The Atchafalaya Flood
Update: For the latest posts and all posts related to the flooding, go to the Categories box on the Right sidebar and select Flood from the drop down list.
Update: Dr. Jeff Masters has a very detailed technical post with good graphics, America’s Achilles’ heel: the Mississippi River’s Old River Control Structure, about what is occurring along the Mississippi system.
The BBC reports on the “fun on the bayou” this weekend” US to open Louisiana gates
The Mississippi River has risen to levels not seen in decades this year.
Fed by rainwater and the spring thaw, the river and its tributaries have caused massive flooding upstream, and officials have said the flooding in Louisiana is the worst since 1927.
If, as expected, the Army Corps of Engineers this weekend opens the Morganza floodway for the first time in 38 years, it will unleash Mississippi River water through the Atchafalaya River basin, flooding parts of seven parishes in southern Louisiana near the Gulf of Mexico.
CNN reports on the reaction in the basin: For Louisiana town, a collective gasp as it braces for floodwaters
(CNN) — On a two-lane road that cuts through a dense forest of Louisiana cypress trees, intermingled with narrow, dark creeks, sits a small community trapped in the path of a looming disaster.
Hundreds of people packed into the Butte La Rose firehouse to learn about the flood projections from the Army Corps of Engineers.
Col. Ed Fleming delivered the dire news.
“Listen to me, listen to me, OK,” he said. “I’m telling you the depth of water from right here will be 15 feet.”
The number stunned the crowd.
Pierre Watermeyer turned to friends and said, “It’s over with, it’s over with.”
The 15-foot flood prediction in Butte La Rose is based on the Corps inundation map if and when the Morganza Spillway is opened.
They opened the gates for the 1973 flood, so there was no way they weren’t going to open them for this one. People should have been moving stuff to higher ground as soon as the Birds Point-New Madrid Spillway was opened. They had to use explosives to open it, not just raise gates, so if they felt they had to breach that one, the Morganza was a given.
Everyone who has watched the River knows that the Mississippi really wants to divert to the Atchafalya, and is only prevented from doing that by the levee system. The River gives, but it will take it away even faster.
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Nonetheless, I can’t help feeling sorry for the folks in the way.
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.
Butte La Rose is an interesting place. When the U.S. government built the Atchafalaya Floodway after the 1927 flood, they reimbursed everybody above US190 for taking their land or use of their land. Everybody below US190… nada. Skinflints in Congress told them, “your land’s all worthless swamp, so you get nothing because it’s worth nothing.” The Cajuns of the southern Atchafalaya Basin have been pissed at the Federal government ever since. And most of the folks in Butte La Rose *ARE* Cajuns, pure-blood — it’s a very parochial place where most of the little buildable land has been passed down from parents to children for over a century and land comes onto the open market for purchase by outsiders, well, never. The majority of homes in Butte La Rose aren’t occupied during weekdays because their residents work in the oil industry and are offshore or are in Lafayette, but I do not suggest that you attempt a crime spree in Butte La Rose, there’s generally enough folks about to put an end to that “Southern Comfort” style.
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
Steve, I definitely feel for those people and think the state and Federal government should have offered trucks to move their stuff, and a dry warehouse to store it in. My main point was that this shouldn’t be a surprise – it was going to happen, just like it happened in Missouri. When the Feds decided the Mississippi was going to be navigable and not shift around, the floods were built in to the process.
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.
Well, Bryan, the folks in Butte La Rose are pretty much lucky to be able to get stuff out by truck. Type “Fisher Island LA” into Google Earth, and start looking in the swamp to the east of this. You’ll find lots of stilt houses and houseboats, none of which have telephone, none of which are reachable by anything but boat. Now, most of these are uninhabited hunting camps, but some of them still have full-time habitation by people who make their living fishing in the Basin and selling the fish to, e.g., the restaurants in Henderson. Again, all of this is privately-owned land since it’s south of US190 and the Corps didn’t buy out any of that land when they created the Floodway, claiming that it was worthless. Well, I suppose it will be, once a 15 foot wall of water floods across it, even stilt houses 9 feet above the low water level are going to have trouble dealing with 15 feet of water and I doubt the anchors on the house boats can deal with that either… and notifying these folks that they’re about to get some real water is going to be a PITA. In fact, I’m not sure it’s possible. My brother reports that when they flew one of their oil exploration choppers across this area, they took fire and his Vietnam veteran pilot practically whipped everybody’s heads off juking out of there trying to avoid getting shot down, there was at least two bullet holes in the plexiglass when they got back to home base in Morgan City. Which was when my brother figured out why the oil company had put a Vietnam veteran flying that chopper in the first place :twisted:. (Note that this would have been in the early 80’s, when there was a plentiful supply of experienced chopper pilots who’d learned their chops in Vietnam).
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
It’s like trying to do search and rescue in the North County after a hurricane, there are areas where people are definitely not friendly, and not just those with stills, meth labs, or hemp farms. They don’t live in the back of beyond because they like company.
It looks like the Corps it going to do this gradually, so there will be some warning.