The opening of Louisiana’s Morganza floodway today may send enough water to fill a football field 10 feet deep every second across the heart of Cajun country, eventually filling an area almost as large as Connecticut.
Major General Michael Walsh, president of the Mississippi River Commission, has told Col. Edward Fleming to open the spillway as soon as the river’s flow reaches 1.5 million cubic feet per second at Louisiana’s Red River Landing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a statement.
The spillway, built in 1954, can release 600,000 cubic feet of water per second into central Louisiana and the Atchafalaya River at maximum capacity, taking pressure off the Mississippi and the cities downstream, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Corps inundation maps assume the spillway operating at 50 percent of capacity.
The corps expects to release 150,000 cubic feet per second from the Morganza, which is 310 river miles above New Orleans.
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.”
About 2,500 people and 2,000 structures are within the spillway and another 22,500 and 11,000 buildings are vulnerable to flooding when the waters rise, according to Jindal’s office.
Oil, Gas Production
When the Morganza Spillway is opened, an estimated 15,000 acres of farmland will be initially underwater in the south- central part of Louisiana along the Mississippi River, Kyle McCann, a spokesman at Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation.
Opening the spillway will also affect Louisiana’s energy production. Inside the threatened area are 2,264 wells that produce 19,278 barrels of crude oil a day, about 10 percent of Louisiana’s onshore total.
About 252.6 million cubic feet a day of gas is produced in the corps’ potential inundation area, Anna Dearmon, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, said in an e-mail. She said there is no estimate of how much of this production would be affected.
“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.
Exxon Baton Rouge
The Mississippi River has flooded Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM)’s river docks at the refinery in Baton Rouge, according to a person familiar with the plant’s operations.
The refinery, on the banks of the Mississippi, had crews working “around the clock” because of the river, said the person, who declined to be identified because the information isn’t public. The plant is operating while “watching the river conditions,” Kevin Allexon, a company spokesman based in Fairfax, Virginia, said in an e-mail yesterday.
Going Door-to-Door
National Guard troops and local sheriffs would start 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.
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.
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.
Watching Flow Rate
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.
Jindal said the corps has asked the State Police to shut the roadway over the Morganza down at 10 a.m. The structure also carries a Kansas City Southern (KSU) railroad line.
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.
To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Baton Rouge atbsullivan10@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Stets at dstets@bloomberg.net.
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