GARYVILLE - Two projects are in the works that will, together, prevent flooding in communities from storms while also restoring dying wetlands.

The West Shore Lake Pontchartrain Project is expansive. It's an 18.5-mile risk reduction system, made up of levees, flood walls, drainage structures, gates and pump stations. The goal is to protect an area that spans St. Charles, St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said has little infrastructure to reduce hurricane risks. Along with protecting the more than 60,000 in the area, the project would also protect I-10, the evacuation route for those in New Orleans.

"When you have a hurricane like Ida, like Isaac, the storm surge pushes water that is in Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, it wants to push the water down south to then flood the community," U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Senior Project Manager L. Jeff Williams said. "Mostly the area that floods the worst during those storms was LaPlace."

USACE said Hurricane Isaac's storm surge flooded around 7,000 homes and put part of I-10 underwater. The project is a 100-year level risk reduction system, stretching from the Bonnet Carre Spillway to Garyville.

"The West Shore project has been studied you know long before Katrina, we knew there was still some vulnerability, it just was not included as a part of the work done in the New Orleans storm damage reduction system, so everything to the east is already protected by that system already because it was done as part of the New Orleans system," Williams said.

Some may worry such an expansive risk reduction system will encourage storm surges and flood waters to move west. Williams said that is not the case.

"You’re calling from the Baton Rouge area and there’s always some concern that when you put a system in one place, all it’s doing is pushing the water into a community in another place right?" Williams said. "What the hydraulic modeling suggests, especially as we go further west, the natural ground gets higher going further west, so at some point the ground is higher and it does not cause flooding the further we get west."

Construction for the West Shore Lake Pontchartrain Project is expected to finish in 2029. USACE announced its selection of Maurepas Swamp as compensatory mitigation in 2023.

"Usually, when you do a levee project, you're going to impact some of the wetlands and you have to do mitigation, you have to offset the impacts that you have on the wetlands," National Wildlife Federation Coastal Scientist Alisha Renfro said.

Renfro said the Maurepas Swamp is slowly dying.

"The Maurepas Swamp is one of the largest, forested swamp areas left in the United States. It’s an area that has been declining in recent years. We built levees along the river for flood mitigation, for navigation, but that cut off the river water and sediment from flowing into the wetlands," she said.

Brad Miller is Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority's project manager for the River Reintroduction into Maurepas Swamp. He says there have been talks about this project for 20 years.

"We had it almost ready to go to construction in 2017-18, a unique thing happened, the West Shore Lake Pontchartrain got federal funding to be built. When that happened, [CPRA] and the Corps of Engineers paused for a little bit and said, 'Okay, we got these two projects, the first two miles of them, they’re right next to each other.'" Miller said. "We’re getting the benefits of one to compensate for the other."

This project will put three box culverts in the Mississippi River Levee which will connect to a conveyance channel that will meet the existing Hope Canal.

"We have this huge conveyance channel. This is the easy part. What we’re seeing has been a canal for over 100 years called Hope Canal. This portion of the project, we’re just widening Hope Canal.” Miller said. “When we’re done, it’s going to be 140 feet wide and eight feet deep."

The water will be released into the Maurepas Swamp outfall area, north of I-10. The project connects the Mississippi River to the swamp, CPRA said it will renourish over 45,000 acres with freshwater, sediment and nutrients.

Renfro said the project in Maurepas Swamp will improve the wetland buffer from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.

"Without this project, what would happen is that the swamp would die off, eventually convert into marsh then disappear, leaving this gigantic open water area, and then pretty soon Baton Rouge would become waterfront property," Renfro said. "It's the buffer between Baton Rouge and the Gulf of Mexico and without that, it becomes exposed to the gulf."

Renfro added hurricane risk reduction, flood protection, and ecosystem restoration, these are areas where Louisiana leads with innovation.

"After the 2005 hurricane season, Louisiana realized that it could no longer do what I call 'random acts of restoration and random acts of protection.' They had to think about how restoration and protection work together hand in hand and how you can design restoration projects greater than the sum of their parts," she said.