The mud is about to hit the fan in Mandeville.

The city’s first ever coastline assimilation project is getting revved up to start distributing tons of effluent into unpopulated marshlands to the city’s tattered coastal areas.

The project has been in the works for some time now, but it wasn’t an acceptable means of coastal restoration until earlier this year. Soon after, in May, the project was put out to bid. And Gilmore & Son Construction Corp. was approved for the venture at a price of $1.68 million.

The Mandeville City Council approved the bid, and the only roadblock left standing in the way was the approval of the U.S. Corps of Engineers.

Mayor Eddie Price recently announced the city has received that approval, and now they have to contact the contractor and find out if his bid still stands.

Price said he hopes to get that accomplished within the next several days because “Santa delivered the nearly 6,000 feet of pipeline for the project over the Christmas holidays,” he said.

The assimilation project consists of stretching a pipe from the state of the art sewer treatment facility south of Mandeville High School, westward toward the Tchefuncte River. Price said the pipe would extend several thousand feet over the expanse of unpopulated wetlands, where it would distribute moderated amounts of effluent into the marshland. The hopes are to restore the desolated wetlands that have been plagued with salt-water intrusion and coastal erosion, Price said.

The effluent distributed would be filtered and rich in nutrients and fresh water.

Price said the Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration Project is the first of its kind in the parish to use effluent as a means of coastal restoration. Neighboring town Lacombe also operates a restoration project using dredged sediment from Lake Pontchartrain pumped into the Big Branch National Wildlife refuge.