— Plastic bottles and tree limbs slowly drifted on the surface of the brown water near Henry Allen’s driveway, an ominous sign the flood was coming toward his home in a low-lying area in northeast Memphis.
As the crest of the Mississippi River crept south, rolling along the big river at a lazy pace, Allen decided it was time to flee. The water threatening his house was actually flowing over the banks of a tributary that feeds into the Mississippi, which is backed up with more water than it can handle.
Communities all along the banks of the Mississippi carefully watched the river rise, like a giant bathtub filling up with water. “I hope I’ve got it worked out,” said Allen, who was getting ready to pack his red Ford F-150 pickup truck with TVs, microwaves and clothes and head for an aunt’s house Saturday. “What we leave behind, I don’t care about it. I hope it don’t get so bad that we have to cry about anything.” His house is about 9 feet above the current water level, but the water has already inundated more than eight houses on his street, approaching the front windows of a few homes, nearly covering their mailboxes. “We can’t do nothing about what Mother Nature kicks at us,” Allen said. “This is history making right here.”
Record river levels, some dating as far back as the 1920s, were expected to be broken in some parts.
In Louisiana, state officials warned residents that even if a key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge was opened, residents should expect floods comparable to those of 1973. Some of Louisiana’s most valuable farmland is expected to be inundated with water.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said the Morganza spillway could be opened as soon as Thursday, but a decision has not been made. If it is opened, it could stay open for weeks.
A separate spillway northwest of New Orleans was to be opened Monday, helping ease the pressure on levees there.
The state’s Department of Children and Family Services increased shelter space near the areas expected to be flooded and is preparing for extended stays. “You could see the spillway opened up for a few weeks, so it is going to be important that these shelters are going to be available to these folks beyond just the few days that is normally the case with a hurricane evacuation,” Jindal said.
To the north in Arkansas, a portion of Interstate 40 remained closed. The water there forced Jeffen Roddy to abandon her home in Biscoe, in the eastern part of the state. Then, the effects of the flooding followed Roddy to work. She waits tables part-time at Craig’s Bros. Cafe, which feeds the truckers who have been rerouted. “There’s no big trucks coming in and out of here,” Roddy said from an empty restaurant in De Valls Bluff on Friday. “We don’t have one customer.”
Since the interstate closed for 23 miles between Hazen and Brinkley on Thursday, people like Roddy who live or work in the middle have been stuck. “It’s bad for business when the roads are closed,” said Roddy, 57, who is staying with a cousin on higher ground.
Because of levees and other flood defenses built over the years, engineers said it is unlikely any major metropolitan areas will be inundated as the water pushes downstream over the next week or two, but farms, small towns and even some urban areas could see extensive flooding. “It’s going to be nasty,” said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California-Berkeley who investigated levee failures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. How bad it gets depends on how well the flood-protection systems have been built and maintained, he said.
More than 4 million people live in 63 counties and parishes adjacent to the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers from Cairo, Illinois south to the Gulf of Mexico, down from 4.1 million in 2000, according to a census analysis by The Associated Press. It’s about twice as many people who lived in the region before the 1927 and 1937 floods. In 1920, 2 million people lived in those counties and in 1930, 2.3 million lived there.See the best pictures of the past week.
