Flood Update

Dr Masters dives into the numbers: Mississippi River flood of 2011 sets all-time flow record, but has crested

The great Mississippi River flood of 2011 crested yesterday and today, and the volume of water being pushed toward the Gulf of Mexico is the largest ever recorded on the Mississippi, said Bob Anderson, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers for the Mississippi Valley Division. “It’s never been this high; it’s never had this much water,” he said. “There’s just a tremendous amount of strain on these levees.” The Mississippi crested yesterday at Vicksburg, Mississippi, reaching 57.06′. This exceeded the previous all-time record of 56.2′, set during the great flood of 1927. The river crested at Natchez, Mississippi early this morning, and is now falling. The flood height at Natchez was also the greatest on record–61.91′, nearly three feet higher than the previous record height of 58′, set in 1937.
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The flow of the Mississippi River past the Old River Control Structure near Simmesport, Louisiana reached its all-time highest volume on record Thursday, when the flow rate hit 2.3 million cubic feet per second (cfs). The flow of Niagara Falls at normal water levels is 100,000 cfs, so the Mississippi’s flow was 23 times that of Niagara Falls.

Dr Masters noted that South Louisiana has been in drought conditions over this past winter, so the land will be soaking up a lot of the water in the spillways, and the levees are stronger than they were in 1927 when they had been saturated by a wet winter. The current data indicates that opening the Morganza Spillway has lowered the level downstream by 1 to 3 feet.

On the Times-Picayune link they have pictures of sandbagging to protect roads and buildings from back-flow flooding around Morgan City, and the rescue of osprey chicks and eggs in nests that would be flooded.

The flow down the Atchafalaya is making crawfishers happier, as the local water levels, low from the drought, have reduced their harvest, but the shrimpers and crabbers worry that their prey will be flushed out to the Gulf. Along with the wildlife pushed into the Gulf, a lot people hope the flow will help to clean oil that was deposited by the Well from Hell out of the marshes.