementing trustees, to ensure project consistency with the Louisiana Trustee Implementation Group and the State of Louisiana Coastal Master Plan.
