BUTTE LAROSE, La. — In the latest agonizing decision along the swollen Mississippi River, federal engineers are close to opening a massive spillway that would protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans but flood hundreds of thousands of acres in Louisiana Cajun country.
With that threat looming, about 25,000 people in an area known for small farms, fish camps, crawfish and a drawling French dialect are hurriedly packing their things and worrying that their homes and way of life might soon be drowned.
People in this riverfront community gathered at their volunteer fire station to hear a man dressed in Army fatigues deliver an ominous flood forecast.
Col. Ed Fleming leaned over a podium this week and warned that projections by the Army Corps of Engineers call for the station to be inundated by up to 15 feet of water. The crowd let out a collective gasp.
“From the ground?” an incredulous resident shouted at the meeting.
“From the ground,” said Fleming, head of the corps’ New Orleans district.
A few skeptics in the audience scoffed at the projection, but many others were shaken.
“It’s over with,” said Pierre Watermeyer. “That’s it. There’s no sense in pretending.”
The corps could open the Morganza floodway north of Baton Rouge as early as this weekend, a move that would relieve pressure on the city’s levee system.
Opening the spillway gates for the first time in 38 years will unleash the Mississippi on a wild ride south to the Gulf of Mexico through the Atchafalaya River and divert floodwater from the river into the basin’s swamplands, backwater lakes and bayous. Several thousand homes would be at risk of flooding.
Even if engineers decide against opening the spillway, no one seems to doubt that a major flood is bound for Butte LaRose, Krotz Springs, the oil-and-seafood hub of Morgan City and other swampland communities in the Atchafalaya Basin.
The Morganza and the nearby Old River Control Structure were built in the 1950s to keep the Mississippi on its current course through New Orleans, one of the world’s busiest ports. If the river rises much higher at New Orleans, the Coast Guard said Thursday that it would consider restrictions on shipping, including potentially closing the channel to the largest, heaviest ships.
For the people of this region, floods from rain-swollen rivers and hurricanes are a familiar hazard. Floodwaters damaged or destroyed many homes and fishing camps in Butte LaRose in 1973, the last time the corps opened the Morganza spillway.
Spillway decision hinges on water volume, river level
Officials were expected to decide as early as today whether to open the Morganza spillway, a move based in part on the volume of water pouring downriver, as measured in cubic feet per second at the spillway, and on the river’s level in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
The so-called “trigger point” for opening the spillway will be reached when the flow volume is 1.5 million cubic feet per second. By Thursday, it was moving at 1.41 million cubic feet per second, an increase over Wednesday’s measurement, according to the Army Corps of Engineers.
By May 23, if the spillway is not opened, the river is forecast to be at 19.5 feet in New Orleans, just 6 inches below the tops of the levees protecting the city.
Los Angeles Times
