Jim Bradshaw: Atchafalaya's power has always been a source of worry

Every year about this time, when the Mississippi begins to fill with snow melt and rainwater from the North, talk begins again about the possibility of the Atchafalaya grabbing almost all of the water from the big river — with dire consequences on both of the streams.
All that keeps it from happening are control structures near Simmesport that regulate how much water can flow from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya.
Some people think it is inevitable that the Atchafalaya will scour a new path beneath the structures and they will be ruined. It’s almost happened during several big floods.
It’s not a new fear; the Atchafalaya’s scour power was causing concern at least as early as the 1880s, maybe before that.
In March 1883, the New Orleans Times-Democrat reported, “The Atchafalaya has been growing year after year, until it now promises to become the main outlet of the Mississippi … A large portion of the Mississippi now goes down that stream … [and] the growth during the past few years has been at [an] extraordinary rate.”
The newspaper said the river was 40 feet deep when the New Orleans & Pacific Railroad first designed a bridge to cross the Atchafalaya at Churchville in St. Landry Parish.
“When, however, the actual work began, another sounding showed that the river had doubled its depth and was 80 feet deep,” the report continued.
“All of the plans of the company had to be changed, [and] another sounding, taken in the meanwhile, showed that the stream had scoured out its channel to 120 feet — increasing three-fold in a few months.”
The newspaper warned that “the increase has been so extraordinary as to threaten to carry the whole river down the Atchafalaya.”
Something had to be done, and quickly, “otherwise the lower Mississippi will be closed to navigation and New Orleans left a dead city on a small and tributary stream.”
That was a dire outlook for the busiest port city in the South and for other communities on the lower Mississippi, but folks living on the lower Atchafalaya feared even worse.
The newspaper printed parts of a letter from Charenton in St. Mary Parish, dated Feb. 19, 1883, strongly suggesting “that the question which should agitate the minds of our engineers at present is, ‘How shall we prevent the Mississippi and Red rivers cutting their channels through the Atchafalaya river?’”
People living up and down the Atchafalaya back then still remembered how the river had swollen from a trickle to a torrent after a huge pile of logs that acted as a dam was dynamited in the name of navigation, and had also noticed that it had been growing steadily ever since.
That was bad news for planters, who were seeing their fields flooded more often and to new depths.
Letting the Atchafalaya have its way, the Charenton letter said, would bring nothing but ruin,
“The inhabitants of this now beautiful region and rich land will be forced to abandon [their homes] with reluctance [and] seek safety in higher but poorer lands” the writer argued.
An unchecked Atchafalaya would “convert this beautiful garden spot of Louisiana into a waste of waters, to become the home of frogs, alligators, [and] snakes, … not fit to be habitable by humans.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.