Environmental activist Harold Schoeffler told residents in St. Martinville at a town hall meeting Tuesday that better management of existing flood control features like the Keystone Locks and Dam on Bayou Teche could help alleviate some catastrophic flooding like the August 2016 flood.

ST. MARTINVILLE — A local environmental activist explained to St. Martinville residents how existing flood control measures, used properly, could prevent or at least mitigate floods like the one that caused more than $350 million in damage to the area in August 2016.

Retired Lafayette businessman and longtime environmental proponent Harold Schoeffler spoke in detail about the Vermilion-Teche watershed and how water flooding into it, not falling rain, caused the 2016 flood that left parts of St. Martin Parish under water for almost a month.

“You had 34 inches of rain at the airport in Iberia Parish and 24 inches at the Lafayette airport, but the water was gone in four days,” Schoeffler said. “In St. Martin Parish, it stayed for 29 days.”

The town hall meeting, held at St. Martinville’s Magnolia Park Community Center, was the first in a series of town hall meetings Mayor Melinda Mitchell has scheduled. She said in her introduction that the meetings are designed to allow the community more access to public officials.

“We will do one in each council district each month,” Mitchell said. “Then we take a month off and do it again.”

She said her goal was to have two meetings in each of the city’s five council districts each year.

Schoeffler kept the audience’s attention throughout his presentation as he described how water draining from Avoyelles and Rapides parishes worked its way south, through the Courtableau and Darbonne locks to overwhelm St. Martin Parish.

“If the Henderson Locks had been open, we would not have flooded as badly,” Schoeffler said. He also said that to allow the Teche to flow properly, any time the Henderson Locks are opened, the Keystone Locks east of St. Martinville also should be opened.

“The Keystone Locks and Dam were built because, in the early 1900s, the Bayou Teche would dry up,” Schoeffler said. “The Keystone keeps the water six feet higher than it needs to be.”

He said the Army Corps of Engineers is planning to test that theory the next time the Bayou Teche water levels are high at Keystone and Bayou Vermilion is at a similar height at Surrey Street in Lafayette.

“When they are both at about 12 feet, they’ll open it and see,” Schoeffler said. “It doesn’t cost anything and could save a lot in the long run.”

He also said the problem with drainage at Pecan Island is not runoff from Youngsville and Broussard but the fact that water entering the area can only get out through the Vermilion River.

“There is a plan to create a way to divert water from there to the Teche,” Schoeffler said.

Residents also heard from Jennifer Stelly with the St. Martin Economic Development District, who explained the services the district offers for new and growing businesses.