Jim Bradshaw: Morganza memories brings memories of 1973

Col. Michael Clancy, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District, had sobering news for south Louisiana when he spoke May 23 to a waterways group in New Orleans.
“We are in a historic [Mississippi] river flood,” he said. “It is the wettest year on record for 124 years, since the National Weather Service began keeping records. We’re breaking records up and down the river now for the longest period in flood stage.”
And heavy rains were still falling regularly in the upper Mississippi River Valley, sending more water into the swollen river, making it inevitable that some of the gates of the Morganza spillway would be opened for only the third time since the control structure was built in 1954.
The spillway begins at the Mississippi River in Pointe Coupee Parish and eventually joins the Atchafalaya Basin floodway near Krotz Springs at the eastern edge of St. Landry. The control structure has 125 gates, but it is unlikely that even a quarter of them will be opened.
Fully opened, the spillway can divert up to one-fifth of the water in the Mississippi away from stressed levees guarding Baton Rouge and New Orleans and other downriver places. But the torrent of water it sends into the Basin swirls across 25,000 acres of farms and grazing land, through timberlands, and over and around crawfish traps, pipelines, and oil and gas operations, finally funneling to a narrow stretch of river at Morgan City.
The town is better protected today, but the prospect of flooding still causes people with long memories to recall how close it came to ruination when some of Morganza’s gates were opened for the first time in 1973.
Back then, Morgan City was partially protected by a seven-foot-high floodwall that had been built in the 1940s. Parts of the wall had been raised to about 10 feet by then, but nobody knew for certain exactly what would happen when the gates were opened. C. R. “Doc” Brownell, who was mayor of Morgan City for more than 30 years, had a pretty good idea.
“If you open the gates, you’ll wipe out Morgan City,” he warned Tommy Sands, then the New Orleans district engineer. Sands didn’t say so explicitly, but everyone, including Brownell, knew that the Corps had only a devil’s option: Leave the gates closed and risk flooding New Orleans, or open the gates and put Morgan City at risk. That decision was also inevitable.
Even before the gates were opened, Morgan City residents began to add sandbags and plywood walls, and anything else they could think of, to the top of their levee. Then they crossed their fingers and prayed. As it ended up, they raised the levee just enough, just barely enough, and their makeshift work somehow held against the rising river.
But then there was another problem: The levee ended downstream from the city, and water began going around it and creeping back up Bayou Chene toward the town’s back door. People thought he was crazy when Mayor Brownell had a 1,500-ton barge sunk in the bayou. It turned out to be not such a looney idea; it held back just enough water, once again just barely enough.
The Corps and the Mississippi River Commission and the local levee boards took a hard look at the entire flood control system in the lower Mississippi after the 1973 flood, and one of the results was that the Morgan City floodwall was raised to more than 20 feet and levees were built to help control backwater flooding.
When 17 of the Morganza gates were opened in May 2011 the water rose to the highest it had ever been at Morgan City, high enough that the 1973 floodwall and all of its sandbags would not have been able to contain it. But the new wall did its work and the flood was kept away from Front Street and the rest of the town.
The water could rise a bit higher this year than in 2011. We were in a drought when the gates were opened then and the parched ground soaked up some of the water. This year everything’s pretty well saturated so the same amount of water flowing through the gates will raise the water level higher.
The good news is that we’ve learned some lessons from the past experience. Protection levees are generally higher and stronger. Morganza’s gates will be opened just a few at a time so that the Basin won’t flood as quickly. And Doc Brownell’s crazy idea has already been imitated; the barge guarding Morgan City’s backside was moved into place a week ago.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, "Cajuns and Other Characters," is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.