The corps expects to release 150,000 cubic feet per second from the Morganza, which is 310 river miles above New Orleans. The spillway, built in 1954 and not opened since 1973, can release 600,000 cubic feet of water per second at maximum capacity. It may send enough water to fill a football field 10 feet deep every second across the heart of what is known as Cajun country, eventually filling an area almost as large as Connecticut.
About 2,500 people and 2,000 structures are within the spillway and another 22,500 and 11,000 buildings are vulnerable when the waters rise, according to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Inside the threatened area are 2,264 wells that each day produce 19,278 barrels of crude oil, about 10 percent of Louisiana’s onshore total, and 252.6 million cubic feet of natural gas, according to the state.
The water flow “is putting tremendous stress on the entire system,” said Major General Michael Walsh, president of the Mississippi River Commission. “I directed the commander to open those bays today.”
Earlier today the river’s flow reached 1.5 million cubic feet per second at Louisiana’s Red River Landing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement.
Opened Gradually
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said yesterday that the Morganza would be opened gradually and wouldn’t result in a wall of water running the length of the state to Morgan City, 70 miles west of New Orleans, where the Atchafalaya empties into the Gulf of Mexico. He stressed the need for residents to move quickly.
“Now is the time to take action,” Jindal said at a press conference. “We wanted to give people as much advance notice as we can.”
An estimated 15,000 acres of farmland will be initially underwater in the south-central part of Louisiana along the Mississippi River as the water flows 100 miles toward Morgan City and into the Gulf of Mexico, said Kyle McCann, a spokesman at Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation. The water will take about three days to reach the Gulf.
The Mississippi River flooded Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s river docks at its refinery in Baton Rouge, Kevin Allexon, a company spokesman said. The plant, second-largest in the U.S. after Exxon’s refinery in Baytown, Texas, remains in production and can process 525,000 barrels of oil a day, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Door-to-Door
National Guard troops and local sheriffs are going door-to- door in the affected areas warning residents to flee, Jindal said. It would take the water three days to travel the length of the floodway from Morganza to Morgan City.
A voluntary evacuation notice has been issued for Melville, Krotz Springs and Three Mile Lake, according to the St. Landry Parish government.
“We are building earthen, sandbag and Hesco basket levees in Amelia,” said Paul Naquin, St. Mary Parish president, based in Franklin, Louisiana. “In five days we should be OK. We are working 24 hours a day trying to beat the clock.”
A Hesco basket is a container that can be filled with dirt to build a temporary levee.
Naquin said there is also a plan to sink a barge in a bayou to slow down the rising water.
For weeks, the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, swollen by heavy rain and melted snow, have been inundating cities and towns, flooding cropland and disrupting shipping. The Ohio rose to a record 61.72 feet (18.8 meters) in Cairo, Illinois, before joining the Mississippi there.
River System
The flooding in Tennessee has affected 650,000 acres of cropland in the western part of the state, including 86,000 acres of wheat, said Lee Maddox, a spokesman for the Tennessee Farm Bureau, citing numbers from the state’s farm service agency, a unit of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Farmers were just getting ready to harvest the wheat, and it’s probably destroyed now, Maddox said.
The Mississippi River system was engineered to absorb a major flood while maintaining flow rates through Baton Rouge and New Orleans to ensure the integrity of levees, according to the corps. The corps wants to limit flow to 1.5 million cubic feet per second at Baton Rouge and 1.25 million at New Orleans, said Ken Holder, a spokesman.
When the river flows exceed that, the system is designed to have water diverted elsewhere by using the Morganza or the Bonnet Carre spillway outside New Orleans, he said.
Opening the Morganza may lower the river’s crest in Baton Rouge by as little as a foot, said Bryan Harmon, the city’s deputy public works director.
By: Brian K. Sullivan and Leela Landress of the Bloomberg News
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