Corps makes plan to open spillways
~Amy Wold
~A request to use the Morganza Spillway north of Baton Rouge to divert some of the water from the rapidly rising Mississippi River could be made as early as Friday, said Col. Ed Fleming, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District.
During a Thursday news conference, Fleming said a decision on whether to ask for permission from the Mississippi River Commission President Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh to open the Morganza Spillway will be made Friday or Saturday. Walsh is also the commander of the Corps’ Mississippi Valley Division in Vicksburg, Miss.
~Wikimapia of Old River Control Structure

Bonnet Carre Spillway will open Monday as Mississippi River swells
~Rising Mississippi River poses threat to Louisiana oyster trade

~Bonnet Carré Spillway in 2008, at appx the 4th day of a 31 day release.

Question: What will we learn from the spillway openings? Answer: Nothing ~LaCoastPost

Jeremy Alford on how a cash-poor state is planning to deal with potential record floodwaters on the Mississippi River ~Gambit

Coast Guard closes stretch of Mississippi
~"It's going to be nasty," said Bob Bea, a civil engineer at the University of California-Berkeley who investigated levee failures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. How bad it gets depends on how well the flood protection systems have been built and maintained, he said.
Bea said he is concerned because some levees across the U.S. have been built with inferior dirt, or even sand, and have been poorly designed."The standards we use to build these things are on the horribly low side if you judge them by world criteria and conditions," he said. "The breaches, as we learned in New Orleans, are the killers."

Mississippi Delta Begins To Flood
~Memphis urges hundreds to flee ahead of flooding

Refiners watch rising Mississippi, operations normal

Commentary: Impressions of Cairo and the flood's racial undertow

Left Behind Party...and not my Left Behind ~American Zombie

La Serenissima: Venice
~He Said/She Said NOLA

The Good Times Keep Rolling ~Blackened Out

~Aphasia Novella, further tales from Editilla's House of Piety

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