Thanks to an overabundance of water hyacinths in Slidell’s drainage canals, the usually close relationship between the city and the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi has gotten even closer.

Earlier this week, workers with Jacobs Technologies, a company that handles the Space Center’s wastewater system, brought a large power shovel to the drainage pumping station at Schneider Canal and began loading up dump trucks with tons of water hyacinths.

Slidell was happy to let Stennis have as many of the pesky plants that can be hauled away. It means that Schneider Canal will be cleared of the hyacinths that are currently choking the waterway and threatening the operations of the city’s newly-refurbished drainage pumps.

A power shovel from the Stennis Space Center scoops up water hyacinths from the Schneider Canal in Slidell Wednesday. Stennis scientists will use the plants to clean the water in their wastewater plant, and Slidell will clear out the hyacinths that threaten to clog the city'€™s drainage pumps. (Staff Photo By Erik Sanzenbach)

In return, the Stennis Space Center will get much-needed plants to clean the sewage at their wastewater plant.

“It’s a real symbiotic relationship,” said Forrest Davis, who heads the environmental technical staff for Jacobs Technologies.

To understand why Stennis desperately needs the water hyacinths, there has to be a history lesson. Back in the 1970’s Stennis built the country’s first tertiary wastewater plant, in which plants like water hyacinths are used to clean the water in the oxidation ponds.

“The hyacinth feeds off the nutrients in the tanks and cleans the water,” Davis said. “Because they are very prolific, water hyacinths are perfect for the job.”

Prolific is an understatement for the plant. Water hyacinths are not indigenous to the United States. They were imported from South America to be used for landscaping. The water hyacinth has no natural enemies here and reproduced at such a rate they threatened other plant life and began clogging rivers and canals. In other words, they became a pest, except as water cleaners.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture was able to find a weevil, appropriately named the hyacinth weevil, whose main diet is water hyacinths. They worked great, and the insects were able to cut down on the water hyacinths in the southern U.S.

However, a couple of weeks ago, some of the weevils got into the wastewater plant at the Stennis Space Center and proved how efficient they were at eating water hyacinths.

“The weevils destroyed over 10 acres of hyacinths in a week,” Davis said.

Jacobs Technologies tried to find more hyacinths in Mississippi, but the weevils had done their job well. Davis and his crew couldn’t find water hyacinths anywhere.

Davis learned that Slidell was having trouble with the plants in the Schneider Canal.

“The timing couldn’t have been better,” Davis said.

When Slidell had started refurbishing the Schneider pumps that had been damaged by Katrina, a crew with the U.S. Department of Wildlife and Fisheries tried to get rid of the prolific plants with herbicide. At first, it worked, but the plants came back with a vengeance. The growth had gotten so bad in the Schneider Canal that the city had to build two boat launches in the canal so that Wildlife and Fisheries agents could get into the canal to use the herbicide. The hyacinths threatened to get into the six pumps’ mechanisms and shut them down. This was not good, considering that hurricane season begins in two weeks.

Stennis and Slidell came to an agreement. Jacobs Technologies can take as much of the hyacinths as they want. So far, the Stennis crew has removed about 10 dump truck loads of the plants, and they are not finished.

“We’re going to take everything we can get,” Davis said. What can’t be harvested will be killed off with herbicide, and hopefully, the Slidell drainage pumps won’t have to deal with the water hyacinth problem.