Community along Tamsui Mississippi River Faces increasing threats due to the invasion of salt water Gulf of Mexico. It has targeted thousands of people to damage public drinking water infrastructure, destroying a local seafood industry that once invested in and raising concerns about the future safety of New Orleans drinking water.

“It’s our primary source of water,” said Mitch Jurisich, a third generation of the southernmost parish in Louisiana, an hour-long drive outside New Orleans.

"This has wiped out our public oyster ground and put a lot of people in poverty," Yulisic said.

Jurisich said the salt water invasion problem has only happened for a decade in the past, but he said it happened for three consecutive summers and now the parish is preparing for it so that it will happen again.

Due to the last three salty summers, the freshwater supply of the Plaquemines parish has been damaged by about 23,000 residents, although the parish has had low salt water levels in the past few months, Jurisich said salt still lags behind the lasting and frustrating damage.

Salt is corroding the diocese's water pipes, causing them to rust and burst underground - creating frequent chaos for parish workers to resolve and reduce water pressure for residents of various diocese communities. Sometimes it's even harder to shower because there's only slow dripping in the faucet, Yulisic said.

Another problem is that lead pipes have the potential to corrode dangerous lead levels into the water supply of parish houses with lead pipe connections. This is something Jurisich said the diocese continues to monitor.

Jurisich said fixing damaged pipelines and building stronger infrastructure to make the small parish more resilient to the problem is estimated to cost $200 million.

The parish has become an unfortunate case study of how serious the problem of salt water invasion is. Currently, other coastal cities around the world are facing threats from the plaquemines parish over the past few summers, including recently in Philadelphia.

When asked what his advice for other cities was, Yulisic said: “You’re not ready until you get hit, like some people don’t have to worry about snakes before they bite them…if you start seeing this trend.

Plaquemines Parish has drafted a 10-year upgrade plan to solve the salt water problem, but will receive grants to pay for all projects, especially when the federal government has already had a lot of money. Cut spending,include Freeze promised grants Nationwide.

"Power is a luxury. Water is a necessity," said Girisch.

Droughts, sea levels rise, severe storms and dredging and dredging are attributed to the frequency of saltwater invasion and the increase in cedar, experts from the University of Arizona and Tulane.

A spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said that roughly every decade after the Mississippi River slitting project made the port of New Orleans more accessible to trade vessels, saltwater invasions began to take place regularly in southern Louisiana in the 1980s.

In 2023, The saline water of the Mississippi River High-level approaches dangerously close to New Orleans, threatening the city’s water supply and sending the city to a state of emergency. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said saltwater invasions and severe droughts were "an unprecedented double water crisis."

The Corps of Engineers who managed the river built an underwater barrier called a “windowsill” that year to prevent brine from flowing northward.

"This prevents water from entering the New Orleans metropolitan area," said Ricky Boyett, a spokesman for the Corps of Engineers.

But, Boyt said, the thresholds wear out over time, causing the Legion to rebuild the threshold in the fall of 2024 to prevent another water scare in New Orleans.

For New Orleans, the threat is serious. In a public comment on federal agencies, city leaders stressed that if 2024 Sill violates, then the big and easy drinking water infrastructure is already hard to withstand.

Only one week Super Bowl Visitors Due to the frequent tides and disruptions of water treatment energy, downtown New Orleans neighborhoods flocked to the city to spend the biggest nights of football.

A spokesperson for the City of New Orleans wrote the following comments to the Legion in part: “Data collection and model development are urgently needed to develop risk assessments for drinking water resilience… We know that this threat will continue in the future and it will be extremely destructive. We ask you to research solutions to protect our municipal water supply, including desalination facilities that can serve the Greater New Orleans area. ”

Louisiana Governor Billy Nungesser estimates an estimated $9 billion in annual tourism spending to the big, saying it is necessary to protect the city's water and infrastructure through more permanent solutions.

"It washed away in six months. We need to build ridges and islands there and give the coast a chance to survive because we know these hurricanes are getting worse every year," Nungesser said.

Nungesser added that if salt water levels hit New Orleans, they hit Plaquemines Parish, “It would be a disaster and it would close the city.”

Another problem with the windowsill is that it is located on narrower rivers with higher rivers, so whenever an invasion occurs, it makes Plaquemines Parish vulnerable and exposed to salt water.

That's why Boyett said the legions provided a special reverse osmosis water filtration system for the water supply to Plaquemines Parish.

Jurisich said his community desperately needed money to pay for long-term infrastructure upgrades because the filtration system was very expensive.

"It's very expensive, very expensive, and it's very maintenance-intensive. You have to have a professional prepare the filters and stand on hand when something doesn't work properly," Jurisich said.

But Nungesser believes a better option is to enhance the flow of the Mississippi River by filling cracks on the edge of the river that has expanded over the years. He said state and local officials have been pushing the Legion to do so for more than a decade.

Just this month, the Legion announced plans to fill one of the cracks as they found it had become so big that it began pulling the trade ships as they headed to the port of New Orleans.

Asked what was the turning point in the Legion’s action, Boyt said: “Once it started to affect navigation, we looked at it and that’s where our authority came in.”

In a statement to CBS News, Boyt explained more about the proposal, which will begin construction this summer: “In short, we will return to the 2018 process (Neptune Pass) and then it will start rapidly expanding in 2019.

NASA's comparison of satellite imagery of Neptune Pass shows how it worked overtime between 2019 and 2023.

Boyett said 40 million metric tons of exports came from New Orleans, along the Mississippi River, the region is the largest transport channel in the United States, where it needs to carefully balance the threat of salt water and drinking water demand while also ensuring that the river can supply ships.

That's why Boyt said the Legion is investing $20 million in a five-year study that has three years to analyze the entire Mississippi River from top to bottom. An important part of the Lower Mississippi River Integrated Management Research will examine the best long-term solutions to saltwater invasion.

"Today, we are evaluating a large number of alternatives to determine what to do in the study or may require your own research to determine feasibility," Boyt said.

But Governor Lieutenant Nujisse said there is no time in southern Louisiana to wait for researchers to complete the study.

"People should feel angry," Nujiser said of his reaction so far.

Byron Marinovich, owner of Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill, a local restaurant at Plaquemines Parish, said he wouldn't wait. He said the salt had corroded his restaurant appliances, killed his plants and caused the clothes torn.

"We're looking for a move," Marinovich said. "There's no clean water really much like the top of the list."

Marinovic said he had recently had to buy a new ice machine for the third time in 15 years, and the latest one cost about $5,600.

But, unlike the restaurateur, Jussi says he stayed there all the time.

He said, "I didn't move, this is my home."