Still Waiting For The Worst
The New Orleans Times-Picayune uses tags on its stories so this link will provide a listing to all of them.
Two stories caught my eye:
Mississippi River shooting through Bonnet Carre Spillway faster than expected
Even though only 330 of its 350 bays are open, an estimated 316,000 cubic feet of water per second is passing through the control structure, more than the structure’s rated capacity of 250,000 cfs, spillway manager Chris Brantley said Monday.
They are watching the side levees for signs of weakness caused by the faster than rated flow. If there is a failure, things will get complicated very quickly as the water pressure will sweep out a major hole.
Meanwhile from over at the Morganza Spillway – Mississippi River flooding threat brings out one town’s Cajun ingenuity
STEPHENSVILLE – A drive through this low-lying town surrounded by water provided a lesson in Cajun ingenuity Monday as residents floodproofed their homes against Mississippi River floodwaters rushing down the Atchafalaya basin from the Morganza Floodway.
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Like many of the 25,000 Atchafalaya basin residents whose homes are in danger of flooding, [Summer] Aucoin said she thinks it was wrong to open the spillway.
“I honestly believe they should let nature take its course,” she said. “I feel for the people of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but they should have let the water go where it was meant to go.”
Unfortunately for Ms Aucoin and the other people in the Atchafalaya basin, the entire river has been trying to go down the basin for decades, and without the Corps of Engineers control system, that is exactly what would have already happened. The basin is the natural path for the river to the Gulf as it is both shorter and steeper than the path by Baton Rouge and New Orleans. If there is a major failure of the flood control system that’s what is going to happen, which is why the Corps is releasing the pressure by opening spillways.
7 comments
I’m baffled. Stephensville is *OUTSIDE* the East Atchafalaya Floodway levee, and thus shouldn’t see any water from Morganza. Are they expecting a levee break? Or backwater from where the water exits at Morgan City? If they do get any flooding, it will be from levee breaks in the Mississippi levees “upstream” of them — levee breaks that the opening of the Morganza spillway should avoid.
The Bonnet Carre situation, however, is definitely one to monitor carefully. The core problem is that the Bonnet Carre “spillway” is actually heavily wooded cypress swamp with lots of brush and mud banks to slow down water going through it. Water doesn’t go swiftly through all these obstacles, thus the rather low flow limits placed upon it. Sending more water into the floodway than it’s designed to handle will result in water backing up and perhaps sloshing over the levees, and if it sloshes over the levees, well. Major flooding of the Norco refinery complex would be pretty bad for the environment, to say the least…
They have all kinds of people walking those levees around the Bonnet Carre. There is no plan B, because they are using all of the major spillways for the first time since the system was built. There are a lot of anxious people hoping nothing goes wrong.
They have to consider this their “worse case” for the planning of the system, and many are probably regretting that they didn’t build a little higher.
There are all kinds of nasty things already in the flood water, so no one needs any extras.
As for Stephensville, after you mentioned it I checked the map, and Morgan City would have a major problem if the water backed up to that far.
Stephensville is one of those towns I always intended to explore with my motorcycle, but never got around to. Now that my motorcycling days are over, I’ll probably never get down there. Sort of like I never managed to do LA 82 thru Grand Cheneir before Hurricane Rita washed it away. Siiiiiiigh…
– Badtux the Wistful Penguin
In case you’re wondering, I explored all the west side of the Atchafalaya, all the way from the northern end of the levee down to Morgan City and all the little towns along and in the basin to the west of the Atchafalaya. I never got to the east side. It was fine riding on my FT-500 Ascot motorcycle (with the exception of the farmer who thought he owned the levee near Morgan City, where I had to feign incomprehension to avoid getting shot), and I saw a lot of interesting countryside. Also got down to Grand Isle and to the end of Bayou Lafouche where that big oil terminal is. Pissed me off that there was a “No Motorcycles” sign at the parking lot to the Grand Isle State Park though, the ranger said it was because people had ridden motorcycles on the beach, well my Ascot had street tires on it and was clearly a street bike, and all I wanted to do was have a picnic lunch on the beach (said picnic lunch contained in the cooler bungeed to my luggage rack). Sheesh. You’d think motorcycle riders were all tatooed hooligans or somethin’!
– Badtux the Reminiscing Penguin
Having been hassled while riding a Lambretta [it was cheap transportation, give me a break] the mind of many local police officers is not exactly open to new ideas. One Marlon Brando movie and everyone on two wheels powered by a motor is part of a barbarian horde. You don’t say if this was before or after Easy Rider was released.
I would have wanted a dirt bike or 4WD before I headed that way because I don’t like the view from I-12. Lots of mud in South Louisiana, more amenable to an airboat than a land vehicle of any kind.
See, thing about a motorcycle, I could park on campus and it got 50mpg so fit with a college student’s budget. I also had a rusty old Chevy Chevette for those times when it was too cold or raining too hard to ride to school, but then I had to park by the football stadium (roughly 5 miles from campus on the old ag extension, which had been turned into the athletic complex so that the on-campus athletic facilities could be torn down and academic buildings built in their place) and take the shuttle bus. On-campus parking was very limited for automobiles because the campus had been originally designed to hold 4,000 students, and there were 16,000 students while I was there. So the only way to park on campus was to win the car lottery… which required a chunk of $$$ just to *enter* it, nevermind the additional fee once you *won* it.
So anyhow, that’s why I bought the Honda FT-500 Ascot. I sold that bike when I moved to Houston for my first real job, because I needed money for deposit on a room in an illegal boarding house run by an Indian immigrant who also published one of the local Indian newspapers (was real fun to see the galley proofs drying on all the furniture in the living room!). Sigh. That was a good little bike, 50mpg, simple as dirt (one big cylinder, air-cooled), and plenty fast for the days of 55mph speed limits… and while it wasn’t a dirt bike, it was the closest thing to a UJM (Universal Japanese Motorcycle) available at the time (remember, “dirt bikes” are a recent invention, the first “dirt bikes” were UJM’s with the lights stripped off and knobbies slung on the wheels). I was careful off pavement because it didn’t have a skid plate, had a low front fender (good for keeping water off me in the rain, not-so-good if it got packed with mud), and had aluminum wheels (lower maintenance than spoked steel wheels, but can shatter if you hit an obstacle with them), but it got me into some places where it wasn’t supposed to be able to go just fine :).
As a bonus, because it got 50mpg and those were the days of $1/gallon gasoline, I could go exploring without (too much) worry about how much gas would cost. Two tacos and a burrito from Taco Bell cost $3. For that same amount of money, I could go 150 miles. Talk about cheap entertainment! Sure, I ate a few more PB&J sandwiches, but there was such a lot of cool stuff to explore in South Louisiana even *without* a boat. Nowadays, alas, so much of it has been blown away, washed away or fell into the sea…
I admit to once owning a 150 Honda “Dream” because I was at a military school for a few months, had arrived by airplane because my car needed work and that was being done while I was in the wilds of West Texas. There was absolutely nothing to do on the small base, and no public transportation, so I bought the bike. It was ugly, but it got me around the local area and it was cheap. I bought a gas can to fuel it, because it was just too weird buying two quarts of gas, which was normally all it took when I thought I should add gas. I sold it for what I paid for it, and threw in the gas can when I left.
You do what you have to do to get around, and they don’t make it easy to do in the US.