ST. MARTIN PARISH, La. (KLFY) — Landowners along the Whiskey Bay Pilot Channel are facing rapid erosion, leading to significant loss of land and property.

Joseph Breaux, a concerned landowner, reports losing 225 feet of his property due to the erosion caused by the pilot channel.

“Our property was 575 feet long from the road to the water. Now it’s 350 feet long because I’ve lost 225 feet of my property from the cave-ins caused by the river,” said Breaux. “It falls off in chunks 25, 50 feet at a time and we’ve tried to stop it, but there’s just nothing we can do.” 

Breaux explained that their property used to extend to where trees now stand in the water, illustrating the extent of the land lost over the years.

The area, right next to the Sherborne Wildlife Management known for its 44,000 acres of hunting land, is a popular retreat for sportsmen, but the ongoing erosion threatens its future use.

“Filled with camps for sportsmen’s and hunting clubs and it’s used a lot during the hunting seasons and also in the summers and spring for fishing, because there’s a lot of good fishing here, too. But we’re all losing our properties. Everything’s fallen into the river,” said Breaux. “It makes us not want to come anymore. My wife is disgusted because we’re losing all our land.”

Breaux recounted how his neighbor had to move their entire house back 200 feet to prevent it from falling into the river after a significant cave-in. In 2023, the Army Corps of Engineers had planned to add stone revetment to stabilize the bank, but the project was not funded in the 2023 budget, delaying relief until 2025.

“They’d have to do the entire bank from the interstate bridge all the way back to where the river curves and that’s what they were going to do. That’s what they said they were going to do is call Revetment. They come out here and they put these concrete slabs that angled down into the water and they connect them together with steel rods and they just lay them along the bank, the whole section and that stops the river from digging up underneath our property and everything caving in. That’s what they were supposed to do. That’s what they told me they had approved and they were supposed to start in January. That was a couple of January’s ago and now they won’t even talk to me,” he explained. 

Breaux expressed frustration over the lack of action, noting that the erosion is now threatening La. 975, a crucial hurricane evacuation route.

“Down the road from here, the guy has lost so much property that the river bank is now about 75 feet from Highway 975. That’s a hurricane evacuation route that has to stay open. If the river takes out that road and we have a hurricane, then what?” he said. Adding we are in the middle of hurricane season he said “If we got a big flood now, it probably would get more of that and once that road caves in, then what?”

All facts in this report were gathered by journalists employed by KLFY. Artificial intelligence tools were used to reformat from a broadcast script into a news article for our website. This report was edited and fact-checked by KLFY staff before being published.

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