The Army Corps of Engineers needs the equivalent of 20 Superdomes full of clay and mud to raise levees high enough to protect the New Orleans area from a 100-year flood.

"Needless to say, that's a lot of dirt," said Chris Gilmore, senior project manager for the corps.

The comment elicited chuckles from many of the 200 people gathered Thursday night at N.P. Trist Middle School in Meraux to discuss the corps' flood-control projects in St. Bernard Parish and eastern New Orleans.

But where that dirt will come from was no laughing matter.

Several speakers urged corps officials to excavate the material from so-called borrow pits outside St. Bernard Parish.

"Most of St. Bernard is marshland. When they start digging these holes, they're going to turn us into a lake," said Dan Arcenaux, chairman of the St. Bernard Coastal Zone Management Committee. "They ought to get the mud from someplace else."

And if the corps does dig borrow pits in St. Bernard, Arcenaux said, the material ought to be used to raise St. Bernard's levees to the required height before any of it is trucked outside the parish.

Gib Owen, the corps' chief of ecological planning and restoration, said the corps is primarily focusing on borrow pits in southeastern Louisiana to minimize transportation costs.

"The material can come from anywhere, but it needs to be brought here at a price we can afford," he said.

The meeting was the second of six forums to seek public feedback as the corps designs structures to protect the New Orleans area from flooding caused by a 100-year hurricane, which is defined as a storm with a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any year.

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