David Kurtz had a very interesting post about the floods that are going on along the Mississippi. I hadn’t realized that this was so serious until a few days.
Use this as an open thread to talk about what is going on and how people can help.
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Served
I think most of the media missed the crisis in Cairo, IL a week or so back, where the Army Corps was preparing to blow a levee, flooding Missouri farmland to save the town.
Missouri sued to prevent the action on every level they could, and the Speaker of the House in the state made some rather derogatory comments about Cairo which were laughed at my MO press in attendance. Cairo is a pretty impoverished and heavily minority community, and there was a clear race/class bias happening.
The corps eventually blew the levee early this month, but it was a nasty fight, indicative of our current discourse.
An Illinois state politics blog outlines some of this here.
Comrade Javamanphil
You won’t hear it on the national news but Lake Champlain is 2.5 feet above flood level (was 3 feet at peak) and has pretty much destroyed major areas of VT. Some Pics
cleek
looks like YouTube’s servers are flooded, too
mem from somerville
Although this won’t help in the immediate crisis, if you might be interested in disaster relief efforts that could help your neighbors look into your local MRC, Medical Reserve Corps. You don’t need medical training. They train the community to do shelters, medicine distribution, vax clinics, mock plane crash drills, etc. This weekend I’m taking the Disaster Sheltering for Companion Animals two day course with my local MRC: http://www.region4bvolunteer.org/R4bVMS/UpcomingEvents.aspx
Someday it could be your community. http://www.medicalreservecorps.gov/
Violet
And Texas is experiencing sever drought. Everyone would be happier if folks along the Mississippi could send a little of that water to Texas.
Montysano
During our residence in New Orleans (’85-’91), we went out for a weekend road trip. There had been a lot of rain, and in Morgan City we saw people feverishly stacking sandbags around their Tudor-style McMansions.
Further up the road, we passed through a little village called Pierre Part. Off in the flooded swamp, we saw a mobile home floating on a raft of 55 gallon drums, connected to a deck floating on a similar raft, where a party was in progress.
Good luck to all who live up close and personal with the big river.
Southern Beale
Yeah you’d almost think God was mad at the South or something.
Memphis has been hit hard, but the good news is, they are used to flooding along the Mississippi and know what to do. This isn’t their first rodeo. I’d say donations to the usual sources — American Red Cross, SPCA etc. — will be appreciated.
The Memphis In May world championship barbecue festival was supposed to be this weekend and I wonder if it will go on as planned. If you’ve never been it’s a fun day on the river. Had my first barbecued alligator there.
In other news, Blogger is still down and Twitter is now down. I am about to go nuts.
The Moar You Know
OT: If BGinCHI and slag read this – you guys had a bit of commentary last night (on the McCain thread) regarding the novel “Blood Meridian”.
I thought, in regards to slag’s comment about how the book made “Mad Max’s dystopian view of the future seem bland” that it might be something to check out.
I stayed up all last night reading it. This might be the best book I’ve ever read.
Thanks, guys. A truly rare gem, this novel.
Violet
@Southern Beale:
I thought I heard on the news that it had been moved. Can’t remember where it was being moved to, but I know some news person mentioned it.
Cris (without an H)
Did you see their 500 error? It’s kind of amusing.
Southern Beale
@Served:
I heard about the Cairo levee issue on MSNBC. I was interested to see who among our newscasters could pronounce Cairo correctly and who could not. (It’s KAY-roe, not KYE-roe).
Served
@Southern Beale: There was a local newscaster here who used KYE-roe, and there was almost a mob. Haven’t these people read American Gods?
Martin
Humans cannot possibly affect the climate, so please pray for rain in Texas and for less rain along the MS.
Dee Loralei
@Southern Beale: They moved the BBQ fest to the Liberty Bowl. Well, to the tailgate party part of it, now that the fairgrounds are no more. BBQFest is a riot, I used to be friends with several teams, it’s a weeklong drunken campout. I always thought that it would be a perfect thing for Christopher Guest et al to make a movie about. Hell, I should write it.
Sunset Symphony is supposed to be next weekend and I have no idea if they’ll have it at the fairgrounds as well. Not going to be the same hearing the 1812 Overture without the firing of the canons over the riverbluff. That’s my favorite day of Memphis in May. Day long picnic with 50,000 friends and neighbors on the river front, with tons of music and great food and wine.
River is usually a half mile across at the Memphis bridge now it’s at least 3 miles wide. Most of Memphis is ok, we’re on a bluff, but there’s lots of feeder rivers that are overbanked too. It’s gonna get much worse further downriver, those folks are mostly on flat land. I think they even closed it mostly to barge traffic and you wouldn’t believe the amount of goods and produce that move up river on any given day.
Oh, and the President is giving the Commencement Address at a local HS, and there was a totally silly and weirdly bigoted LTE in the local paper about Booker T Washington not being integrated and why do we still have busing? And why is the President speaking to a single race school?
Southern Beale
@Served:
LOL. I used to live in Cadiz, KY (KAY-deez, not ka-DEEZ) and drove through KYE-roe Ill. once on my way to St. Louis. I’ve also been to MYE-lan, Tennessee (Milan) and ver-SAILS (Versailles) Kentucky.
People talk funny ’round these parts.
Church Lady
@Southern Beale:
Tom Lee Park, on the river and where the contest has always been held, is under water. The contest has been moved to Tiger Lane at the old Fairgrounds. My son was down there last night and said it was great – the lack of mud (from the Beale Street Music Festival two weeks ago) more than made up for the lack of a river view.
Very few people here have been affected by the flooding of the Mississippi itself – some homes in Harbor Town on Mud Island and some businesses on President’s Island. However, the flooding is causing backup on the Wolf and Loosahatchie Rivers and Nonconnah Creek, which in turn has flooded a number of homes and businesses. Last report I heard was that up to 3,000 had taken on some amount of water.
Some of our local churches had really stepped up, providing food and shelter to those flooded out of their homes. Hope Presbyterian is currently sheltering around 300 people, mostly hispanic.
Tunica, Mississippi is really suffering, particularly people located in the Tunica Cutoff area. It’s completely under water and many don’t have flood insurance.
The Red Cross is a great place to send disaster relief donations.
johnsmith1882
@The Moar You Know:
How far into Blood Meridian have you gotten? I want to make a comment, but don’t want to ruin anything for you. I guess I’ll just say that McCarthy’s descriptions are the most vivid, pull-you-in-and-take-you-along-for-the-ride of any modern author that I am aware of.
As for the issue at hand, does anybody know why the silt from flooding the MO farmland after blowing the Cairo dam is supposed to ruin the land for generations? Up here in Chicago, that’s the gist of the story that we got, but not the explanation. I thought that silt from flooding is what makes land fertile, a la the Nile delta, you know, like we learned in sixth grade social studies.
sukabi
what makes it worse for Mississippians is that Barbour’s told them they are on their own… the state won’t help evac people… and has asked the feds to step in… http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/11/barbour-mississippi-flood/
Gin & Tonic
@Southern Beale: Last night on (maybe) the Snooze Hour, somebody mentioned Cairo, New Madrid and Baton Rouge in one sentence, and pronounced them all correctly (meaning in keeping with local custom.)
Dee Loralei
@Dee Loralei: Oh and the President is giving the Commencement Address to a local HS, which is such a huge honor. But there was a weirdly racist and oddly angry LTE in the local paper about why Booker T Washington HS isn’t integrated and if that’s the case, why do we still have busing? And if Obama is everyone’s President why is he only speaking at a single race school and Memphis has flooding and a great many needs and the writer was proud of the Grizzlies and how much money will the city waste to host this President? As I said, damned odd and disjointed letter.
Just Some Fuckhead
God is punishing Iowa and Vermont for the gay thing. It’s a shame other communities have to suffer.
johnsmith1882
@sukabi:
Federal assistance? Isn’t that socialism? Or something equally bad, probably even worse, like Hitler. Asking for federal assistance is like asking for more Hitler!
The hypocrisy of these blowhard Republican governors who threaten secession, criticize TARP, and make political hay over demonizing the federal government, then turn around and ask for federal assistance and puff up their chest over the things “they’ve” done (with federal money) really turns my stomach. Am I being heartless when I think that the people who voted these assholes in get what they deserve, and if they want federal assistance, they need to kneel down and kiss Obama’s ring?
Southern Beale
@Gin & Tonic:
I forgot about New MAD-rid, Missouri.
PeakVT
@Comrade Javamanphil: The flooding along Lake Champlain (and along the Richelieu River in Québec) has inundated a lot of lakefront homes and some business on the Burlington waterfront, but it hasn’t “destroyed major areas of VT.”
Linda Featheringill
The Mississippi:
As I understand it, just about every river in the Mississippi Basin is flooding or close to flooding. Mississippi, of course, just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. One of the problems is that in the area south of St. Louis or thereabouts, the Mississippi is pushing water back into its tributaries [the water is going backwards]. The tributaries are thus getting it from both ends and are flooding. This water will have to drain eventually, presumably after the Mississippi crest has worked its way further south. The result will be flooding for a long time. I read somewhere that any place that is flooded at this time may be under water for a month or so.
Any crops under water for that long are finished, of course. I don’t know how long houses can last under water.
If I understood the report correctly, Natchez [on the Mississippi] has already experienced record-breaking water height and the crest hasn’t even arrived there yet.
And, to make things worse, according to weather dot com, rain is expected today and tomorrow in about the whole Mississippi Basin. And all that water has to make its way down.
It looks like some folks are going to be under water for a long time.
chopper
@Southern Beale:
you should stop by Bourbonnais (bur-BON-niss) IL sometime.
chopper
@Linda Featheringill:
the crops are finished, but i’m willing to bet after it’s all done and dried out the silt deposited from this event will actually revitalize a lot of that soil. if these guys practice regular farming, that is.
Mart
@Served: I heard the MO State Senator’s coded racist remarks to the press about Cairo, and was shocked to hear guffaws as the press response. Been simpler if he had said let the coloreds drown.
Since you are from the area can you believe the billions in development under the rebuilt Missouri River levee in west county Chesterfield? Everyone knows it had ten feet of water in 93, and the river will eventually over-top the Army Corps best 500 year plus three feet of free-board plans. Or more commonly work its way under the levee through boils.
While sorta on topic I have hurricane response plan from a New Orleans factory dated 1983. The first line states: As everyone in the area knows, a Level III or greater hurricane will result in widespread and devastating flooding in the New Orleans region. Who could’a predicted such a thing?
Linda Featheringill
@chopper:
Revitalizing river:
You’re probably right. If they can just hang on until next year, things might be a lot better.
This year doesn’t look so good.
Cait
I live in New Orleans. We hate what’s going to happen to Butte la Rose, and we’re worried about the rising river here…but God, man, we just need a fricking break from levee and spillway issues, you know?
artem1s
@Southern Beale:
Ly-ma, Ohio, not Lee-ma. and Kay-ro not Ky-ro as well. Cadiz is Kay-diz not Kah-dis. Tol-ee-doe not To-lay-doe
Bell-fountain, not Bell-fon-tane for Bellfountaine
Bucyrus is pretty much what you see, though I have heard foreigners say Bucky-ruse.
ET
I don’t know if anyone has read it but if you want to truly understand the managing of the Mississippi River John Barry’s Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America is really good and really readable.
It helps to understand how the “managing” impacted what happened in NOLA after Katrina as it relates to replenishing the Delta as well as how the river “works.”
South of I-10
@Cait: I feel for them too, but they are well aware they are in a spillway. They get a letter from the Corps every year reminding them they are in a spillway. Just because it hasn’t opened since 1973 doesn’t mean it will never open again. Having both Baton Rouge and New Orleans flooding and/or the river taking the Atchafalaya’s path would have devastating consequences for the entire state. I hope all the people are finishing up their evacuation, now Morganza is supposed to open by tomorrow/Sunday.
matryoshka
@johnsmith1882: I think the silt is bad for Missouri farm soil is because it carries tons of sand. At least that was what ruined farm land in central MO in ’93. There are places along the Missouri River that look a little like deserts.
stuckinred
Ya’ll pups don’t know about the riots and boycotts in Cairo in late 60’s early 70’s? It pretty much ruined the town, I think the population is down to about 2,800 now.
Bill Murray
@Southern Beale: how could you forget the earthquakes? sure they were two hundred years ago, but they were big.
Moonbatman
Wingnuts are swiftboarding Sheriff Dupnik who proved that Palin caused the Tucson shootings.
Get a load of the Chickenhawk butthurt about the police following proper procedure denying treatment to the man they shot until he died, sealing the search warrant and correcting their story multiple times.
The guy that they killed was a criminal just like James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart.
Peace Out. The Power is Yours. Free Crystal Mangum
Southern Beale
Can anyone tell me how to pronounce Bala Cynwyd?
stuckinred
Cairo 1970
Gozer
@Southern Beale: Bala Kinwuud. (hope this isn’t a repost…FYWP ate my other post)
Comrade Javamanphil
@PeakVT: Forgive the hyperbole. But it’s bad and every time I talk to anyone outside of the state they have no idea there is any problem. Plenty of folks I chat with on a regular basis have roads they can’t cross and / or homes that are underwater. It’s pretty crappy for a lot of people and will be quite some time before we truly understand all the devastation.
Served
@chopper: I thought it was Bur-bun-AY! At least, an ex who grew up there pronounced it that way. He must’ve been a pinko commie elitist.
Southern Beale
@Gozer:
Thanks. I always wondered.
In other news, Ron Paul says no FEMA help for you!
Never understood the attraction there. I know some lefties who are Rondroids. So he’s against the war, so what, so are a bunch of people. He’s also against EVERYTHING ELSE THE GOVERNMENT DOES. Get a fucking clue. He’s a wackjob.
Perfect Tommy
John M. Barry’s “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America” documents how Black sharecroppers were rounded up at gunpoint and held for months in work camps on the banks of the Mississippi to shore up the levees with sand bags.
On a related note, I would like to thank whoever posted the link to The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877 – Open Yale Courses a few weeks back. I’ve listened to 24 lectures so far, and I am really enjoying them. Blight required the class to watch Ken Burns’ “The Civil War”, which is available via Netflix streaming so I am able to follow along with that as well.
►
Doctor Science
Most strongly recommended: Jeff Master’s post today, America’s Achilles’ heel: the Mississippi River’s Old River Control Structure.
daveNYC
@Linda Featheringill:
If you’re a farmer, that’s true pretty much every year.
nodakfarmboy
@Comrade Javamanphil: It could be worse. My hometown of Devils Lake, ND sits next to a lake that’s come up 31 feet. The flooding has been going on since 1993- 18 years of unrelenting, creeping destruction. It’s like the lake is a cancer, slowly spreading and killing the community. It’s wiped out almost 150,000 acres of farm and ranchland. That’s around 230 square miles of land- an area about 3.5 times the size of the District of Columbia, underwater. Hundreds of people have lost their homes, or had to move them, sometimes multiple times. The lake is in a closed drainage basin, which means the water runs in, and then sits there, with nowhere to go. On top of that, tens of thousands of acres of land throughout the lake’s drainage basin are also flooded.
It’s a damn mess, and no one knows much about it nationally. Government is ill-equipped to deal with slow motion disasters. Response mechanisms are built around response to a disaster that occurs and ends, allowing cleanup and recovery to begin. Unfortunately for the people of Devils Lake, there has been no recovery- just muddling along, hoping for an end to the rain.
The Atlantic just did a piece on it today, if you’re interested in checking it out. http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/05/where-the-roads-end-in-water-the-lake-that-wont-stop-rising/238848/
A.J.
That flood was a lot more than just high water. Get the book “Rising Tide” by John Barry.
The book details the history of the river, the way government handled works projects, the history of the Army Corp of Engineers, the economy of the region and it vicious racism.
But more important was the political changes that flood caused. Blacks left the Party of Lincoln – because of that flood! White Southerners in Mississippi had re-enslaved blacks at gunpoint to work on the levees, it brought a massive change in black leadership in those times, it brought Herbert Hoover into the White House, it brought Huey Long into the Governor’s office in Louisiana, it changed the way Americon government came to respond to disasters as a nation vs. the Ayn Rand/Rand Paul/Ron Paul/Repuke philosophy of “It’s your problem. Fuck off.”
A great book I didn’t want to read until I couldn’t put it down.
The Moar You Know
@johnsmith1882: About halfway. You’re not kidding.
PeakVT
@Comrade Javamanphil: No doubt it’s a mess. It looks like we’re about to get another inch or so of rain this weekend, too. I think I’ll go take some pics along the waterfront this evening. I should have done that earlier as it has just clouded up.
stuckinred
@Perfect Tommy: The Yale stuff is on iTunesU.
fidelio
Here is a link to the Army Corps of Engineers River Gages site, which you can refresh to update as needed. New reading usually come in every hour or so. This is the ACE’s page on the current flood, for the New Orleans district. They have maps of projected flooding and other interesting things. Over half the bays on the Bonnet Carré spillway are open at the present time; the river levels for New Orleans keep bobbing up and down around flood stage as they open more gates to take the pressure off.
The New Madrid floodway was opened only partly because of Cairo’s situation, with the level of the Ohio River; levees all around there and south of the confluence at Bird’s Point were in a bad way; there were some private levees on the Mississippi northwest of Dyersburg, TN that were being overtopped, and others were leaking and developing sand boils; the flood gates in Hickman, KY were developing leaks that would. Although Cairo’s situation was the most urgent (projections indicated the Ohio would top the flood wall, which is designed to protect to flood levels up to 64 feet, and there were numerous sand boils, sink holes, and other signs of likely levee failure), they weren’t too optimistic about the rest of the system, and opening the floodway on purpose at a place where it was designed to be opened, in a way that allowed them to evacuate people in water’s path, was the only choice, because the river was going to go through one or more levees.
Several places have already met their historic high water levels; Baton Rouge is now very close, as are some others. The New Orleans river levees and flood wall are, IIRC, only good to about 20 feet, and the river level is hovering around flood stage at 17 feet. Crests on the lower Mississippi are not expected to arrive until late next week or later.
What hit the low-lying parts of Memphis has also landed on a lot of little places you’ve never heard of, and people who didn’t have the resources to deal with this are going to need all the help they can get to get on with their lives.
The White River in Arkansas and Missouri has been in serious flood stage–Interstate 40 in Arkansas was closed this week because of flooding from the White. The Black River in Arkansas and Missouri was flooding in late April and early May, with levees topped at Poplar Bluff and Pocahontas. The Ohio had serious problems all April.
Besides the damage in Vermont and Canada from Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River, Manitoba is undergoing serious flooding as the result of flooding on the Red River of the North and its cousins.
Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground has had some excellent posts on the floods (as well as other interesting weather-related postss); his latest is on the Old River Control Structure, part of the Mississippi River waterworks system. His overview of April’s weather has a map that shows quite plainly one of the big causes, besides snow melt for the current situation: it’s been an incredibly rainy spring in the central US. If you don’t follow his blog at Weather Underground already, it’s well worth a look.
fidelio
I have a comment awaiting moderation; it’s got lots of links, and that’s probably the problem.
Perfect Tommy
@stuckinred: Thanks! My car has a relic six-CD changer setup, so I burned the mp3s to audio CDs and listen during my daily commute. I never thought I would enjoy “books on tape”, but after listening to this lecture series, I may have to reconsider that.
mclaren
As climatologists have been warning everyone for 50 years, “global warming” should more properly be called “global climate disruption.” Meaning: higher highs, lower unseasonable lows, more severe storms, many more hurricanes and tornadoes and typhoons each year.
So we can expect exponentially increasing numbers of floods and tornadoes throughout America. We can expect each decade to score record new high temperatures for the American Southwest, including Southern California. We can expect increasingly higher flood levels in each decade, more violent flash floods, more savage breaches of the levees.
Naturally, America is doing essentially nothing about this, just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about a casino capitalist system designed to crash and burn and destroy the global economy periodically…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our massive chronic foreign oil dependency…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our broken collapsing national health care delivery system…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our national economic policy of exporting most middle class jobs overseas…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our national policy of infinitely increasing military budgets to pay for a series of endless unwinnable foreign wars.
The chicken-driven clown car called “America” veers toward the edge of the cliff, and the clowns on board are too busy watching “Dancing with the stars” to even try to take the wheel away from the chicken.
mclaren
As climatologists have been warning everyone for 50 years, “global warming” should more properly be called “global climate disruption.” Meaning: higher highs, lower unseasonable lows, more severe storms, many more hurricanes and tornadoes and typhoons each year.
So we can expect exponentially increasing numbers of floods and tornadoes throughout America. We can expect each decade to score record new high temperatures for the American Southwest, including Southern California. We can expect increasingly higher flood levels in each decade, more violent flash floods, more savage breaches of the levees.
Naturally, America is doing essentially nothing about this, just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about a corrupt crony-capitalist Ponziconomy designed to let rich looters crash and burn and destroy the global economy periodically…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our massive chronic foreign oil dependency…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our broken collapsing national health care delivery system…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our national economic policy of exporting most middle class jobs overseas…just as we’ve decided to do essentially nothing about our national policy of infinitely increasing military budgets to pay for a series of endless unwinnable foreign wars.
The chicken-driven clown car called “America” veers toward the edge of the cliff, and the clowns on board are too busy watching “Dancing with the stars” to even try to take the wheel away from the cross-eyed chicken.
henry
Little did I realize I have some latent libertarianism in me. My first response was It’s “their problem”, because they knew before they built. Then I realized that if those were words to live by, half of California would only consist of people living in small tents to weather earthquakes without damage.