It looks like the Corps it going to do this gradually, so there will be some warning.
]]>Yeah, that’s some wild country there. But about to be less wild, rather flat, in fact, once the deep water comes through. Oh well.
– Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
]]>This year several points have already hit record highs and the river is still rising.
The real problem is that several of the feeder rivers are also flooding, like the Ohio, and really raising the downstream levels.
The levees upstream are higher than ever to prevent any flooding at all, so more water is making it downstream. As long as people refuse to tolerate minor flooding things get worse for the people below them.
Badtux, people these days just don’t understand the concept of owning land for generations, or the ties that develop.
I would have rigged pontoons out of 55 gallon drums and permanent anchors, like the Dutch have done. But I’m more into solutions than traditions.
]]>Most access to Butte La Rose is via LA3177 from the West Atchafalaya Floodway levee from Henderson, LA. Henderson LA is famous in South Louisiana for its seafood, BTW, if you are ever in South Louisiana and want the best Cajun food you’ll ever have, anywhere, that’s where you go. When I first went through Butte La Rose in 1984, riding a Honda XL-350 dual-sport motorcycle, the road was on top of the levee and was gravel. That was fun, zipping down that road at 45mph with a 20 foot drop on either side :). The bridge over the levee construction canal (on the inside of the floodway) was a pontoon bridge made of wooden railroad ties on top of steel pontoons with entry and exit ramps and that was fun to cross with skinny dirt-bike tires too. Since then the Corps of Engineers has raised the floodway containment levee another ten feet and put a concrete floodwall on top of it, and moved the road to the “dry” side of the levee, I don’t remember if they blacktopped it at the same time or left it gravel, check Google Earth. They also replaced the creaky wood pontoon bridge with a modern concrete-and-steel bridge.
A wall of water 15 feet high coming through town is actually going to be twice as high as the 1927 flood was in Butte La Rose. Most homes in Butte La Rose in 1927 were built on piers about 6 feet high, they were designed for flooding, there was no road access remember, boat was the only way to get there, the road actually parallels the old canal that used to be the only way to get to Butte La Rose (a canal built by the cypress loggers when they logged out the area to drag out the logs). Most homes got about a foot and a half of water in them in 1927. I.e., about 7.5 feet of water. The 1927 flood wasn’t a very big deal in Butte La Rose, everybody had boats (since that was the only way to get to Butte La Rose) so they just waited it out in their boats while tied off to their homes. But the deal is that the east and west containment levees did not exist then, so the water spread out all the way to the Bayou Teche on the west (flooding St. Martinville and New Iberia) and all the way to Bayou Lafouche to the east (flooding out Thibodeaux and Houma). Now the water is constrained to a much narrower strip of land, so it’s going to be much higher than in 1927 — i.e., yet another reason for folks in Butte La Rose to be pissed about the fact that they got not a dime for the Feds turning their land into a floodway.
The current homes in Butte La Rose are built on shorter piers than in 1927 but are generally designed so that four feet of water coming through town isn’t going to do a great deal of damage to them — they have cypress wood interior walls rather than drywall, and when flooding is expected anything that could be damaged by water is moved into the attic. But 15 feet of water is going to float those houses right off their piers. Somehow I think moving stuff into the attic isn’t going to suffice here. (BTW, the 1973 flood only put a couple of feet of water into town, because there is a levee between the town and the eastern part of the Atchafalaya Basin so only backwater that backed up from bayous that flow into the Atchafalaya ended up coming into town, but that levee is going to get overtopped BIG-time by a 15 foot wall of water!).
So anyhow, that’s the story on Butte La Rose. Which apparently is now going to be the *FORMER* town of Butte La Rose, thanks to the U.S. government turning their land into a spillway with not a dime of compensation to them for that taking.
– Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
]]>I remember the times they’ve opened the Trinity River Dam spillway in the vicinity of Livingston, TX, with similar results. The worst I ever personally suffered was being trapped on the wrong side of a flooded stream as I attempted to find a route back to US 69 (it was 59 back then).
Even so, my late parents’ property never flooded, because Dad had taken the trouble to examine a topo map before they bought the property.
Even in Houston, I’ve seen the damage floodwaters can do. In the worst cases, freeways become raging rivers. When it’s many years between occurrences of catastrophic floods, one can excuse residents, especially newcomers, for having let down their guard about a danger that spans a long period of time.
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