58 Time Sept. 2–9, 2019
SOURCES: U.S. ARMYCORPS OF ENGINEERS
TIME GRAPHIC BY EMILY BARONEAND LON TWEETEN
y may 9, 2019, The U.S. army
Corps of Engineers had been
in a flood fight in Louisiana for
nearly 200 days. Officials gath-
ered every morning in a confer-
ence room in New Orleans that
was—perhaps thankfully—
windowless, keeping their opponent out
of view: just below the office snarled the
overladen Mississippi River, more than
8 million gallons of water ripping past
each second.
That morning the team discussed the
latest forecasts and notes from inspectors,
who were assessing every foot of every
levee every day. They were dealing not
with a river, really, but with the Missis-
sippi River & Tributaries Project: the web
of canals and spouts the lower Mississippi
has become, with floodgates that can be
opened or closed to redirect the water on
command. The New Orleans team had
been focused on the Bonnet Carré Spill-
way, which diverts water from the Missis-
sippi into Lake Pontchartrain, connected
to the Gulf of Mexico, during floods.
Whether to open a spillway can be
an agonizing decision. When the Bon-
net Carré is activated, the rush of fresh
water can decimate the Gulf ’s saltwater
ecosystems and seafood industry. An-
other spillway, the Morganza Floodway,
has been used so infrequently (only twice
since it was built in 1954) that many peo-
ple farm within its boundaries. When the
Army Corps considered opening it earlier
this year, ranchers scrambled to move
their cattle out of harm’s way.
Over its first 80 years in operation, the
Bonnet Carré Spillway was activated just
10 times. Then something changed. The
river hit the trigger point in 2011, 2016,
2018 and—for the first time ever in back-
to-back years—February of this year.
Economists calculated that the opening
in 2011 cost the Mississippi economy
$58 million over the next few years, largely
because of the reduced oyster harvest.
When the trigger point is hit, the Corps
is legally bound to open the spillway, but
recently, rising waters have forced them
to do so before the law would require it.
On May 9, the leaders of the Corps’
New Orleans district announced that the
river was rising again and that in five days
they would reopen Bonnet Carré. “It’s a
bit extraordinary,” the Corps’ emergency-
operations manager told the press. For the
first time in history, the spillway would be
operated twice in one year.
Then came the rain.
That night, so much poured over
Louisiana that the river rose 6 in. Soon
it would hit 17.5 ft., higher than the city
had seen in more than 40 years. For Corps
officials, that was too close to the tops of
the levees, which sit around 20 ft. At the
next morning’s meeting, they decided to
open the spillway that day, immediately.
Within hours a crane began to pluck
wooden pins out of the spillway’s gates.
The water came roaring out, the collected
runoff from a flooded continent.
More trouble was on the way. Hurri-
cane season was incipient. A storm hitting
while the river was already this swollen is
the stuff of nightmares; the Corps had al-
ready nearly exhausted its water- diversion
options. When Hurricane Barry brushed
past the city in July and delivered little
damage, it was both a relief and a warning
shot, a reminder of what’s almost certainly
to come: a flood that could sink a nation.The Missouri, The ohio; the Red, the
Illinois, the Arkansas; the Pecatonica, the
Poteau, the Big Sioux—across the U.S.,
rivers have swollen this year, swamping
homes and cropland, costing farmers bil-
lions of dollars. Running through more
than a million square miles of the heart of
the U.S.—40% of its land area—100,000
waterways eventually drain into the Mis-
sissippi. Over 30 million people live near
the Mississippi or one of its tributaries.
There, on the big river, the Army Corps
spent the last nine months trying to con-
tain its longest recorded flood, the latest
in an increasingly devastating series.
Scientists blame much of the epidemic
of flooding on the Corps’ own engineer-
ing. In order to protect farms and cit-
ies, they built humps of earth along the
Mississippi’s banks—levees, which nar-
rowed the river, forcing it to rise. Mean-
while, countless acres of urban pavement
have replaced absorbent soil. Pair these
changes with the wettest 12 months in re-
corded history, and the Mississippi River
becomes a menace.
On March 18, as the river hit the first
of many crests this season, I launched a
canoe near Baton Rouge, La., to study
the flood from inside. I’ve spent plenty of
time on the river but had rarely seen it like
this. One night the only campsite avail-able was a set of flood-drowned trees, be-
tween which I strung a hammock. I slept
uneasily, dangling above the rising water.
The river architecture—often all that
stands between a town and tons of rush-
ing water—is part highly engineered tech-
nology, part rickety old machine. Along
almost every mile of the Mississippi
River, levees both control the flooding
and exacerbate it. Some levees are hun-
dreds of years old, and most are unregu-
lated. No one actually knows how many
miles of levees are on the river; there is
no complete inventory. Engineers have
long considered the nation’s levees to be
at considerable risk, given their age and
the lack of funding for repairs, and many
across the Midwest either collapsed or
were overtopped during this year’s floods.
Farm Market iD, an agricultural- data
firm, estimates that 16 million acres of
farmland—an area larger than all of West
Virginia—have been affected across the
Midwest this year. That reflects a choice,
not an inevitability. “It’s actually national
policy, if you will, to put [floodwater
upriver] instead of Baton Rouge or New
Orleans,” says Mark Davis, director of the
Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law
and Policy. The devastating flooding in the
Midwest protected the South from worse
floods by design.
On the lower Mississippi River—Nation
REINING THE RIVER
The Mississippi River & Tributaries Project
has controlled the lower Mississippi since
the 1927 floods. Here’s how it works:OP
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