Repeated raw sewage leaks in Bayou Duplantier

Sometimes, ugly is in the nose of the beholder.

On an October Sunday morning, Michael Simon looked out the kitchen window across his backyard to see Bayou Duplantier had turned bright green, which meant one thing: it was filled with raw sewage—again.

As soon as he opened the door the horrific stench confirmed his fears. While his family went out to church, he stayed behind to start calling to complain.

It would be days before he finally got adequate action, although the culprit was no real mystery to city-parish officials: a sewage system pump near South Boulevard failed, causing up to 10,000 gallons of raw sewage to seep into Corporation Canal downtown. The filth flowed down Bayou Duplantier, past Simon’s home south of Perkins Road, and on past Kenilworth and beyond.

For the past 15 years, sewage has gushed into the bayou about once a year, estimates Simon, a longtime business instructor at LSU who moved to the bayou’s banks for its picturesque serenity.

“It wasn’t just a little spill,” Simon says. What made things worse is he spent the better part of three days on the phone with officials from the state Department of Environmental Quality and the city-parish Public Works Department trying to get something done.

He says they were slow to respond, and at first all they did was show up and pour copious amounts of Clorox into the bayou “to placate me.”

“It’s a bureaucracy,” Simon says. “It seems like they fill out a lot of paperwork, but we still get sewer spills. These are waterways the EPA is supposed to enforce the law on. How long is Baton Rouge going to wait?”

Contacted for comment, DEQ officials explained they follow a plan to respond to spills like the one Simon reported. But when told how long it took for action on this one, the DEQ representative we spoke to guffawed in disbelief—although he did say the agency would look into the matter to find ways to improve its response time.

Meanwhile, Simon will continue to host his grandchildren in his picturesque backyard, but keep a wary nose so he can quickly usher them inside next time there’s a foul discharge.