The Mississippi River Floods America’s Heartland

The Mississippi River flows down the middle of the United States to the Gulf of Mexico. Right now, melted snow and heavy rains from the north are moving south. The result has been what some people are calling the worst flooding in eighty years in states along the Mississippi.

In Louisiana, engineers are working to keep floodwaters away from two big cities -- New Orleans and Baton Rouge. New Orleans is still recovering from the failure of its flood controls during Hurricane Katrina in two thousand five.

A plan to direct some of the water into the Morganza spillway means flooding rich farmlands in another part of the state. As many as twenty-five thousand people may have to leave areas that would be flooded. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has been urging them to prepare to leave.

The Morganza spillway is about seventy-five kilometers upriver from Baton Rouge, the state capital. The spillway is a thirty-two-kilometer-long channel that can take waters from the Mississippi to another river system. The spillway was used only once before, in nineteen seventy-three.

Last week, the Army Corps of Engineers exploded a three-kilometer-wide hole along an earthen levee in Missouri. They did that to protect river towns in two other states, Kentucky and Illinois. But fifty-two thousand hectares of farmland were flooded as a result.

The American insurance industry says natural disasters have already caused five billion dollars in damage this year. A record number of tornadoes struck along a path from Texas to Georgia. The storms killed more than two hundred people in six states. At the same time, states like Texas and Oklahoma are experiencing extremely dry weather and high winds that have caused wildfires.

President Obama plans to inspect the flooding on Monday. He will visit Memphis, Tennessee, where the Mississippi River reached nearly record levels earlier this week.