The fight to keep our home continues!

Twenty-one years ago, there were only six homes in all of St. Bernard Parish that survived the floods of Hurricane Katrina when the inferior levees broke, and 164 residents perished. The population in our parish plummeted from 69,000 to zero.

Today, 49,000 residents have chosen to fight and return to “Da Parish” to rebuild in the place that we call home. Now comes the Port of New Orleans once again, applying its power and political might over the citizens of St. Bernard Parish with its Louisiana International Terminal.

Despite the objection of every elected official in Da Parish, the Port of New Orleans forges forward on a project destined to destroy an entire community that was settled before the Louisiana Purchase.

No parish in the history of Louisiana has ever been so challenged by the powers that be, including the governor and the Port of New Orleans, who refuse to even appear in front of the citizens to hear our pleas. Here is how an entire community is destroyed.

All simultaneously, the Army Corps of Engineers is engaged in the Industrial Canal lock-widening project, at one of only two entrances to the parish. The Port of New Orleans is developing a grain terminal in the neighboring Lower 9th Ward of the city, requiring a railroad system connecting to St. Bernard Parish’s only railroad.

The Port of New Orleans is developing its massive 416-acre container port in our parish. And the Louisiana DOTD is constructing an elevated highway over the last remaining pristine marsh to carry 1,700 trucks in and out each day.

This will be nothing other than total gridlock and will paralyze an entire community — thus the destruction of what we call home.

PHILLIP DIFATTA

former board member, St. Bernard Port Harbor and Terminal

Violet