Whoever said you can’t fool Mother Nature probably wasn’t from Texas. At least not from Jefferson County in the far southeastern corner of the state, where nature’s way includes frequent flooding due to a slope of just 0.05 percent across miles of territory.

Tired of seeing their homes, roads and crops damaged by floods, area residents gave Jefferson County Drainage District No. 6 the green light to tackle the problem through the Needmore Diversion Project. The Big Ditch project, as it’s also known, requires moving 10 million cubic yards of dirt to create a 12-mile-long drainage basin averaging 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep. Existing pipelines need to be lowered in several locations to cross under the man-made river, which will run from the convergence of the north and south forks of the Taylor Bayou to the Intracoastal Waterway.

One-way “flap gates” are being built into a series of 16 side-by-side concrete box culverts, each measuring 15-by-15 feet, at the southern end of the project. The gates will allow funneled floodwaters into the Intracoastal Waterway and from there into the Gulf, but will prevent seawater from running inland. The district has devoted about 40 district workers to the project, which is estimated to cost $35 million, almost all of it from local tax dollars, before its expected completion in 2018, according to district engineer Doug Canant.

Shaky Start

Digging started in the summer of 2008, but Mother Nature swung back hard. Hurricane Ike and its 20-foot storm surge hit the Gulf Coast that September, severely damaging the project’s large draglines, which could not be quickly moved to higher ground. The Manitowoc machines, equipped with seven-cubic-yard buckets and 140-foot booms, had to be disassembled, shipped to the manufacturer and rebuilt.

Work resumed in January 2009 when the draglines were returned to the jobsite. Canant notes that Cat equipment dedicated to the project — dozers, excavators and ejector dump trucks — had been moved out harm’s way before the hurricane.

As a public agency, Drainage District No. 6 had solicited bids for the project equipment, but had also specified performance requirements critical to the work. Just as draglines were needed for the volume of soil they could move, the Cat equipment was selected for its capabilities, Canant says.

For example, the project easement measures 1,000 feet wide, providing enough room for the excavated soil to be formed into levees along the waterway. However, traditional dump trucks cannot move along the inclines while spreading their loads, so the district armed itself with a half-dozen Cat 740 Ejector Dump Trucks with 30-cubic-yard beds and 42-ton capacity to do the work most efficiently. “Cat’s ejector trucks push dirt out the back end of the box, so we can keep rolling along and spread the dirt into a row for the levee, instead of dumping the dirt into a pile that we need to move again,” Canant says.

Likewise, the district relies on 11 Cat dozers, including D6T XWs with Cat PAT blades, D6R LGPs and D6N LGPs, and D7R LGPs for the project. In addition, the district bought a D7E LGP, recently introduced by Caterpillar, after testing at the jobsite showed that the D7E used only 6.9 gph of fuel, compared to 10 gph for a D7R. The D7E also proved popular with the operators.

Cat dozers were chosen because they are able to push soil up 3-to-1 and 4-to-1 slopes as needed to build the levee along the Big Ditch, a capability not matched by other brands of equipment. “The Cat machines are the best equipment out there,” Canant says.

The district purchased the Cat equipment from the local Caterpillar dealership, Mustang Cat, which supplied machines with the needed capabilities while providing competitive pricing. Canant says support from the dealership was another consideration in selecting Cat equipment.

Obtaining the necessary permits for the Big Ditch took nearly 15 years, Canant says, and the need to route the basin through 600 acres of wetlands meant the district needed to buy 3,000 acres of land that was then donated to an environmental preservation organization, the Legacy Land Trust, in remediation efforts.

But with work well under way, the district and its residents can look forward to seeing the basin, which will always hold groundwater because the area is only five feet above sea level, carrying Mother Nature’s extra out to the Gulf of Mexico. “There’s still a lot of work to do, but it’s been a great accomplishment already,” Canant says.