It rained on southern Louisiana Thursday night, May 12 — and that made fears along the
lower Mississippi River rise as high as the Big Muddy’s already
dangerously swollen levels. The Mississippi grew to 43.4 ft., almost 20
ft. above its normal mark at Louisiana’s capital, Baton Rouge, and even
more rain is forecast for today. Heading into the weekend, state officials
are faced with an ugly reality: the river keeps rising even though they’ve
opened more than half the bays on a spillway that diverts raging floodwaters
around the city of New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico. More floodgates,
as a result, have to be opened.
By Saturday, in fact, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to partially open the Morganza Spillway, northwest of Baton Rouge, for the first time since the storied 1973 floods. On Friday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said the Army Corps told him the Mississippi is flowing at close to 1.5 million cu. ft. per sec., the official benchmark for opening the spillway. Once the Morganza is uncorked, it will send excess river water south through the Atchafalaya Swamp and into the Gulf — and, officials hope, alleviate some of the pressure on levees protecting Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
The decision came with a catch-22: if the Army Corps decided not to open the Morganza, it ran the risk of sending a catastrophic 20 to 40 ft. of water into New Orleans, where memories of Hurricane Katrina — which drowned the Crescent City in 2005 — are still fresh. Instead, it will open the spillway and send 150,000 cu. ft. of water per sec. racing into a swamp west of New Orleans, sparing the Big Easy but inundating at least 3,000 people in the outlying fishing and farming communities of the Louisiana bayou. On Friday, Jindal advised residents there that “now is the time to get out of harm’s way.”
Among the communities at risk is Morgan City , a town
southwest of New Orleans. Mayor Tim Matte says his city has done all it can
to shore up its levees, but there is a sense of dread about what might
happen if there is a breach. Home to fuel docks and shipyards, shrimpers and
oilmen, Morgan City is the last stop for any river water that flows down the
Morganza floodway. “We live with that reality,” Matte says. Some projections
have Morgan City getting as much as 15 ft. of water once the Morganza is
opened.
Meanwhile, the mayors of the much larger cities of Baton Rouge and New
Orleans worked to calm nervous residents, telling them they need not worry
about the floods. But with those reassurances came what Baton Rouge
Mayor-President Kip Holden called an “X factor.” Says Holden: “If there is a
breach in the levee, we’re going to have some problems.” And the levees are
still a sensitive issue. In Baton Rouge — where officials say
the river could reach 47.5 ft. by May 22, breaking the 1927 record of 47.28
ft. — the city built up a two-mile section of levee with 4-ft.-high
orange tubing and ordered residents to stay off the levees for the time
being. Still, on Thursday evening, water clearly seeped onto the grounds
of chemical plants along the Mississippi River. In New Orleans, where water
levels sit about 3 ft. under the flood wall, officials pondered whether
to shut down ship traffic between Baton Rouge and the Gulf.
And yet, strangely, a rare piece of good news emerged in New Orleans: the
river level late this week started dropping there inch by inch. “Lowest it’s
been in a while,” tweeted local meteorologist Margaret Orr. “16.87′ at New
Orleans. The bay openings in the Bonnet Carr [Spillway] making a
difference!” But small victories like this come at a price. In the coming
days, it will become evident just what sort of flood bath small towns like
Morgan City will have to take so the Big Easy and Baton Rouge can inch
toward a dry triumph in their battle with a raging river. See the world’s most influential people in the 2011 TIME 100.
See TIME’s 140 best Twitter feeds.
