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All Along the Spillway
Posted May 7, 2011 in Louisiana Travel
Flood control systems in south Louisiana are so omnipresent, and so massive, that it’s easy to take them for granted. All that changes when we really need them, however, like right now.
While New Orleans parties in the midst of Jazz Fest time, the Mississippi River is sending its largest flood stage in generations our way from the Midwest. And so attention fixates on the levees and the spillways built to protect settled areas from a potential flood.
Certain stretches of the New Orleans levee system, the literal life ring for the vulnerable city, are popular places for people to have picnics, bring their dogs to exercise or ride horses. There’s a paved bicycling and walking path along the levee top, and I know a few jocks who run “inclines” up its slope, trying to get their calves accustomed to hills while living in a region without them. The levee is like a part-time, linear park whose fulltime job happens to be keeping the city from oblivion.
It’s a similar story just a bit upriver at the Bonnet Carre Spillway, a huge structure built as an emergency valve to divert a portion of the flow of the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain when very high river levels threaten New Orleans. This has been done sparingly in the structure’s history, with the structure opened only eight times since it was completed in the 1930s. The Army Corps of Engineers plans to open the spillway again on Monday.
Most of the time, then, the river is not spilling through the spillway, thank goodness. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t in use. The spillway corridor, extending from the river to the lake, has evolved through the years as an outdoor recreation area. People come to the spillway to hunt and fish, to catch crawfish and for hunting dog trials. There are extensive trails for dirt bikes and ATVs and each July there’s a trail run organized by a local running club. There’s even a model airplane flying range where people maneuver their miniature Messerschmitts and Mustangs over the contained wilds of the spillway.
All of this will be under a periodic, if temporary, distributary next week as the Bonnet Carre Spillway completes its real job as a vital stopgap in the flood protection of south Louisiana.
The photos above are from drier times earlier in the year. For more current photos from the Times Picayune, click here .