Perilous
Times
More evacuations as US floods worsen
From correspondents in Memphis, Tennessee
From: AP
May 09, 2011 10:30AM
TOURISTS gathered and gawkers snapped photos of the rising
Mississippi River, even as more residents were told to flee their
homes and the river's crest edged toward the city.
Officials went door-to-door today, warning about 240 people to get
out before the river reaches its expected peak on Wednesday.
In all, residents in more than 1300 homes have been told to go,
and some 370 people were staying in shelters.
The Mississippi spared Kentucky and northwest Tennessee
catastrophic flooding, but some low-lying towns and farmland along
the banks of the big river have been inundated with water.
There's tension farther south in the Mississippi Delta and
Louisiana, with the river's crest continuing a lazy pace, leaving
behind what could be a slow-developing disaster.
Jittery Memphis residents have been abandoning low-lying homes for
days as the dangerously surging river threatened to crest at
14.63m, just shy of a 14.84m record of a devastating 1937 flood.
Record river levels, some dating as far back as the 1920s, have
already been broken in some areas upstream.
Heavy rains and snowmelt have been blamed for swelling the big
river, and there's so much water in the Mississippi, the
tributaries that feed into it are also backed up, creating some of
the worst flood problems so far.
Downriver in Louisiana, officials warned residents that even if a
key spillway northwest of Baton Rouge were to be opened, residents
could expect water 1.5 to 7.5m deep over parts of seven parishes.
Some of Louisiana's most valuable farmland is expected to be
inundated.
The vital Morganza spillway, northwest of Baton Rouge, could be
opened as early as Thursday although a decision has not yet been
made.
A separate spillway northwest of New Orleans was to be opened
tomorrow, helping ease the pressure on levees there, and inmates
were set to be evacuated from the low-lying state prison in
Angola.
Engineers say it is unlikely any major metropolitan areas will be
inundated as the water pushes downstream over the next week or
two. Nonetheless, officials are cautious.
Since the flood in 1927, a disaster that killed hundreds, Congress
has made protecting the cities on the lower Mississippi a
priority, spending billions to fortify cities with floodwalls and
carve out overflow basins and ponds - a departure from the
"levees-only" strategy that led to the 1927 disaster.