Posted on 08/21/2016 5:27:22 AM PDT by fella
Trey Poirrier and Jerry Gravois stood in waist-deep floodwater near the St. Amant Fire Department Monday morning trying, unsuccessfully, to reach a relative’s waterlogged home.
Nearby, caskets were floating around the Methodist church. Volunteer boaters sailed by them with a rescued family of five, including three girls young enough to attend close-by Lake Primary School, also under water.
“The pictures and the videos don’t serve it justice until you get out here,” Poirrier remarked.
This is South Louisiana in August 2016 — people reduced to pleading for diapers in Central, whole neighborhoods wrecked in Baton Rouge, and most of Denham Springs buried under water and debris.
There have been other visions for the Amite River Basin — the main culprit in the catastrophe. As early as the 1970s, officials talked about drainage improvements, and their voices got louder after the horrific flood of 1983.
A canal would redirect high water from the Comite River through Baker and into the Mississippi River. A dam and reservoir would hold back the flow of the Amite in East Feliciana and St. Helena. Levees would protect Denham Springs.
Three decades later, Ascension Parish has built several drainage pumps, levees and floodgates, but the big, federal projects have been abandoned or left incomplete.
Southeastern Louisiana, at present, has thousands of families digging out of their mud- and water-ruined homes, a gaggle of government officials calling each other incompetent and a flood-control structure with no canal to control.
No one has suggested that the proposed Comite River Diversion Canal or the Darlington Reservoir would have prevented the flood. But the canal alone could have saved up to a quarter of the homes damaged in the basin, says the former president of the commission that oversees the project.
Following the 1983 flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drew up several designs to improve drainage along the Amite and Comite rivers. There were some early discussions of putting levees along the Amite around Denham Springs, but the plan was deemed impractical, said Dietmar Rietschier, executive director of the Amite River Basin Commission.
Instead, officials focused on digging the canal and creating a reservoir on the Amite near Darlington, by the Mississippi state line. However, that project has also since been abandoned.
“It was always the idea to have these two projects working together complementing each other,” Rietschier said. “It would have benefitted (the region) by lowering the flood stage — to what degree, I don’t know.”
The Corps is currently studying whose homes the canal may have saved. They've previously investigated the effect the diversion would have during smaller storms, but nothing the size of the recent one.
The basin, and the rain
The Amite River itself emerges from Mississippi and forms the parish lines between much of East Feliciana, East Baton Rouge and Ascension on one bank and St. Helena and Livingston on the other. The Comite and Bayou Manchac are two of the bigger waterways that drain into the Amite, which eventually empties into Lake Maurepas.
Last week, as in 1983, the Amite became swollen with water, beginning a cascade of floods in the rivers, bayous and ditches farther upstream, a phenomenon known as backwater flooding. But while the similarities between 1983 and the 2016 floods are striking, there are several reasons for the difference in magnitude.
First were the circling storms that fed the floods. Barry Keim, Louisiana state climatologist, said nine weather stations in the region exceeded a 1,000-year rainfall event, which roughly equals 21 inches of rain in 48 hours. Most of that happened in the North Baton Rouge area and Denham Springs.
“It’s really no wonder that the floods were as catastrophic as they were,” Keim said.
A 1,000-year rainfall event is one that has one-tenth of a percent chance of happening in a given year. In contrast, the more often-cited 100-year rain event has a 1 percent chance of happening in a given year. Despite the terminology, these events don’t necessarily happen only once every 100 or 1,000 years. In terms of probability, one storm doesn’t affect the chances of another happening, just as one flip of the coin doesn’t affect the next.
Todd Baumann, data chief for the U.S. Geological Survey's Lower Mississippi-Gulf Water Science Center in Louisiana, said it’s a safe bet much of the flooding is beyond a 100-year event.
“We had 12 river gauges across the state that exceeded the highest events we’ve ever seen, so we’re in completely uncharted territory,” Baumann said.
According to National Weather Service data, every gauge on the Amite River from Darlington to French Settlement broke an all-time record.
"We don’t even know yet exactly how much it was. We’re still working those numbers out,” Baumann said.
Compounding the damage is the growth of the communities along the Amite.
They have exploded in population in the intervening 33 years, putting more people and homes in the path of the water. The number of inhabitants in Livingston and Ascension parishes has more than doubled, from about 109,000 combined in the 1980 census to more than a quarter-million last year.
And now many of those people are asking what could have been done to save their homes and businesses.
Diversion canal
Even before the floodwaters hit their highest marks, local officials began questioning why the Comite Diversion Canal remains unfinished.
The canal is supposed to begin at the Comite near the intersection of Lower Zachary Road and La. 67 and run westward between Baker and Zachary. The canal would take water from the Comite — as well as from Cypress and White bayous — before emptying into Lily Bayou, which flows into the Mississippi River. Upstream of the confluence with the Amite River, the canal would also reduce flooding in Livingston and Ascension Parishes, though to a lesser extent.
It would be 20 feet deep and 300 feet across — wide as a football field, said state Sen. Bodi White.
“That’s a lot of water,” he remarked.
The Corps has estimated that the canal could reduce the height of the Comite River near Central by more than 7 feet in a small-scale flood, and by 5½ feet for a "100-year" flood. However, there is no model for an event the size of what Louisiana just experienced.
In Central, 90 percent of the homes are flooded, said Mayor Jr. Shelton, who challenged those involved with the diversion canal to come out to his city and see people lining up for food and desperate for toiletries.
“How many people’s lives ruined does it take to get the solution?” he asked. "It's disgusting."
The diversion would have the greatest impact on people in places like Central, Baker and Zachary, though it would make a measurable difference as far south on the Amite River as Port Vincent, the Corps has reported in the past.
That far downstream, the Amite also receives drainage from other bodies of water, including Bayou Manchac. A onetime trade route in Louisiana's early days, Manchac receives much runoff from growing south Baton Rouge, as well as from parts of expanding Prairieville in Ascension.
Toni Guitreau is both the executive secretary at the Amite River Basin Commission and the mayor of French Settlement, just down the river from Port Vincent.
“We have homes flooded that have never been flooded,” she said.
Guitreau said the canal would have helped prevent damage in her town.
Even if it’s just an inch … if it’s your house, that counts,” she said.
The mention about caskets popping up out of the ground. That seems to happen a lot down there during floods. Up in Michigan, the casket is enclosed in a concrete vault so that can’t happen. It is also, allegedly so that the casket and its contents won’t contaminate the groundwater. are there no similar regulations down there? It’s gotta be a lot of fun every flood season seeing the dearly departed pop up and go sailing off downstream like some macabre little regatta.
No pumps made can keep up with 2 feet of rainfall.
Government is not in the business of fixing things. There’s not much to be gained in “fixing things”.
Government exists to step up when trouble strikes and exclaim, “I can fix that!”. This is now you get votes. This is how you get tax increases.
All that good stuff evaporates if you actually “fix things”.
This is true for flood areas. It is also true for government schools. Having bad government schools is very advantageous for people in government. They don’t want these things fixed. They want problems. As many problems as possible.
The supreme danger of Donald Trump is that he actually wants to fix stuff. That messes everything up and gets people very agitated.
No way the Feds would allow the canal to be built. They would argue it would hurt the wetlands and impact an alligator.
You can’t simply ‘engineer’ for a 500-1000 year event Who ever wrote the article is foolish to think ‘drainage improvements would have done any good.
I may be 100% wrong on this, but ...
I think it's French culture to bury people above ground in stone structures. Paris cemeteries are often built like this. New Orleans cemeteries are sometimes built like this. If a flood hits a cemetery it may not be difficult to damage the structure and push the contents out through a hole in the wall.
But I'm not sure that's the case.
A lot of those floating caskets have been there a long time.
All of this water is going into the Mississippi River. What is going to happen to New Orleans when it gets there. Are the NO levees going to hold up?
I believe in new Orleans the water table is so high they can’t bury people underground.
No idea about the rest of Louisiana.
[[ I may be 100% wrong on this, but ...
I think it’s French culture to bury people above ground in stone structures. Paris cemeteries are often built like this. New Orleans cemeteries are sometimes built like this. If a flood hits a cemetery it may not be difficult to damage the structure and push the contents out through a hole in the wall.
But I’m not sure that’s the case. ]]
It’s done because in some areas you can’t dig there and not hit water .
I remember standing in New Orleans by the river as a little kid where the ships move in and out and it looks like you are sitting in a hole looking up at the ships .
Water tables.
Early Halloween decorations??
He conceded that the water tables are fairly high in New Orleans; it IS below sea level, after all. But he said that actually contributes to more rapid decomposition of the body and the casket, so that the idea of rotting coffins popping out of the soggy soil is alarmist nonsense.
Then again, I think the guide was half drunk.
I’ve seen pictures where some caskets in concrete vaults have also floated up. I am guessing that in extremely soaked ground and with newly packed dirt a vault could certainly come up.
Not to mention the mighty Mississippi into which many other rivers flow.
They can’t stop the flooding in Memphis any better when the Mississippi goes into FLOOD STAGE, all the smaller inlet/outlets over flow too.
We have seen more heavy rain this year than is normal for the regions of MS, AR and TN that are a tri state area and all flow into the Mississippi River.
I have been to in Louisiana several times and it seems to be basically one vast swamp. Do not take this as a criticism of the people or anything. I was down there a long time a go for job interviews and more recently business trips. Everywhere I went the water table seemed to be right at the surface of the ground. Once I remember standing in front of my hotel and stepping on to what looked like a normal professionally kept hotel lawn and it was like stepping on to a sponge. My feet immediately sank into it and water went into my shoes.
Other then that all the trips were great as were the people and the food was fantastic.
That's not true in general. As the article notes, a "1000 year event" is an event which has a probability of occurring of .1% per year. Most disciplines of engineering prevent failures due to events with much lower probability than that.
The real issue, as you noted, is the difficulty and expense of building solutions to low probability events in civil engineering. It isn't hard to figure out how to prevent damage from a rarely occurring phenomenon, but it is hard to justify spending the money on the solution when everyone thinks it isn't likely to happen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.