Small towns are in deep
As floodwaters rise, farms may be lost
BUTTE LA ROSE, La. – Water is a way of life here. You settle beside a river, on soft, fertile soil barely more than a swamp, and it’s understood that you’re going to get flooded. But when that flooding is intentional, orchestrated by the government to save the big cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge from their own inundations, it has an especially cruel twist.
“It’s depressing. But I can’t stop it,” Greg Kirsch said Thursday as a maintenance man disconnected the water on his 16-by-80-foot trailer, which sits in the shady depths of the Atchafalaya River basin. Soon, the trailer would be hauled away for safekeeping on higher ground, and Kirsch’s way of life would be another casualty in the slow-motion disaster expected to reach here next week if a spillway is opened to divert water from the flood-swollen Mississippi River.
“That’s what the Morganza is for,” Kirsch said of the Morganza Spillway some 50 miles north. “We took a gamble when we bought here.”
For nearly 40 years, that gamble paid off. The spillway, designed to redirect Mississippi River water to prevent flooding in Baton Rouge and other population centers downstream, was opened just once, in 1973.
Officials were expected to decide as early as today whether to open the spillway, a move based in part on the volume of water pouring downriver. By May 23, if the spillway is not opened, the river was forecast to be at 19.5 feet in New Orleans, just six inches below the tops of the levees protecting the city.
Along the tributaries and other waterways that stand to be flooded if the spillway opens, efforts continued Thursday to prepare for the worst. Prisoners dressed in black and white striped coveralls filled sandbags in Butte La Rose, as earthmovers and other heavy equipment moved soil and sand atop levees protecting small cities and hamlets so tiny they rarely appear on maps.
“It’s something we’ve lived with, knowing it might happen,” said Morganza resident Mitch Frey, who had already harvested his wheat and crawfish but stood to lose 500 acres of rice. But after so many years of calm, he said, most people had grown to ignore the risk.