Water continues push to sea

LITTLE ROCK — Creeping floodwaters from the Morganza spillway prompted Louisiana authorities Wednesday to issue a mandatory evacuation for a small bayou community in the flood’s path.

Residents of low-lying areas of Terrebonne and Assumption parishes, meanwhile, resorted to time honored methods, such as building earthen dikes and using sandbags, to try to keep anticipated floodwaters out of their homes.

Elsewhere, backwater flooding remained a problem along the Yazoo River in Mississippi, but residents there and in the Atchafalaya (Uh-CHAFF-uh-ly-uh) River basin in Louisiana received some good news - water wasn’t rising as fast and in some cases was falling.

Closer to Arkansas, several casinos in Tunica prepared to reopen after being closed for weeks because of high water, and Memphis-area residents began to clean up as floodwaters there continued to slowly recede.

Water was also beginning to fall at Arkansas City, but forecasters Wednesday were watching a storm system moving into Oklahoma that could dump heavy rain throughout Arkansas by the weekend.

“It could definitely cause some problems in Arkansas” and could slow down receding along the Mississippi River, said Marty Pope, a senior hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Jackson, Miss.

But the immediate threat Wednesday was for residents south of Arkansas.

In the Atchafalaya River basin, floodwaters had crawled to just south of U.S. 190 after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened two more bays of the Morganza spillway slightly more than 20 miles north of the highway, said Ken Holder, spokesman for the Corps’ New Orleans district.

The Mississippi River is now pouring through 17 spillway bays at 114,000 cubic feet per second into the basin where people in several rural communities were closely watching the encroaching water.

In St. Martin Parish, officials set a Saturday morning deadline for residents to leave Butte La Rose, a community of about 650 people directly in the path of water unleashed by the spillway’s opening last weekend.

Water is expected to reach from 5 feet to 12 feet deep at Butte La Rose, but on Wednesday it hadn’t reached “levels that are at a risk for anybody,” said Maj. Ginny Higgins with the St. Martin Parish sheriff’s office.

Still, 90 percent to 95 percent of people there had already left Wednesday, and the remaining 50 or so will be forced to leave in coming days, she said.

Deputies were restricting access to residents. On Friday, the parish plans to close a nearby pontoon bridge, one of only two routes into the small community, and set up a shelter for the refugees.

All across the parish, residents were fortifying levees and packing sandbag walls, trying to protect their homes and businesses.

“Everybody’s working some very long days,” said Higgins, noting that the parish had handed out more than 500,000 sandbags in the past 10 days.

Floodwaters have yet to touch most of those, and so far the Atchafalaya River is behaving better than expected, said Shawn O’Neil, a meteorologist with the weather service in Slidell, La.

“We still really haven’t gotten any significant damage reports or flooding reports. Kind of status quo,” he said. “There seems to be some hope that it’s not going to be as bad as anticipated.”

Farther south, residents near Stephensville in St. Martin Parish, hoped that a barge that was sunk in St. Mary Parish on Monday will keep water from backing up into the town.

“The gauges down there do look like it’s doing some good,” O’Neil said.

A gauge in Amelia, La., had dropped from its peak of 3.4 feet Saturday to 2.85 feet Wednesday.

Farther downstream about 200 people were digging up dirt from their yards for a 7-foot-tall levee to protect residents in Gibson, in Terrebonne Parish. Floodwaters weren’t expected to reach there until the weekend.

Dewayne Henson said his neighbors were still surrounding their houses with sandbags in case the levee doesn’t hold.

“The levee’s brand new. If we do get this 5-foot water surge in our backyards and that levee doesn’t hold, then we’re going to have a big mess,” said Henson, 45. “It won’t be a gradual climb of water. It’ll be really fast.”

Henson’s home, which is elevated about 6 feet by cinder blocks, wouldn’t be in danger, but up to 2 feet of water would cover the area where he has lived for more than 20 years if the levee breaks, rushing into homes nearby that are built on the ground.

MISSISSIPPI

In Mississippi, backwater flooding continued along the Yazoo River north of Vicksburg.

“They still had a really good current moving upriver, going the wrong direction,” said Pope, the weather service hydrologist in Jackson.

The rising water has overtaken several rural areas but nearby Yazoo City remains dry, said Jeff Rent, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

“A lot of farmland is inundated,” he said.

Statewide, about 4,900 people in 17 counties had fled their homes, and more than 2,900 had been evacuated ahead of the flooding as of Wednesday, Rent said.

Still, there were some bright spots.

Forecasts for the Yazoo River improved Wednesday, and water wasn’t expected to over top a levee north of Vicksburg as forecasters had predicted, said Eileen Williamson, a spokesman in the Corps’ Vicksburg unit.

Also, at Vicksburg the Mississippi is expected to crest this morning at 57.1 feet, Pope said. Flood stage is 43 feet.

Upriver there were other good signs, Pope said.

Water levels at “Greenville and Arkansas City are falling ... a little bit better than we were anticipating as much water as there is in the backwater areas,” he said.

In Tunica County, the Gold Strike casino reopened Wednesday, putting 1,268 employees back to work.

Other Tunica County casinos are to follow, starting with the Roadhouse today at 4 p.m. and the Horseshoe on Friday at 4 p.m., said Valerie Morris, a spokesman for Caesar’s Entertainment.

Downriver at Natchez, where a 15-mile section of river closed temporarily Tuesday, the U.S. Coast Guard continued to take barges through one at a time to reduce sand erosion caused by wakes, said Petty Officer Bill Colclough.

Weather service officials still expected the river to crest there at 62.5 feet Saturday. The Coast Guard has said that level, if reached, will likely close the river to traffic again.

TENNESSEE

Floodwaters continued to recede Wednesday in Memphis, where hundreds of homes remained swamped from backwater flooding along the Loosahatchie and Wolf rivers, which remained above flood stage.

About 2,500 properties were touched by flooding, including 700 mobile homes thatremain waterlogged in lowlying areas of north Memphis and the suburb of Millington, Shelby County officials told The Associated Press.

More than 1,700 households have requested federal disaster assistance, and about 520 people were in shelters, most of them residents of two mobile-home parks that were the first to be evacuated ahead of the rising water, the AP reported.

The Mississippi River at Memphis crested more than a week ago near 48 feet, inches short of the record set in 1937. The river stood at 43.2 feet Wednesday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service. The river’s level is expected to go down to about 40 feet over the weekend.

Information for this article was contributed by Paul P. Quinn of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Adrian Sainz of The Associated Press.