The levee is a wonderful thing

The levee is a marvelous invention. It mostly keeps the water where it is supposed to be - in the river - and out of where it should not - my house.

Also, it makes a great walking, jogging and biking path and a place to chat with neighbors. If you have a dog, he'd enjoy running on the levee. It is a good place to meditate or mull things over, as well.

On our levee, we have pelicans, egrets, herons, cranes, butterflies, mice and opossum. That's what I have seen so far.

Yesterday, I saw a praying mantis - they are supposed to mean good luck. The river makes a fine habitat for small creatures.




Because the levee is so high, you can appreciate the horizon and some marvelous sunsets! There are different colors every night.

From my part of the levee, I see the Crescent City Connection bridge that crosses the Mississippi to the West Bank.

I can also take in the downtown skyline. And ships, tugs and barges pass day and night.

At noon and 7 p.m., the paddlewheeler comes by tooting its horn. On Sunday evenings, the cruise ships head out to the Gulf.

The levee is a good place to sit

and also to fish...

ET lands in Holy Cross

I live near the Mississippi River. In other places, there are flood lights on the levee to light the way of people strolling along its banks. But here, it is very dark. I'd say, pitch black.

Driving home tonight, it looked like the USS Enterprise had landed at the foot of my street. Towering above my little house were lights and booms. A ship was docked at the wharf. It isn't much of a dock, but I guess big enough to provide a resting place for a huge ship.

Mosquito Hawk

Ships from all over the world come up and down the river. Most of them have names I can't even recognize. They're from Eastern Europe and Africa.

We've got a sugar refinery nearby in Chalmette. I assume we ship sugar to the four corners of the earth. There's this massive body of water and we know so little about what goes on there.

1.41 million cubic feet of water per second

Photo by Matthew Hinton, Times-Picayune

At a news conference in Baton Rouge, Gov. Bobby Jindal said the Army Corps of Engineers has made it clear to him that it will order the Morganza Floodway to be opened on Saturday or on Sunday at the latest.

“Now is the time to take action. Don’t delay, Don’t hope something will change,” Jindal said.

The corps manual for water flow in the lower Mississippi River calls for the spillway to open when the flow of water past Red River Landing, across from the Louisiana State Prison at Angola, reaches 1.5 million cubic feet per second.

"At Red River landing today, the Army Corps said the water flow is currently at 1.41 million cubic feet per second," Jindal said, and is expected to reach the trigger point on Saturday.

The corps had opened 223 of the 350 bays in the Bonnet Carre Spillway, upriver from New Orleans, and will open the rest in the next few days. That will divert 250,000 cubic feet per second of water from the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain, about 1/6 of the river's volume. The National Weather Service warned that when fully open, the spillway will cause lake levels to rise as much as 2-1/2 feet.

"Everybody is on pins and needles, from the public to the decision makers, which makes it more frightening to the public when the decision makers don't know what's going to happen in the next 12 hours," said Matthew Rota, director of science and water policy with the Gulf Restoration Network.

Reporting by the Times-Picayune.