Mitt liv som Tobin

On Saturday I got to attend the opening of the Morganza spillway. The road was closed a few miles from the spillway, but my friend Tegan simply flashed her PRESS badge and we were immediately ushered through the roadblock. (Alas, the other car in our party was turned away.)

The Army Corps of Engineers gave a press conference at 2:30pm just below (and to the side of) the control structure. Here you can see the media circus, with a depth marker placed ominously in the foreground:



The Army Corps of Engineers official gave a speech and then addressed questions from the reporters.

I was surprised how quickly the floodway below the control structure began to fill. The area where the press conference was held began to be submerged less than 15 minutes after the single spillway gate was opened:



I hope to get a followup photo when this is all completely under water.

Here is the water cascading through that one open spillway gate:



Now there are 15 gates open.

And here's a video taken from the road deck of the control structure, looking down at the water spewing through it. Look at all the fish!

Here are two local blog entries about the flooding:

• http://louisianaswamp.blogspot.com/2011/05/louisiana-swamp-tours-crawfish-and.html


• http://false-river.blogspot.com/2011/05/nine-gates-open.html

>> The Miss Rockaway Armada is both a collection of individuals and an idea. At its most basic, the idea is this: we’re going to float down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on rafts that we built ourselves. The crew can be called many things: artists, musicians, builders, travelers, organizers, dreamers. ... We are floating down the Mississippi River on a raft we built from trash. The catch is that we don’t know much about boats or rivers, and we don’t have any money. We know we are blowing crazy hot air, but if the idea makes your eyes glow like coals then you understand what we’re doing. <<

http://www.flickr.com/groups/missrockaway/pool/tags/forsite/show/

http://www.missrockaway.org/wordpress/boat/

Being a chief mate, he was a prodigious and competent swearer, a thing which the office requires. But he had an auxiliary vocabulary which no other mate on the river possessed and it made him able to persuade indolent roustabouts more effectively than did the swearing of any other mate in the business, because while it was not profane it was of so mysterious and formidable and terrifying a nature that it sounded five or six times as profane as any language to be found on the fo'castle anywhere in the river service.

[He] had no education beyond reading and something which so nearly resembled writing that it was reasonably well calculated to deceive. He read, and he read a great deal, and diligently, but his whole library consisted of a single book. It was Lyell's Geology, and he had stuck to it until all its grim and rugged scientific terminology was familiar to his mouth, though he hadn't the least idea of what the words meant. ...All he wanted out of those great words was the energy they stirred in his roustabouts. In times of extreme emergency he would let fly a volcanic irruption of the old regular orthodox profanity mixed up and seasoned all through with imposing geological terms, then formally charge his roustabouts with being Old Silurian Invertebrates out of the Incandescent Anisodactylous Post-Pliocene Period and damn the whole gang in a body to perdition.

Mark Twain in Autobiography, as quoted in Marcia Bjornerud's Reading the Rocks, p32.