Historic MS River flooding forecasted once in a 100 year event

[dkmac]

Hot off the press:

Published: Friday, May 13, 2011, 4:30 PM Updated: Friday, May 13, 2011, 4:45 PM

By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune The Times-Picayune


Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh has instructed officials to open the Morganza Floodway within the next 24 hours to reduce the flow of the Mississippi River past Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a corps spokesman said.




The announcement and a map indicating the potential flow and height of water moving through the floodway into the Atchafalaya River basin will be released by the corps' New Orleans District office later today, said Bob Anderson, a spokesman for the corps' Mississippi Valley Division office in Vicksburg.
Walsh is commander of the division and president of the Mississippi River Commission, which gives him authority over the floodway.
Anderson also said that the floodway is likely to only be opened to allow the passage of 125,000 feet per second of water into the Atchafalaya, which is less than a fourth of the floodway's capacity and less than half of the water release originally planned.
Anderson said the smaller release is the result of new preliminiary estimates of the amount and speed of water moving downstream.
The "deliberate and slow opening of the floodway will take several days, Anderson said.
Earlier today, Gov. Bobby Jindal asked parish sheriffs and other elected officials to begin formal evacuation efforts, including door to door notifications, in areas expected to be flooded during the spillway opening.

http://www.nola.com/environment/inde...nza_flood.html

[Joe-Nathan]

They have to open it b/c the structures at three rivers are at max capacity. They were not designed to last very long in those kinds of conditions.

I will probably make it up there Sunday morning. Maybe the crowds will be gone.

[Joe-Nathan]

Now this is some highly motivated people.

This is on the White River in Arkansas. The news outlets tend to focus on the Miss River only and not all the tributaries that are backing up and doing some major damage.

[Joe-Nathan]

This from the Farm levee breech in East Carrol ph.

Please note that this levee was built in 1912ish, was not one of the Miss River main levees and was not maintained by the U.S.C.O.E.

[Joe-Nathan]

VERY IMPORTANT MAP!!!

THIS IS THE U.S.C.O.E. FLOODWATER TRAVEL TIMES ONCE THE MORGANZA IS OPENED:

[ROLLTIDE]

....

La. readies to open spillway, flood Cajun country

AP – This image provided by NASA Saturday May 14, 2011 and taken by an Expedition 27 crew member aboard the …

• Slideshow:Mississippi River Flooding
• Play Video Weather Forecast Video:National Forecast weather.com

By MARY FOSTER and HOLBROOK MOHR, Associated Press Mary Foster And Holbrook Mohr, Associated Press – 1 hr 55 mins ago
LAKE PROVIDENCE, La. – Army engineers prepared Saturday to slowly open the gates of an emergency spillway along the rising Mississippi River, diverting floodwaters from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, yet inundating homes and farms in parts of Louisiana's populated Cajun country.
About 25,000 people and 11,000 structures could be in harm's way when the Morganza spillway is unlocked for the first time in 38 years. Sheriffs and National Guardsmen were warning people in a door-to-door sweep through the area, and shelters were ready to accept up to 4,800 evacuees, Gov. Bobby Jindal said.
Some people living in the threatened stretch of countryside — an area known for small farms, fish camps and a drawling French dialect — have already started fleeing for higher ground.
"Now's the time to evacuate," Jindal said. "Now's the time for our people to execute their plans. That water's coming."
Opening the spillway will release a torrent that could submerge about 3,000 square miles under as much as 25 feet of water in some areas but take the pressure off the downstream levees protecting New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the numerous oil refineries and chemical plants along the lower reaches of the Mississippi.
"Protecting lives is the No. 1 priority," Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh said at a news conference aboard a vessel on the river at Vicksburg. A few hours later, the corps made the decision to open the key spillway and inundate thousands of homes and farms in Louisiana's Cajun country to avert a potentially bigger disaster in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Engineers feared that weeks of pressure on the levees could cause them to fail, swamping New Orleans under as much as 20 feet of water in a disaster that would have been much worse than Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Instead, the water will flow 20 miles south into the Atchafalaya Basin. From there it will roll on to Morgan City, an oil-and-seafood hub and a community of 12,000, and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico, flooding swamps and croplands.
A sliver of land north of Morgan City, about 70 miles long and 20 miles wide, was expected to be inundated with 10- to 20-feet of water, according to Army Corps of Engineers estimates. It will take hours and days for the water to run south, and wasn't expected to reach Morgan City until around Tuesday. Still, the city has already taken steps to shore up its levee.
The corps employed a similar cities-first strategy earlier this month when it blew up a levee in Missouri — inundating an estimated 200 square miles of farmland and damaging or destroying about 100 homes — to take the pressure off the levees protecting the town of Cairo, Ill., population 2,800.
The disaster was averted in Cairo, a bottleneck where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet.
This intentional flood is more controlled, however, and residents are warned by the corps each year in written letters, reminding them of the possibility of opening the spillway, which is 4,000 feet long and has 125 gate bays.
The spillway, built in 1954, is part of a flood plan largely put into motion in the 1930s in the aftermath of the devastating 1927 flood that killed hundreds.
It is set to be opened when a flow rate of 1.5 million cubic feet per second is reached and projected to rise. Just north of the spillway at Red River Landing, the river had reached that flow rate, according to the National Weather Service.
To put things in perspective, corps engineer Jerry Smith crunched some numbers and found that the amount of water flowing past Vicksburg, Miss., would fill the Superdome, where the NFL's New Orleans Saints play, in 50 seconds.
This is the second spillway to be opened in Louisiana. About a week ago, the corps used cranes to remove some of the Bonnet Carre's wooden barriers, sending water into the massive Lake Ponchatrian and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
That spillway, which the corps built about 30 miles upriver from New Orleans in response to the flood of 1927, was last opened in 2008. May 9 marked the 10th time it has been opened since the structure was completed in 1931. The spillways could be opened for weeks, or perhaps less, if the river flow starts to subside.
In Vicksburg, Miss., Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace said at least five neighborhoods have taken on water.
"We're patrolling subdivisions by boat," Pace said Friday.
Deputies are also living at Eagle Lake, a community north of Vicksburg that was evacuated and is now isolated. And U.S. Highway 61, a major north-south route has been cut off by water, affecting thousands of people, Pace said.
Meanwhile, farmers along the lower Mississippi had been expecting a big year with crop prices skyrocketing, but now many are facing ruin, with floodwaters swallowing up corn, cotton, rice and soybean fields.
In far northeastern Louisiana, where Tap Parker and about 50 other farmers filled and stacked massive sandbags along an old levee to no avail. The Mississippi flowed over the top and nearly 19 square miles of soybeans and corn, known in the industry as "green gold," was lost.
"This was supposed to be our good year. We had a chance to really catch up. Now we're scrambling to break even," said Parker, who has been farming since 1985.
Cotton prices are up 86 percent from a year ago, and corn — which is feed for livestock, a major ingredient in cereals and soft drinks, and the raw material used to produce ethanol — is up 80 percent. Soybeans have risen 39 percent. The increase is attributed, in part, to worldwide demand, crop-damaging weather elsewhere and rising production of ethanol.
While the Mississippi River flooding has not had any immediate impact on prices in the supermarket, the long-term effects are still unknown. A full damage assessment can't be made until the water has receded in many places.
Some of the estimates have been dire, though.
More than 1,500 square miles of farmland in Arkansas, which produces about half of the nation's rice, have been swamped over the past few weeks. In Missouri, where a levee was intentionally blown open to ease the flood threat in the town of Cairo, Ill., more than 200 square miles of croplands were submerged, damage that will probably exceed $100 million. More than 2,100 square miles could flood in Mississippi.
When the water level goes down — and that could take many weeks in some places — farmers can expect to find the soil washed away or their fields covered with sand. Some will probably replant on the soggy soil, but they will be behind their normal growing schedule, which could hurt yields.
Many farmers have crop insurance, but it won't be enough to cover their losses. And it won't even come close to what they could have expected with a bumper crop.
"I might get enough money from insurance to take us to a movie, but it better be dollar night," said Karsten Simrall, who lives in Redwood, Miss.
Simrall's family has farmed the low-lying fields in Redwood for five generations and has been fighting floods for years, but it's never been this bad. And the river is not expected to crest here until around Tuesday.
"How the hell do you recoup all these losses?" he said. "You just wait. It's in God's hands."
The river's rise may also force the closing of the river to shipping, from Baton Rouge to the mouth of the Mississippi, as early as next week. That would cause grain barges from the heartland to stack up along with other commodities.
If the portion is closed, the U.S. economy could lose hundreds of millions of dollars a day. In 2008, a 100-mile stretch of the river was closed for six days after a tugboat collided with a tanker, spilling about 500,000 gallons of fuel. The Port of New Orleans estimated the shutdown cost the economy up to $275 million a day.
___

[ROLLTIDE]

...

Civil Emergency Message

---

LAC007-047-057-077-109-150000-

URGENT - IMMEDIATE BROADCAST REQUESTED
CIVIL EMERGENCY MESSAGE
LOUISIANA EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY NEW ORLEANS LOUISIANA
RELAYED BY NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
930 AM CDT SAT MAY 14 2011

THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE IS TRANSMITTED AT THE REQUEST OF THE
LOUISIANA EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY NEW ORLEANS LOUISIANA.

...EMERGENCY MESSAGE FROM THE STATE OF LOUISIANA...

AVOYELLES...POINT COUPEE...ST LANDRY...ST
MARTIN...IBERVILLE...IBERIA...ASSUMPTION...ST
MARY...TERREBONNE...LAFOURCHE

DUE TO THE HIGH WATER IN THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER...THE U S ARMY
CORPS OF ENGINEERS HAS OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED THEY WILL OPEN THE
MORGANZA SPILLWAY WITHIN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. FLOODING WILL OCCUR
IN THE SPILLWAY AND LOW LYING AREAS IN AND AROUND THE ATCHAFALAYA
RIVER BASIN IN SOUTH CENTRAL LOUISIANA. CITIZENS SHOULD PAY CLOSE
ATTENTION TO INFORMATION FROM LOCAL OFFICIALS AND THE MEDIA FOR
UPDATES AND FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

$$

[ROLLTIDE]

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will open the first bay of Louisiana's Morganza Spillway at 3 p.m. Saturday (4 p.m. ET), Col. Ed Fleming said.

The move is aimed at lowering anticipated cresting levels along the rising Mississippi River and divert water from Baton Rouge and New Orleans.


The move would flood parts of low-lying south-central Louisiana.
>+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

[Joe-Nathan]

I was out today doing some recon for before and after photos. I have never really seen the water as high as it is now in the Atch river north of Butte LaRose. The amount of water that is moving by is amazing.

Now I will be making a trip tomorrow up to Morganza then work my way back down. The water in Henderson is way up already, but I have seen it higher. It is supposed to get another 15 or so feet higher by next weekend. This will put the water about halfway up the western Levees. I pray they hold!!!

[Joe-Nathan]

This is NOT good:

Barges Hit Baton Rouge Bridge

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Twenty-five barges under tow on the Mississippi River broke loose north of a highway bridge at Baton Rouge and two of them hit the bridge before they were contained.

Jodi Conachen, a state transportation department spokeswoman, said the U.S. Highway 190 bridge was closed after the Saturday afternoon accident so a thorough inspection could be made. It was unclear when the bridge would re-open.

What caused the barges to break loose was not clear. Coast Guard Petty Officer Casey Ranel said said they all have been contained and no injuries were reported.

[nightrider]

The flooding begins

[Joe-Nathan]

Did any one see the footage of the little rabbit escaping the flood at the spillway? I saw it on the news, but can not find it on internet.

[Joe-Nathan]

Rounds of heavy Miss. Valley rain could prolong flood conditions

AccuWeather.com reports the weather pattern is likely to continue to bring rounds of heavy rain to part of the Mississippi Valley in the coming several weeks, which could mean very slow recovery from flood conditions in Louisiana.

The dry weather hovering over the Mississippi Valley to start the week is helping, but a lot more help is needed into the summer from Mother Nature.

The concern for a dose of heavy rain late this week continues as a storm now impacting the West migrates slowly eastward.

The latest indications are that this rain may aim over portions of Arkansas and Missouri over the weekend.

The Mississippi River at Memphis is likely to remain above flood stage until early June, even without significant rainfall.

Many locations along the lower Mississippi River are in the same boat, no pun intended.

However, since the rounds of moisture-rich storms are likely to continue to feed in from the West for the next several weeks, the potential for pockets of heavy rain will continue.

While this rainfall is not likely to lead to new record levels of flooding, it will tend to prolong the above-normal water levels and could keep flood waters lingering in some locations well into the summer.

The Mississippi River drains most of the middle of the U.S. and includes major rivers such as the Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Des Moines and the Red River of the South.

These tributaries are likely to be hit with episodes of heavy rain amounting to up to several inches in some cases.

In turn, the runoff from the events, although not as concentrated nor as intense as that of late April, will be enough to bring periodic rises on these tributaries.

The flow downstream could then slow or stall recession, or perhaps even lead to modest secondary rises on the Mississippi.

One thing that will tend to work in favor of those hoping to get back into their homes and begin the cleanup process is higher evaporation rates during the summer.

Strong sunshine, long days and higher temperatures will pull moisture out of the ground leaving less water available to run off into streams and rivers.

We have to get the rain to shut off for a long enough period to get all or most of the tributary rivers back down.

Just as this begins to happen, along comes another rain event it seems.

As a result, the normally slow recession of the Mississippi could be agonizingly slow in some areas.

Read more: TecheToday.com - Rounds of heavy Miss Valley rain could prolong flood conditions 

[Joe-Nathan]

Temporary gauge on Hwy 190 about half way b/w atch river and eastern protection levee:

http://waterdata.usgs.gov/la/nwis/uv...20,63160,00060

[Joe-Nathan]

THIS NOT GOOD FOR MORGAN CITY:


AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE LAKE CHARLES LA
630 AM CDT THU MAY 19 2011

SPRING TIDES WILL BE RUNNING ABOUT TWO TO THREE FEET ABOVE MEAN
SEA LEVEL AT THE TIME OF HIGH TIDE AROUND 7 AM. SOME MINOR
FLOODING WILL BE POSSIBLE. TIDES WILL BEGIN TO FALL LATER THIS
AFTERNOON.

[dkmac]

From Jeff Master's blogpost on Friday:

Mississippi River flood of 2011 sets all-time flow record, but has crested

Posted by: JeffMasters, 9:43 AM CDT on May 20, 2011

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. The opening of the Morganza Spillway on Saturday helped to reduce the flood heights from Vicksburg to New Orleans by 1 - 3 feet, greatly reducing the pressure on the levees and on the critical Old River Control Structure (which, as I discussed last Friday, is America's Achilles' heel, and must be protected.) According the National Weather Service, the Mississippi River is no longer rising anywhere along its length, and the great flood of 2011 has likely seen its peak. Rainfall over the next five days will not be enough to raise the Mississippi River water levels above the crests recorded yesterday and today. While it is great news that the flood has peaked, and the Old River Control Structure and all of the mainline levees on the Mississippi River have held, the fight is not over yet. Water levels will stay high for many weeks, and these structures will take a sustained pounding that could still cause failures. If another incredible heavy rain event like we experienced in mid-April occurs in June, the levee system and Old River Control Structure will threatened. Let's hope we don't have an early season Gulf of Mexico tropical storm that makes landfall over Louisiana. The latest 2-week forecast from the GFS model is not hinting at anything like this, fortunately. It's a good thing (for the sake of the levees) that Louisiana experienced severe drought over the winter and spring--had the water levels been high throughout winter and spring, like occurred in the run-up to the great 1927 flood, the levees would have been soggy and much more vulnerable to failure once the big flood crest hit.


Figure 1. 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. Image credit: Army Corps of Engineers.

Recommended reading
My post on the Old River Control Structure, America's Achilles' heel: the Mississippi River Old River Control Structure, is well worth reading, if you haven't done so. I plan on making a follow-up post next week discussing the economic cost of the failure of this critical flood-control structure.

[wcmi92]

I'm just glad the Ohio wasn't part of this... We had a minor flood on the Ohio a month ago, our floodwalls took it. It was the highest it was since the last major flood in 1997.

[Joe-Nathan]

Looks like it is the Missouri Rivers turn.

Pretty dire predictions here:

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion...cc81845a4.html

Guest commentary: The looming Missouri dam flood

BY:  Bernard Shanks | Posted: Tuesday, June 7, 2011 12:00 am | (12) Comments


There is very real threat of a flood that will leave St. Louis in chest-high water. The reason: Six old, huge, faulty dams that normally have reserve space for spring snow melt are nearly full now — before the spring floods start. Floodgates that haven't been opened in 50 years have begun to open. Flooding has begun. And the human and economic toll could be ghastly.

Why another flood disaster? Six dams from Fort Peck in Montana to Gavins Point in South Dakota, authorized by the Flood Control Act of 1944, are in the process of failing at flood control. With spring water levels low, they can hold back more than three years of average Missouri River flow — enough to stop the worst floods and protect 750 miles of the Missouri River valley and heartland cities. This year, that is not the case.

Let me give you a sense of scale. These reservoirs are massive. Four of the nation's 10 largest reservoirs are along the Missouri River — Fort Peck, Fort Randall, Garrison and Oahe. Three of these had less than five feet of total storage space behind the floodgates at the end of May. With a combined height of 700 feet, these three dams are nearly full. Melting snow surely will complete the task.

With cities from Wolf Point, Mont., to St. Louis facing record levels of water, hundreds of thousands of people are threatened by the unprecedented opening of floodgates. The greatest fear is the massive Fort Peck Dam, a hydraulic-fill dam that is the largest of its kind.

The Fort Peck Dam is built with a flawed design that has suffered a well-known fate for this type of dam — liquefaction — in which saturated soil loses its stability. Hydraulic-fill dams are prone to almost instant collapse from stress or earthquakes. California required all hydraulic-fill dams be torn out or rebuilt — and no other large dams have been built this way since.

At three miles wide, Fort Peck Dam last opened its floodgates 36 years ago. By the end of the first week in June, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will be releasing a record spill of water. The corps recently answered the question of possible failure with a statement the dam is "absolutely safe." It may be the largest at-risk dam in the nation.

Downstream, Garrison Dam never has had to use its floodgates since the dam was constructed 50 years ago. By mid-June, the corps plans to dump water equal to a good-sized river. The same is true for Oahe Dam, the next one downstream. Since the reservoirs are nearly full, the corps has no choice.

Effective flood control from six large dams is no longer an option. As a corps representative said, "It now moves us into uncharted territory."

We must all pose a question of national significance to the corps: What if Fort Peck Dam should fail?

Here is a likely scenario: Garrison, Oahe and three other downstream earthen dams would have to catch and hold a massive amount of water, an area covering nearly 250 square miles 100 feet deep. But earthen dams, when overtopped with floodwater, do not stand. They break and erode away, usually within an hour. All are full.

There is a possibility a failure of Fort Peck Dam could lead to a domino-like collapse of all five downstream dams. It probably would wreck every bridge, highway, pipeline and power line and split the heartland of the nation, leaving a gap 1,500 miles wide. Countless sewage treatment plants, toxic waste sites and even Superfund sites would be flushed downstream. The death toll and blow to our economy would be ghastly.

Years after Katrina and the New Orleans levee breaks, professional engineers and a federal court judge ruled theCorps of Engineers was to blame.

Are we once again at the brink of a massive corps failure? The corps is infamous for management errors, caving to commercial pressure and losing sight of its primary mission. This pending threat is so huge that it is gambling with the nation's security.

The corps is placing the nation at risk, and if the dams fail, Leon Panetta, who will become secretary of Defense later this month, will have the great Missouri Flood Disaster on his desk. And the entire nation will demand answers as to why the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not avert disaster with more economically and ecologically sound methods of flood prevention.

Bernard Shanks, an adviser to the Resource Renewal Institute, has studied the six main-stem Missouri River dams for more than four decades. He has worked for the U.S. Geological Survey and served as director of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. He has written three books on public land policy and is completing a book on the hazards of the Missouri River dams. 

[dkmac]

Thanks for the story J-N. We were planning to stay in St. Joseph, MO on our return trip from Minnesota. I'm going to plan a route that stays east of the Miss river until we're below St. Louis.

[Joe-Nathan]

Here is a link to some Missouri flooding aerial photos:

https://picasaweb.google.com/1045925...verFloodOf2011