It’s official: The Bogue Falaya Shoreline Protection and Paddlers Launch has received the “2020 National Recognition Award” by the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC)!

In 2019, this project won the ACEC/Louisiana “Engineering Excellence Award - Special Projects Category” making it eligible for national merit.

We are thrilled for the City of Covington and its residents as well our team, who understood the importance of this project to the local community and passionately worked to make this a facility they can be proud of. 

Below we have an excerpt of the story behind this project and its impact on the Covington community and other park users. 

The framework.  

Located along the Bogue Falaya River, the northeastern shoreline of Bogue Falaya Park was experiencing continuous land loss while the steep, sloughing shoreline also kept the public from safely accessing the water’s edge. Previous efforts to stabilize the shoreline using rip-rap and crushed concrete proved unsightly and unsafe for the public and did little to preserve the shoreline or improve water access.

Furthermore, if the park continued to experience poor water quality and erosion, habitat loss would escalate making reversal more difficult.

Realizing these challenges, the City of Covington hired DE to develop a Master Plan that served as a framework for overall park improvements including shoreline protection.

The solution.

Following the acceptance of the Master Plan, DE implemented the first phase of improvements: Bogue Falaya Park Shoreline Protection and Paddlers Launch.

The complexity of the project lay within the multi-faceted needs of the City: the project must stop shoreline retreat; provide safe, universal access to the waterfront; enhance access to natural resources; be resilient to frequent inundation from the Bogue Falaya River; and be an aesthetically pleasing backdrop to the variety of community events held at the park throughout the year.

To satisfy these requirements, the DE project team used its interdisciplinary staff of coastal and water resource professionals, transportation engineers, and urban planner to design a bulkhead that could withstand a wide range of scour and inundation scenarios which was integrated with the ADA accessible kayak launch and waterfront walkway that met the universal design requirements for water point of entry. The final design also offered flexibility in construction methods for contractors ensuring the best price for the owner.

By stabilizing the shoreline in Bogue Falaya Park and providing safe access to the water, the bulkhead is a highly visible engineering feature that the public can depend on to preserve the existing landscape of the park. The project is a demonstration to the public that with proper planning and engineering processes and inter-government cooperation, engineers can create infrastructure that serves a variety of public interests such as preservation of public spaces and safe, universal access to natural resources.