The Slidell City Council has approved the low bid of Hard Rock Construction Co. of Metairie to repair several million dollars worth of street and drainage-related works, mostly in the southern half of the city.

Hard Rock bid $2.35 million for the federally financed project that could take as long as two years to complete. The only other bidder was McDonald Construction Inc. of Slidell at $3.9 million. Work is expected to begin within the next few weeks.

City Engineer Donna O’Dell and the city’s consulting engineer, Richard C. Lambert Consultants LLC of Mandeville, recommended acceptance of Hard Rock’s bid. The company’s bid was lower than anticipated. Lambert had estimated $3.86 million for the hundreds of projects — many of them similar or identical but in different locations — in hurricane-battered Slidell.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has obligated $2.9 million in the Submerged Roads Program to help finance the work. FEMA approved the “project worksheet” and amount in November. That approval indicates FEMA will pay all of the “actual cost of repair.”

City officials have noted FEMA concurred with the city that more than 95 percent of the projects listed in a 66-page report compiled by last year qualified for funding through the Submerged Roads Program.

Teams of city officials and employees had walked the streets in Slidell and put together a list of projects to fix street, curb, sidewalk, driveway and related works. FEMA inspectors later retraced the city’s steps and ultimately agreed with almost all of the findings.

The damage — much of it not clearly visible because it’s subsurface — was the result of Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters and brutal winds in August 2005 and the subsequent swarms of heavy equipment and truck traffic during the hectic early post-Katrina recovery months.

The city was reluctant to start work on its own for any repairs — other than the most pressing ones such as public health and safety — for fear of FEMA later declining to reimburse those expenses.

The list breaks down about 980 projects on or along 270 streets, of which 730 projects on or along more than 180 streets are in the southern half of the city.

Although the south Slidell projects are 74 percent of the total, they represent 92 percent of the potential cost because of the greater damage caused south of the so-called “slosh line” at Fremaux Avenue. Most areas north of Fremaux escaped flood damage, although wind damage affected residences and commercial buildings to some extent throughout the city.

The project worksheets indicate the streets in the subdivisions on either side of Pontchartrain Drive — especially Yester Oaks, Westchester Estates, Lakeshore Village, Magnolia Heights and Windsor Place — and the tidally influenced Palm Lake area of southwest Slidell suffered the most extensive damage.