6 years later, FEMA provides funding

Louisiana will get an extra $390 million from FEMA

 By Bruce Alpert, Times-Picayune 

WASHINGTON — Louisiana will get an additional $390 million in hazard mitigation money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, nearly a 30 percent increase in funding designed to reduce future flooding damage in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Times-Picayune archive'This is really a big deal for our state,' Sen. Mary Landrieu said Monday.

FEMA made the announcement Monday after the Obama administration agreed to recalculate financing after the state’s congressional members said previous allocations didn’t reflect actual damage from the 2005 storms.

So far, according to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who led the delegation efforts, the state has received about $1.4 billion in mitigation money.

Landrieu said the additional money is expected to be targeted to parishes with the most damage, mentioning Orleans, St. Bernard and Cameron parishes as the likely biggest beneficiaries.

“This is really a big deal for our state,” said Landrieu of the money, which can go for a variety of purposes, including repairing levees, strengthening schools and other public facilities to protect them against future storms and, if needed, more money to help homeowners raise their homes.

Gov. Bobby Jindal welcomed the announcement and said the state will allocate the funds to parishes most affected by the hurricanes so they can set their own priorities.

“As we did after Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike, we are sending these dollars directly to parishes because local leaders know how best to protect our communities from future losses in the event of another natural disaster, not folks in Baton Rouge,” Jindal said.

He made no mention of the Obama administration, which freed the funds, or Landrieu and other congressional members, perhaps reflecting tension over the senator’s criticism of the Jindal administration after an $80 million federal grant to develop broadband service in the state’s rural communities was rescinded by the Commerce Department. Commerce officials said the state’s application was insufficient and late and state officials didn’t respond to questions.

In her press release on the hazard mitigation money, Landrieu makes no mention of Jindal.

View full sizeTimes-Picayune archiveHazard mitigation money from FEMA will go to parishes hit the hardest by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said Monday’s announcement is “great news for our recovery and preparedness.” He praised Sen. Landrieu, who is his sister, for pushing for the financing.

“Along with Sen. Landrieu, I have been advocating for our fair share of these funds so that we can be better prepared for disaster and prevent damages in the future,” Mayor Landrieu said. “We have a strong relationship with FEMA and appreciate their commitment to getting it right.”

Louisiana’s allocation of $1.4 billion in hazard mitigation funding from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was based on a calculation of 7.5 percent of FEMA’s estimates of costs for response and recovery operations. It was calculated 18 months after the disaster, which is usually enough time to assess an accurate figure.

But Sen. Landrieu and others argued that the damage from the 2005 hurricanes was so overwhelming that it would take many more years to develop accurate data.

Landrieu praised Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate for giving the delegation’s arguments a fair hearing. Her staff said FEMA regional director Tony Russell was also instrumental in getting the hazard mitigation funding increased.

•••••••

Bruce Alpert can be reached at balpert@timespicayune.com or 202.450.1406.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Bike ride atop the levee reveals dangers

Mississippi River's flood a battle for all on the river's edge

Published: Saturday, May 14, 2011, 5:35 PM     Updated: Sunday, May 15, 2011, 1:34 PM

 By James O'Byrne, NOLA.com 

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.

-- T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages

The flooding Mississippi River is done watching and waiting. And anyone who doubts that the river has become T.S. Eliot's personification of "a strong brown god" need only walk up the slope of the levee and peer over the top.

If, like me, you frequent the levee path that runs along the Mississippi, you have developed a more personal relationship with the river than almost everyone else who lives on the dry side, in the levee's inert, protective shadow.

Bicycling or walking along any part of the 25-mile paved path that runs uninterrupted from Audubon Park in New Orleans to Norco in St. Charles Parish, you get to know the river as a highly changeable organism; as a bit of batture wilderness amid urban and suburban sprawl; and as a bustling, pulsating center of commerce.

For weeks now, on bicycle rides along the New Orleans and Jefferson Parish stretches of the path, we in the community of river watchers have witnessed the river rise and rise, and keep on rising, until the water towers over the homes on the other side of the levee.

On Monday, I bicycled the full 25-mile path, taking photographs along the way, to get a sense of how the creatures, both human and animal, are coping with the worst Mississippi River flood since 1927.

My ride ended at the Bonnet Carre spillway, which was commissioned after the 1927 disaster, along with the Morganza Floodway north of Baton Rouge, in anticipation of just such an event as we are witnessing now. The painstaking process of opening the spillway's 350 bays was underway, and river water was coursing its way to Lake Pontchartrain.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has already determined  that the massive diversion of river water at Bonnet Carre is not enough to prevent big problems in New Orleans. On Saturday, the Morganza was opened for only the second time in its history. That means others farther north will lose their homes and businesses in the flood, so that New Orleans and Baton Rouge can be saved. Such is the cruel calculus of the river's raging rise.

Living on the river

It's just after dawn when my ride begins, and soon I reach the Orleans-Jefferson line near Riverbend, where there remains a small community of homes on the Mississippi River batture, that narrow strip of land that sits between the base of the levee and the water's edge, mostly forested and usually dry, except in the springtime when the high water comes.

It's a foggy morning on the river, as usual at this time of year. Even when there's no fog elsewhere, the river fogs over, as the warm humid air of late spring contacts the much cooler river, chilled by the recently melted snow and cold northern rains rolling to the Gulf of Mexico. On the river, the tankers' tall superstructures poke out of the low fog banks, moving back and forth like skyscrapers floating on a cloud.

At the Riverbend, the water is lapping at the floorboards of some of the batture homes. A man wades in three feet of water in his yard to tie his propane tank to the trees, so that it doesn't float away. I ask him, literally in passing, if this is the highest he has seen the water. "Nope, '73 was higher," he recalls of the flood that sparked the first and only opening of Morganza. "But I know more water is coming."

A resident of the batture in New Orleans ties his propane tank to trees in his yard to keep it from floating away in the flood.

More water is indeed coming. The river crested at Memphis on Tuesday at nearly 48 feet. That bulging torrent of water is heading our way.

A hard time for business

Unknown to many who stay on the dry side of the levee, the river batture is alive with commerce. There are stevedoring companies and boat maintenance yards. There are huge bluffs of river sand that rise as high as the levee. Dump trucks roll over the levees, darting in and out of these sand pits, taking loads to far-off construction sites. Companies specializing in rocks and gravel and other aggregates that move up and down the river stack their products in giant mounds on the high parts of the batture.

All of these companies are engaged in a battle with water. Here, the road is flooded, and a mini-dozer tries to push enough gravel onto the crown to make it passable. There, untended trucks and tractors sit in increasingly dangerous pools of water. Workmen stand in two feet of water, working on a tugboat, its status "in dry dock" increasingly tenuous in the rising river. A couple of more feet, and they'll have to tie it down.

At the Petroleum Helicopters terminal on the batture in Jefferson Parish, near the Huey P.  Long Bridge, several of the landing pads are already under water. The helicopters that I'm used to seeing on my daily rides have been moved to safety.

And at the massive construction site at the Huey Long, a vast area that was bustling just a few weeks ago with cranes, supplies, equipment and workers, is now a pond stretching to the river's edge.

Flotsam and jetsam

Along the river bank near Ochsner, a huge swath of trees has been cleared from the batture, creating an unparalleled panorama where you can see the full breadth of the river  and the wide turn that gives the Riverbend area its name. Outside of the city, such stretches are rare, as usually the forest on the batture is so thick that it blocks out a clear view of the river.

Downriver from curves in the Mississippi, huge jams of driftwood and debris dotted with brightly colored plastic bottles form in the flooded batture space. When the water recedes, this debris will be left behind.

It's a favored spot for the workers at Ochnser Hospital to sit in the grass and eat their lunches and watch the ships and barges roll by. The batture was cleared out over the winter, when the river was low in its banks, so that the Corps could lay out sprawling mats, big as a football field, made up of concrete slabs hinged together like a quilt. These articulated mats were rolled across the underwater part of the riverbank to stabilize the bank, particularly where there's lots of pressure, such as where the river takes a sharp bend. A similar mat was installed at Algiers Point over the winter.

As I watch the river's flow, I am relieved at the unseen armor. Because right now, the Mississippi River, far from looking like the Old Man celebrated in song, seems rather young and impetuous, its surface roiling and surging southward with uncharacteristic swiftness.

At each bend in the river, debris floating along in the flood keeps going straight, and ends up stacked in huge floating fields pressed against the concrete armor that lines the river side of the levees. Woven into the tapestry of driftwood are old tires, wooden spools, strange blobs of orange Styrofoam, rusted metal orbs that must have been buoys, the occasional stray toilet seat and, seemingly everywhere, little pockmarks of bright color, the ubiquitous plastic bottles. When the water goes down, these piles of debris will remain.

A concrete bird habitat

The Mississippi River batture is a bird sanctuary that stretches the length of the continent. In southeast Louisiana, it harbors herons, cranes, egrets, ducks, owls – you name it. If it's native to Louisiana, it's here. As I ride farther into Jefferson Parish, where life on the dry side turns from industrial to residential, the birds become ubiquitous.

The flood has chased all manner of wildlife from the protective cover of the batture forest. Birds live on the water's edge. When that edge becomes the concrete slope of the levee, that's where you will find them still.

Many of these birds live their lives at the water's edge. And now that edge is a swath of sloped concrete. Squeezed in by the river on one side, and the assortment of intermittent bicyclers, joggers and walkers who amble by, these huge communities of birds stand warily and incongruously on the concrete levee, waiting for the water to recede so they can retreat to the forest once again.

I am not an experienced bird watcher. I recognize egrets, but can't say what kind. I see ducks of many varieties. I watch an owl digging away at a tuft of grass growing between the concrete before sensing me and fleeing to the safety of the batture forest. I curse the flood. But I feel fortunate on this day that the water has narrowed the distance between me and the creatures that make the river home.

At the spillway

The scene at the Bonnet Carre feels more like going to a New Orleans Saints preseason practice than witnessing the commencement of a deadly serious effort to tame the wild river. People have lined the levee along the spillway with lawn chairs. They have brought the family, baby strollers and all. They have coolers and snacks and binoculars.

But they are not making light of the situation. It's clear from listening to their conversations that they know they have a front row seat to history. It has, after all, been 84 years since the Mississippi River has flexed its muscles in this way. And the last time it happened, none of these structures – the mighty, armored levees, the Morganza Floodway, the Bonnet Carre Spillway – existed.

People who live in Southeast Louisiana seem to have an innate sense that, no matter how mighty are man's accomplishments, no matter how confident are the "worshippers of the machine" that T.S. Eliot speaks of, this battle between man and nature is often a 50-50 proposition. And after what we've been through, we know better than almost anyone else: sometimes you end up on the wrong end of that equation. 

Each bay of the Bonnet Carre Spillway has 20 pins that are removed one by one by the cranes.

As I watch the Corps workers begin the painstaking, week-long task of pulling the wood and metal pins from each spillway bay – 20 pins per bay, 350 bays, 7,000 pins in all – I know that the war analogy is apt. Each day, across the country, men and women are battling the river, on levees, in boardrooms, at sand bag centers, in homes and businesses, and in front of computers that spit out data about flow rates and river stages and crest models.

I remember a story I wrote early in my career, in 1986, when the Corps opened a new Auxiliary Control Structure at the critical Old River complex, where engineers grudgingly feed 30 percent of the Mississippi River's flow into the Atchafalaya River, to keep the whole shooting match from heading down the shorter, easier route to the sea. The auxiliary structure was authorized after the mighty 1973 flood, which almost destroyed the Old River structure, an event that would have unleashed an unprecedented human and economic disaster.

And so it goes through the years. The river floods. Engineers devise an answer. The river makes a mockery of the new machines. Humans build better machines in hopes of triumphing. Until the next, greater flood. It is a loser's game.  

As I watch the water surge through the Bonnet Carre, I think about the floodway 160 miles upriver, and about the people who will have water in their homes because the Morganza is opened. I have had water in my home, and I don't wish that heartbreak on anyone. But I know that it is inevitable.

In The Times-Picayune earlier this week, a woman in Morgan City contemplated losing her home, so that Baton Rouge and New Orleans might stay dry. "Y'all pray for us," she asked.

It seems the least we can do.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Oysters face another assault

New Orleans family oyster company sees only dark days ahead

Published: Sunday, May 15, 2011, 6:30 AM     Updated: Sunday, May 15, 2011, 12:11 PM

 By Brett Anderson, The Times-Picayune 

Al Sunseri is livid. It's not his usual disposition.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-PicayuneSal Sunseri Jr at his desk at P&J Oyster Company in New Orleans Monday April 24 2011

Last June, when Sunseri announced the BP oil spill was forcing his family's company, P&J Oyster Company, to cease regular business operations, his tone was measured. The move cost 13 of the company's employees their jobs -- everyone not named Sunseri -- leaving Al and his brother, Sal, to try to keep the business afloat.

Sunseri appeared calm even last fall. At the time, P&J's business had slowed to a trickle, a consequence of the state's decision to divert large amounts of freshwater into Louisiana's brackish coastal wetlands in an effort to keep the oil off shore. The diversions reduced the salinity of the waters where some of the state's most prized oysters are harvested, causing widespread oyster mortality that devastated areas where P&J, which has been processing and distributing Louisiana oysters for 135 years, sourced most of its products.

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"I'm basically an optimistic guy," Al Sunseri said. "But now I'm mad."

Sunseri sat cross-legged on a couch in his French Quarter office. It was a few days before last month's anniversary of the Macondo oil well explosion. Despite mounting evidence that Louisiana's wetlands were less polluted by oil than feared, Sunseri's portfolio of worry and disgruntlement had gradually swelled since the well was capped last July. It has only gotten worse in the last week, as the Mississippi River has risen to levels that threaten to cause even more destruction to Louisiana's oyster supply.

Deep distrust of BP, claims process

Sunseri, like many in the Louisiana oyster business, doesn't believe Kenneth Feinberg's Gulf Coast Claims Facility has negotiated in good faith with oyster fishers, farmers and distributors. BP argues that it didn't authorize the freshwater diversions that share blame for the precipitous drop in Louisiana's oyster production in 2010 and therefore shouldn't be held responsible for the harm it caused the $360 million industry.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-Picayune'I'm basically an optimistic guy,' Al Sunseri says. 'But now I'm mad.'

The company's refusal to pay for a $15 million reseeding project to repair damaged oyster beds was fresh on Sunseri's mind as he moved from couch to desk in P&J's eerily quiet headquarters.

"They said they were going to make people whole," Sunseri said of BP. "We just recently received a check from them, and it was a pittance compared to what we've lost. They haven't done what they said. They're going to come up with any excuse, any reason to not come up with what we've lost."

Before the oil spill, P&J was almost exclusively dependent on oysters harvested in Louisiana. But now, the historically high river poses the latest in a dizzying series of obstacles that threatens the Sunseris' ability to remain New Orleans' go-to supplier of quality local oysters. The spike in uncertainty lends even more urgency to the questions they've been asking themselves for a year now:

When will damaged oyster beds return to health? Will there be enough fishers to harvest them when and if they do? Will out-of-state demand ever rebound? How large a portion of P&J's business has been lost forever?

'This is just one bad thing after another'

"I've been doing this for over 30 years," Al Sunseri said. "P&J has been through hurricanes, the Depression, world wars, all that, but this is just one bad thing after another. It's terrible."

And that was before the river started to rise.

View full sizeDavid Grunfeld, The Times-PicayuneSal Sunseri Jr. at his desk at P&J Oyster Company in New Orleans.

P&J's business is based on a reputation for quality built over generations. The Sunseris' involvement dates to the 1920s, when Alfred Sunseri -- grandfather to Al and Sal -- was hired by P&J's founders, John Popich and Joseph Jurisich.

The Sunseri family took sole possession of P&J in the 1970s, but the current owners see their work as a continuation of a project that began in the crucial early stages of New Orleans' culinary history. "The P&J Oyster Cookbook" makes a point, for instance, of mentioning that the company was around when Oysters Rockefeller was invented at Antoine's in the 1880s.

Rodney Fox, owner of R&A Oyster Co., a seafood supplier in Bayou La Batre, Ala., said his father, Kenny, has told him stories about P&J's founders.

"Back in the day, he said, 'If you were lucky enough, Mr. Jurisich and Mr. Popich would sell you oysters,'" Fox recalled. "When you speak of oysters, name recognition is really important, and Al and Sal have done a good job maintaining that. It's nothing for Al and Sal to go down to the docks and shake hands with the fishermen, just to say hello, even if they're not buying from them. That's how they stay abreast of what's going on in the industry."

Tenney Flynn, chef and co-owner of GW Fins, a French Quarter seafood restaurant not far from P&J headquarters, said he buys from P&J "partly out of habit and partly out of loyalty, which is based on the fact that they have the best oysters."

No more shucking

Today, the production facility that fronts the company's offices appears as it has for more than a year now: empty, save for the handful of part-time employees who help package and deliver oysters to the company's dwindling base of clients. The company has not returned to shucking. In the span of a couple of hours in April, Al Sunseri turned away two customers who had wandered in looking to buy oysters and countless others who called his cell and office phones looking for product.

Last fall, the Sunseris said P&J's distribution business had been cut to an eighth of what it was before the oil spill. They've since hired four part-time workers to help package oysters and drive the trucks. Sunseri declined to share specifics on the advice of his lawyer, who has filed a lawsuit against BP on P&J's behalf.

"I can't go into numbers," he said. "All I can say is (business) is substantially off. We're just trying to take care of our customers."

Doing so has been touch and go for more than a year now. The freshwater oyster kill-offs that followed the oil spill wreaked havoc on P&J's practice of sourcing oysters almost exclusively from areas they believe produce the highest quality.

Before the spill, Mitch Jurisich, an oyster fisher and supplier based in Empire who is no relation to P&J's co-founder, sold to P&J once a week. "We're kind of like winemakers," Jurisich said. "We don't harvest oysters before it's time." Jurisich has yet to resume supplying P&J since he stopped harvesting June 4, although he returned to the water April 19.

Around the same time P&J received a shipment of shell oysters from Copano Bay, just north of Corpus Christi, Texas. The company has a long history dealing in Texas oysters. During the months of November and December, when the demand for Gulf oysters is at its height, P&J used to rely on Texas for nearly half of its supply.

But in the 1990s, Sunseri said an increase in the number of New Orleans oyster bars increased demand for Louisiana oysters among P&J's customers. "When that happened, those customers demanded we only sell them Louisiana oysters," he said.

As the oil spill dried up the Sunseris' established sources for Louisiana oysters, they had to scramble for supplies from Texas to keep up with demand.

"Now our customers want to make sure that we have oysters for them, but these are oysters that they wouldn't buy before," Sunseri said as he handed over a shucked Copano Bay oyster, which was cool, mildly salty and about as big around as a satsuma. "They're beautiful oysters, but they're not the kind of oysters that I would regularly sell. They're too small. Our (regular) oysters would probably be between a half-inch and an inch larger than that."

The Sunseris have been able to source quality oysters from Louisiana, too. They insist the second annual Louisiana Oyster Festival slated for June 4 and 5 will feature nothing but local product.

But the impact of the spill on smaller farmers and fishers has rendered P&J's old business model of relying exclusively on regional oysters untenable.

More bad days ahead

And things are about to get worse. With the opening of the Bonne Carre and Morganza spillways, tons of freshwater will invade brackish waters where oysters thrive. Most of the reefs that help Louisiana produce 40 percent of the nation's crop are located along the southeastern corner of the coast from Lake Borgne to Vermilion Bay.

"We're very likely we're going to see more mortalities in our oyster beds," said Olivia Watkins, special adviser to the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries. Watkins declined to speculate on how much damage the freshwater would cause, but members of the Louisiana oyster industry are bracing for paralyzing losses.

"I think we're going to lose 50 percent of what's there," said Mike Voisin, owner of Motivatit Seafoods in Houma and a Louisiana Oyster Task Force board member.

The prediction is especially grim in light of the severity of oyster mortality stemming from the oil spill. Louisiana oyster production was down more than 55 percent in 2010 compared with 2009, according to Wildlife & Fisheries, dropping Louisiana behind Washington state as the country's leading domestic oyster producer. The level of damage Voisin and others fear would put local oyster production at 25 percent of what it was just over a year ago. "And that," according to Voisin, "would hold true for a couple of years."

That's the Sunseris' greatest concern.

"I'm 53 years old. I've already worked 32 years. I was hoping my son would be here," Al Sunseri said, referring to his 25-year-old son Blake, whose September departure from the company he blames on the oil spill.

"That's another reason I'm angry. My son has been in the hospital a couple of times because of complications with this whole thing, depression and all. He was being groomed to take over this thing like my grandfather did for my daddy and my daddy did for us," he said. "I don't think that's going to happen now."

Sunseri was sitting up on the couch. Glassy-eyed, he pointed toward an empty chair.

"That's Blake's desk," he said. "He would be the first one here in the morning after I got here. We'd do things together. I was teaching him all of the stuff he needed to do. Now I don't see him. I call him every day just to see what he's doing. Sometimes he doesn't answer."

•••••••

Brett Anderson can be reached at banderson@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3353. Read more dining features at nola.com/dining or nola.com/dining-guide. Follow him at twitter.com/BrettAndersonTP.

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Living near the floodwaters in New Orleans

Mississippi River just a fact of life for batture dwellers in New Orleans area

Published: Wednesday, May 11, 2011, 9:30 PM

 By John Pope, The Times-Picayune 

Life along the Mississippi River batture: Call it resignation. Call it fatalism. Call it acceptance.

Even though the river may reach its highest level in nearly 75 years, forcing the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard to talk of contingency plans to keep New Orleans from drowning, people like Marcy Schramm and Scott Campbell, who live on the "wet" side of the massive levee just west of the Orleans-Jefferson line, are vigilant but not hysterical.

"Everyone who lives on the batture knows we live on the river and in the river, so this is what we signed up for," said Schramm, executive director of the French Quarter Festival.

"We're concerned, like everyone else that's either outside or inside the levee system," said Campbell, Pelican Publishing Co.'s Mid-South sales manager. "We're watching it closely, but we're not panicking."

The couple are taking precautions, as are agencies such as the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad and the Audubon Nature Institute, which operates Audubon Zoo. The Audubon Institute owns a wide swath of green space beyond the levee, and the Aquarium of the Americas, on the river near Canal Street.

If calamity strikes, "we have an ongoing emergency response program at all our localities," Audubon spokeswoman Sarah Burnette said.

"The way it looks now, we're going to be OK once they open up Morganza," she said, referring to the spillway upriver from Baton Rouge that appears likely to be opened.

View full size

On the batture, Schramm and Campbell have parked their pickup truck as close to the levee as they can get without violating the ban on parking there, and they're moving some household items into a storage container to keep them from getting drenched.

The couple bought their house, part of a small strip of homes on the river side of the levee, in 2003. They moved in last year after some work that included raising the building five feet higher than Jefferson Parish recommended.

"Those camps have been up there for about 100 years," Schramm said. "It's a hardy bunch of people and property up there."

Hardy or not, the batture residents are getting ready. One man, who declined to be identified, was helping his neighbor haul debris from under his house that, with a strong wave, could undermine the piers. When the river is at normal levels, a fence running behind the homes protects them from logs and other floating debris that could damage pilings, but the top of the fence is barely visible above the rising water.

As the two men worked, a goat roamed in a fenced enclosure.

"Are we worried? No," the man said. "Everybody out here can handle it. Everybody's prepared."

The Public Belt, which operates 25 miles of track that snakes along the river and through the Port of New Orleans, is poised to move all cars, locomotives and other equipment inside existing floodwalls "at a moment's notice," General Manager John Morrow said.

Sewerage & Water Board officials have asked the Coast Guard to make sure ships and barges steer clear of water-intake pumps in the river near the Jefferson Parish line now that rising water has submerged barriers designed to keep traffic away, spokesman Robert Jackson said.

The same goes for sewer-outflow infrastructure near the St. Bernard Parish line, he said.

The steamboat Natchez continues to ply the river, and passengers keep boarding, said Adrienne Thomas, a spokeswoman for the New Orleans Steamboat Co.

In addition to watching for floating debris, the principal adjustment that the Natchez crew has had to make as the river rises is to change the pitch of the gangway so people can continue to board on the middle level, she said.

Because the Natchez isn't a speedboat, it hasn't stirred up wakes that could weaken levees or pilings, Thomas said.

That's a major concern of batture dwellers, Schramm said.

"They're like intolerant drivers that push wakes into houses," she said. "But last night when I got home from work, a big ship came by. I went out to the deck, and I didn't see any waves."

Moreover, Schramm said, the house didn't shudder.

"It's a great place to live," Campbell said. "We love it. It's unique. Even with the high water, we wouldn't change it."

Said Macon Fry, another batture resident: "People who live there are used to water. Nobody moves up there unless they understand the way the river works. Just like you don't move to the desert unless you expect it to be dry.

"No worries. It is what it is."

••••••••

Staff writer Michelle Krupa contributed to this article. John Pope can be reached at jpope@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3317.

Mississippi River flooding update with reporter Mark SchleifsteinTimes-Picayune environment reporter Mark Schleifstein explains the 'worst case scenario' map that the Army Corps of Engineers has issued showing what will happen if the Morganza floodway is not opened

© 2011 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.