like the rest of the delta, BA-39 had come out of the Mississippi, just not in the usual way. “Picture a massive eight-foot drill bit on the bottom of the river,” he said. As the drill spun, it had gouged out sand and mud. Enormous diesel-powered pumps had sent this slurry gushing through a steel pipe thirty inches in diameter. The pipe had run for five miles, from the west bank of the Mississippi, over the river levees, under Route 23, across some cattle fields, over the back levees, and finally into a shallow basin of Barataria Bay. There the muck had piled up until bulldozers spread it
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