Every year, dredgers dig up mud from shipping channels on Louisiana’s Lower Atchafalaya River. In the 1990s, they deposited the sediment at disposal sites along the riverbanks, near a bend called Horseshoe Bend, just north of Morgan City. By 1999, those sites were nearly full, so engineers tried something different in 2002, according to a project record from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Engineering With Nature initiative. Instead of hauling the dredged sediment away, they piled it upstream of a small, naturally forming island and let the current disperse it.
A problem with nowhere left to put the mud
