They're Tryin' to Wash Us Away ...

The Corps of Engineers is fixin' to open the Morganza Spillway–the Bonnet Carre is already partially open–to release the Mississippi River's pressure on the levees south of the Atchalafaya. This will probably spare Baton Rouge and New Orleans from flooding, but it is gonna put a whole lot of swamp and farmland under water, ten or fifteen feet deep, so they say.


They'll close Hwy. 190 when they do, and Krotz Springs and Morgan City are gonna get their feet wet all the way up to their eyebrows.


This is why the spillways were built, to save having to dynamite the levees upstream to spare the cities, but there are a lot of coonasses living out in the spillway who are going to have to move or drown, and it's going to ruin the fishing and crawfishing for a while, though the crawfish will probably get a lot better once the water ebbs.


I was living in B.R. when they opened the spillway in the early seventies, and it was something to see.


In Randy Newman's song, Louisiana, 1927, the lyric:


President Coolidge came down on a railroad train/
With a little fat man with a note pad in his hand/
President say, 'Little fat man, isn't it a shame?/
What the river has done to this poor cracker's land?