These stairs normally go way, way down to the water, but this week it's backwards and the river is climbing them. As of this afternoon when I took these pictures, it only has four more steps to climb before coming up against this new weird orange bladder thing. And supposedly the Mississippi is due to rise to forty seven and a half feet in Baton Rouge by May 22nd. But as I write this it's already at forty three feet and rising. With ten days to go.
Baton Rouge's levees are from forty seven to fifty one feet elevation, so the best case scenario right now involves what is referred to as "overtopping" and "inundation." Actually some inundation has already started. In one place near campus and one downtown I saw little streams of water inexplicably squirting up out of the ground, like when Jed Clampett discovered oil in the beginning of the Beverly Hillbillies themesong. We can expect a lot more of that.
However the plan now seems to be to sacrifice the rural areas north of us in effort to save Baton Rouge. Flooding Morgan City's environs could potentially lower the surge in Baton Rouge by a foot and a half, which might save the day if you don't live around Morgan City at least. [And it would be remiss of me not to note that the Mississippi River has been trying to redirect itself in exactly that direction for the past century or so. There is a sharp turn eastward right when it enters Louisiana, and at this point the descent westward through the Atchafalaya to the Gulf of Mexico is actually steeper than the route it now takes. If we were to get out of the way today it would immediately no longer flow through Baton Rouge or New Orleans. Given the amount of shipping involved, the economic cost in adapting to the new course would be incalculable, and has thus been treated as an Armageddon scenario by the Army Corps of Engineers for the past fifty years; skeptics say the redirection is inevitable.]
Mayor Holden has several times warned all of us to think of this like a "slow moving hurricane" and as a result we all know what to do. Get lots of batteries, flashlights, canned goods, powdered and/or condensed milk (if you have small children), charcoal, bottled water, gasoline, cash, ice, ice, ice, and some stuff to grill the first few days without power. The first few days before everything of that sort rots. And maybe fill up your bathtubs too just for extra water right as things start to get bad.We mostly just prepare for dealing with a week to ten days of diminished or non existent services in the heat. But it's also a huge pain in the ass if your medical prescriptions are due to run out during that potential week. Lots of people have to bug the relevant bureaucrats to get extras ahead of whatever irritating purchasing schedule is forced on them by the twin fists of American insurance companies and the war on drugs.
If you don't have good screens on your windows you are in for even more misery as the insects seem to get worse after acts of God (I forget where Mark Twain argues that God made creation for insects). And pray that you don't have to evacuate, because that is likely to mean tens of hours stopped on the interstate with the possibility of no gasoline to be purchased, and the effect that many people stall out in the heat, of which some elderly, very young, and otherwise infirm will die (cf. the Houston area during Hurricane Rita), and many more give up and turn around to just go back towards the hopefully merely potential devastation. And this isn't counting all of the people too poor and/or infirm to move in the first place.
I like the phrase "slow moving hurricane" because I always experience the period leading up to a hurricane (you usually have a week when it wanders around the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico) as a slow moving anxiety attack. With this water rising, the rate of the potential disaster even more closely matches the rate of my freakout. And I honestly would not be near so nauseatingly anxious during this kind of stuff if I wasn't so worried about my small children. During Hurricane Gustav Thomas was one year old and he got terrible heat rash during the week without power. During the first two days we couldn't get anything to treat him with. There's at least one Bible verse (and several blues songs) testifying to the special kind of suffering visited upon parents during disasters. . .
In this picture on the right you can see just how close the river is to overtopping the levee. The red splotches are the top of the huge letters of the word "Baton Rouge" which you can usually read with meters of levee below it to spare. Two days ago the letters were half way covered and today the whole word is covered. Last night they used some kind of powerful machine to put bolts into the concrete so that the orange rubber bladder won't just get pushed away if the levee overtops. The yellow ribbon hooks around the bolt and affixes over the bladder. They were putting these every four feet or so. Unfortunately most of the top of the levee is dirt. In those parts they are putting sandbags around the bladder. As you can see from the picture on the left, it looks depressingly puny next to all that river water. About a mile downstream where the levee is further back from the normal shoreline a couple of acres of really tall trees have already completely drowned. I would have gotten some pictures but sherriff's deputies are keeping people off of the dirt levees because supposedly during inundation even footsteps might weaken the structure and lead to a breach, which is infinitely worse than overtopping or inundation.
This is a weird true fact. the first word I learned to spell as a kid was Mississippi. I had no idea what it meant. This was during the time in my life where I thought elemeno was one letter. My sister and I would just go around showing off that we could say "em eye ess ess eye ess ess eye pee pee eye", happy that we could spell such a big word that also sounded so cool in its very spelling.
I also remember eight years ago when my friend Jorn Sonderholm was so hyped to see the river the first time (he was visiting Baton Rouge from Saint Andrews). We took him down to the river itself, in the part where the levees are further back than in the picture above, the part where the trees are now underwater. "Jon!" (with Jorn's Danish accent) "This is where Huckleberry Finn and Jim escaped to freedom. Right here Jon! Huckleberry Finn Jon!" It was pretty cool, and for some reason continues to give me hope that things will be O.K.
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