Louisianans along the Mississippi await inevitable

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 about 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.

The amount of water released then was far less than what would probably be released this time, setting the stage for a rise in water levels in the isolated towns dotting the Atchafalaya Basin, a lush region of quiet fishing camps, friendly hamlets linked by dirt roads, and “wildlife crossing” signs on the paved highways.

A tree across the road from Kirsch’s trailer illustrates the threat facing those who don’t leave. About 8 feet up its trunk, a bright pink ribbon marks the anticipated water level by Monday if the spillway is opened. By Wednesday, the water would be at least 2 feet higher -- high enough to swallow cars and roads, and to flow into people’s front doors and over their window sills.

If some people living here feel like they’re being sacrificed in favor of others, it’s because they are, a choice made when the Morganza was constructed as part of a decades-long effort to shore up flood-control measures after a devastating inundation in 1927. It would be opened only in a dire emergency. Like now.

Officials were expected to decide as early as Friday whether to open the spillway, a move based in part on the volume of water pouring downriver as measured at Morganza, and on the river’s level in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The “trigger point” for opening the spillway would be reached when the flow volume is 1.5 million cubic feet per second.

By Thursday, it was moving at 1.41 million cubic feet per second, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, an increase over Wednesday’s measurement. By May 23, if the spillway is not opened, the river was forecast to be at 19.5 feet in New Orleans, just 6 inches below the tops of the levees protecting the city.

“I guess the way to look at it is that this is a monumental flood,” said Ricky Boyett, an Army Corps of Engineers spokesman, as he watched waves from the Mississippi roar through another spillway near the Morganza. Huge white-capped rapids exploded from the rushing river, and logs and other debris smashed on the banks. On a normal day, the shore would be lined with fishermen, and egrets would scan the usually calm waters for fish. On this day, the only people near the shore were corps officials pondering their next move.

Boyett said he sympathized with people in remote towns like Butte La Rose, who stand to be washed out if waters like this are steered away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans and guided in their direction. In the end, though, choices are made based on how best to protect the most people and keep damage to a minimum.

“We just have to look at what’s best for the collective community,” said Boyett, adding that even people like him, who spend their lives watching these waters, were stunned by what they were witnessing.

“It’s usually just a nice, calm flow. This is a whole new ballgame,” he said.

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.

Chris Wainwright, who moved to Butte La Rose 11 years ago, said he had begun piling sandbags around his home until he realized that if the water rose as high as forecast -- and so far the National Weather Service’s river forecasts have been accurate -- he would be filling sandbags for three weeks. So on Thursday, his uncle and brother-in-law came and helped him load up his belongings and put them into storage.

“My house -- it’s not the Taj Mahal, but I have a nice little house,” said Wainwright, his face red from the midday heat.

He was irritated, not because he knows his little slice of paradise is going to take a bullet to save bigger cities from the same fate, but because he thinks this could have been prevented if the government had regularly dredged the river bottoms to prevent silt from building up.

As silt accumulated over the decades, it aggravated the problem of rising water levels, said Wainwright, who blamed it in part on officials not wanting to spend money to protect backwaters like this.

“They’d rather run us out of here so they could just use this area for the water and not have to deal with the people,” said Wainwright, who doubts he or anyone living in Butte La Rose will ever be able to get flood insurance again.

At Four Oaks Farms in the town of Morganza, though, Mitch Frey said most people understood the risks inherent in living in the area. He and his brothers, Matt, Marty and Mark, farm 10,000 acres, 2,000 of which sit in the pathway of the anticipated flood.

“It’s something we’ve lived with, knowing it might happen,” said 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.

That may be the downside to the construction of engineering marvels such as the Morganza Spillway, said Craig Colten, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, and an expert on the river’s flood-control systems.

“They create a false sense of security, and people begin to expect a level of protection when that was never the deal,” Colten said.

“It’s just an assumed protection.”

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tina.susman@latimes.com

Times staff writer Stephen Ceasar in Los Angeles contributed to this report.