10-ton floodgate was raised Saturday for the first time in nearly four decades, unleashing a torrent of water from the Mississippi River across thousands of miles of delta farmland to spare Baton Rouge, New Orleans and the petroleum plants between them.
The water spit out slowly at first, then began gushing like a waterfall as it headed to swamp as much as 3,000 square miles of Cajun countryside known for small farms and fish camps. Some places could wind up under as much as 25 feet of water.
Opening the Morganza Spillway diverts water from the swollen river away from heavily populated cities and numerous refineries and chemical plants along the lower reaches of the Mississippi.
"We're using every flood control tool we have in the system," Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh said from the dry side of the spillway, before the bay was opened. The podium Walsh was standing at was expected to be under several feet of water by today.
The Morganza Spillway is part of a system of locks and levees built after the great flood of 1927. When it opened Saturday for the first time since 1973, it was the first time in U.S. history that three flood-control systems were unlocked to control the Mississippi River.
Earlier this month, the corps intentionally blew holes into a levee in Missouri to employ a similar cities-first strategy, and it opened the Bonnet Carre spillway northwest of New Orleans to send water into massive Lake Pontchartrain.
An estimated 15,000 acres of farmland will be underwater initially in south-central Louisiana as the water flows 100 miles toward Morgan City and into the Gulf of Mexico, said Kyle McCann, spokesman at the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation. The water will take about three days to reach the gulf.
About 2,500 people and 2,000 structures are within the spillway and another 22,500 people and 11,000 buildings are vulnerable to the rising water, according to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Snowmelt and heavy rain were blamed for inflating the Mississippi, and the rising river levels shattered records set 70 years ago. The spillway gates were opened as the National Weather Service forecast the river's flow at Baton Rouge would exceed 1.62 million cubic feet per second, exceeding the 1.5 million cubic feet per second the city's levees were designed to withstand.
In Krotz Springs, La., one of the towns in the Atchafalaya River Basin that's bracing for floodwaters, Monita Reed, 56, recalled the last time the Morganza was opened.
"We could sit in our yard and hear the water," she said as workers constructed a makeshift levee of sandbags and soil-filled mesh boxes in hopes of protecting the 240 homes in her subdivision.
Some people living in the threatened stretch of Cajun country are heading out. Reed's family packed her furniture, clothing and photos in a rental truck and a relative's trailer.
"I'm just going to move and store my stuff. I'm going to stay here until they tell us to leave," Reed said. "Hopefully, we won't see much water and then I can move back in."
Engineers feared that weeks of pressure on the levees could cause them to fail, swamping New Orleans under as much as 20 feet of water in a disaster that would have been much worse than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Even though water was being released from the river, the levees still will be put to the test for a couple of weeks.
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