Corps plans to open Bonnet Carre Spillway beginning Wednesday
Updated 6 min ago;
Posted 1 hr ago
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By Maria Clark, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
The Army Corps of Engineers announced Monday (Feb. 25) that it will begin opening bays of the Bonnet Carre Spillway beginning Wednesday at 10 a.m. to deal with the rising water levels of the Mississippi River.
The Corps announced that they will start by opening about 38 of the floodway structure’s 350 bays on Wednesday, and then adjusting each day after that. Current projections say that the spillway will be open for at least a month, and the Corps says it could open approximately 200 of the spillway’s bays.
Waters are expected to crest at 17 feet at the Carrollton Gage in New Orleans — the official flood stage — on March 18, according to the National Weather Service. This would be the 13th time the spillway will have been opened since it was built in response to the historic 1927 Mississippi River flood, and the fifth time since 2000.
By opening the Spillway, the Corps will be able to keep the river flow from topping 1.25 million cubic feet per second, a capacity which could fill the Superdome in a second, according to Col. Michael Clancy, the commander of the New Orleans district USACE.
He said that the New Orleans district has been in a flood fight for about four months, which began when the river hit 11 ft at the Carrolton Gage on Nov. 2. The water level reached 15 ft this Feb. 23, due to excessive rain in the Ohio River Valley, Clancy said.
“This has been the wettest winter in the Mississippi Valley in the last 124 years that’s what’s bringing us all this water,” Clancy said. “We still have the spring rains to get through and snow melt in the north to get through so there is no telling when the flood fight will end here or when the Bonnet Carre spillway will close.”
He added that there are currently no plans to open the Morganza Spillway further upriver.
While the official flood stage in New Orleans is listed as 17 feet, floodwalls and other structures protect from river overtopping to a height of about 20 feet.
As of Monday the river level had reached 15.4 feet in New Orleans.
The Bonnet Carre control structure is a concrete weir spanning about a mile and a half, with a total of 350 gated bays. Each bay holds 20 timber “needles” which are raised to allow water to flow through to the floodway, a natural 5.7-mile course between guide levees to Lake Pontchartrain.
This year’s high water period is about a week or so earlier than last year, when the corps opened 186 bays in the spillway to divert water from the river.
Reporter Mark Schleifstein contributed to this report.