They're Not Actually Trying to Wash Us Away

The 2011 Mississippi Flood and the flood of bullshit

If there's one thing both sides of the new American Civil War can agree on, it's that old media no longer serves our needs. For the intelligent among us, anyway. The movie Network was prophetic in the extreme: once news became taken over by the profit motive, people spouting crazy shit has always proved more newsworthy than people spouting truth. So now what we have is a nation that goes to their anchors/pundits not to find out what has happened -- the internet does that in a much more direct and timely and cost-efficient manner -- but to ponder what might happen.

Right now, that means the Great Southern Flood of 2011.

I'm going to go into detail here about what's actually going on in Louisiana, since I'm here on the scene and have been my whole life. But first, because I know you're busy, I'm gonna give you the bullet points on the bullshit media storyline, so that you can use this against your aunt in Illinois who thinks Anderson Cooper makes the world go round. I had to become a one-man disinformation cleanup service for about three years after Katrina, so I figure I'll get a jump start on this one.

Here's what you need to know:

• New Orleans is not about to flood, much less flood "worse than Katrina."
• The Morganza Spillway is not being opened to save New Orleans. 
• Poor people are not being drowned or losing their homes to save New Orleans or Baton Rouge.
• The people who live in the possible path of the floodways have always been aware that this could happen. It's happened before.
• This is not a controlled levee demolition, like the recent one in Missouri.
• The levees in question, the ones on the Mississippi River, are not the same levees that broke during Katrina. They're not even the same kind of levees.
• "Flood stage" does not mean a town is flooding, or even that a levee is leaking or being overtopped.

Okay, now the backstory.

The 1927 flood inspired some creativity in Memphis.

If you've ever heard Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks"* or Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927," or read Faulkner's short story "Old Man," you know that there was a catastrophic flood in this region of the country in that year. My grandmother was five and never remembered much about it, but her family lost everything they owned, and were lucky to get away with their lives. The US government had an interesting method of Federal Disaster assistance back then: none. Or, as I like to call it, The Fuck You Method. Or as Randy put it in his famous song:

President Coolidge come down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note pad in his hand.

President say, "Little fat man, isn't it a shame

What the river has done to this poor cracker's land."**

The flooding was historic, to say the least. The rising river broke through the levees in spots, spilled out 50 miles wide and 30 feet deep on either side at some points, and claimed some 3,000 lives. Take a look.

The natural state of the river (left) and an approximation of how it looked after the 1927 flood (right).

It was decided to blow a levee in nearby St. Bernard Parish to save New Orleans, but it turned out to be unnecessary: nature had already, um, relieved itself all over the basin.

After this disaster, a massive federal infrastructure project was created -- you know, those bureaucratic thingies that waste taxpayer's money -- and the world's largest levee system was built. In addition, two spillways were created to a) keep the River from flooding anywhere in South Louisiana, and b) keep the River from shifting course, as it naturally would, and flowing directly down the left side of Louisiana's boot, bypassing the Port of New Orleans entirely.

This is the controlled demolition of 1927, much like the one in Illinois recently.

The first of these, the Morganza Spillway, was finished in 1954 and, before now, was only opened once, in 1973. The people who bought homes in those floodways were well aware of the project -- they couldn't not be, since they'd gotten the land cheap due to land grants. That is, the federal government knew there was a risk, informed the buyers of the risk, and helped lower prices accordingly. Why would anyone want to live in a floodway, you ask? Because the natural tendency of the areas to flood results in a rich "bottomland," or soil that grows just about anything. And farmers knew it. 

Only problem is, there are few small-time farmers any more, and not many in the area. So every year, the Corps of Engineers sends out a letter that essentially says, "Hey, don't forget, you're living in a floodway. Be prepared in case we need you to get your asses out of there." But a few of the people who live there, bolstered by the attitude and ignorance of the national media, bitch anyway, even though many of them were living in the area in 1973, when the last major flooding occurred. "I guess they're gonna flood us poor people to save New Orleans," said one elderly resident on the local news, apparently forgetting all this, as well as the fact that the Morganza sits 45 miles upriver from Baton Rouge. 

Even so, the Morganza does not exist merely to save Baton Rouge. The river doesn't know where cities are. It rises to a certain danger level, called a "flood stage," at which point measures are taken to prevent the next stage, "minor flooding," which means that some water starts to leak over the top of the levee. Opening the spillways reduces the level of the entire river, thus easing pressure on the levees up and down the entire corridor known locally as the "River Parishes." 

The Bonnet Carre Spillway is the spillway which saves New Orleans. It has been opened six times since 1973. It floods a small stretch of land with nothing on it, then quickly enters Lake Ponchartrain. It does disturb the ecosystem, introducing fresh water into a salt water environment, which is bad news for the oyster crop and good news for the crawfish harvest. And that's about it. Teenagers used to routinely go to "The Spillway" to cut donuts in the land with their pick-up trucks. That's how much nothing is there.   

Finally, all levees are not created equal. The levees that run along the river at New Orleans are some 23-25 feet high and some 60 feet wide in spots. They are giant piles of earth that are fortified with trees and, in some places, concrete, and the natural flow of the river compresses them, making them stronger. They were begun in 1879, and greatly reinforced after the '27 disaster. They are safe. 

Also a good place to make out, brah.

The infamous Katrina levees protected the city from canals, and were begun in 1965 after the worst 20th Century hurricane, Betsy, ravaged the city. These were simple concrete floodwalls, not really levees in the proper sense, and part of a federal project that was never completed -- several Presidential administrations passed the buck, refusing to commit the amount of money necessary to fortify them properly. When Katrina hit, the massive rush of water from the city's Gulf outlets simply overtopped them and washed out the supports that held them up.  

Very much not a place you want to be making out.

The levees at New Orleans, the real ones, can handle 20 feet of water. This historic flood has caused the river to potentially crest at a safe 19.5. Opening the Morganza allows it to rise only to a even safer 17 ft. There is no second Katrina here. 

That's not to say tens of thousands of people have not been displaced by this flood so far along the Mississippi River from Missouri on down, or that the 14 who have already died from it should be written off. But 1927 this is not. Despite the media's worst intentions.

* Originally written by Memphis Minnie, a native of the New Orleans suburb of Algiers. Zep's added line "If you're going down South and there's no work to do, then you don't know 'bout Chicago" refers to the disintegrating race relations after the flood that started many blacks on their Midwestern diaspora. 

** Aaron Neville's version replaces "cracker" with the more politically correct "farmer." Which sort of undercuts the point.