Workers stand atop the Morganza Spillway in Morganza, La., Thursday, May 12, 2011, as water seeps through, bottom, during an aerial tour of areas that may be affected by flooding if the spillway is opened. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)(Credit: AP)
Army engineers prepared Saturday to slowly open the gates of an emergency spillway along the rising Mississippi River, diverting floodwaters from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, yet inundating homes and farms in parts of Louisiana’s populated Cajun country.
About 25,000 people and 11,000 structures could be in harm’s way when the Morganza spillway is unlocked for the first time in 38 years. Sheriffs and National Guardsmen were warning people in a door-to-door sweep through the area, and shelters were ready to accept up to 4,800 evacuees, Gov. Bobby Jindal said.
Some people living in the threatened stretch of countryside — an area known for small farms, fish camps and a drawling French dialect — have already started fleeing for higher ground.
“Now’s the time to evacuate,” Jindal said. “Now’s the time for our people to execute their plans. That water’s coming.”
Opening the spillway will release a torrent that could submerge about 3,000 square miles under as much as 25 feet of water in some areas but take the pressure off the downstream levees protecting New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the numerous oil refineries and chemical plants along the lower reaches of the Mississippi.
“Protecting lives is the No. 1 priority,” Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh said at a news conference aboard a vessel on the river at Vicksburg. A few hours later, the corps made the decision to open the key spillway and inundate thousands of homes and farms in Louisiana’s Cajun country to avert a potentially bigger disaster in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
Engineers feared that weeks of pressure on the levees could cause them to fail, swamping New Orleans under as much as 20 feet of water in a disaster that would have been much worse than Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Instead, the water will flow 20 miles south into the Atchafalaya Basin. From there it will roll on to Morgan City, an oil-and-seafood hub and a community of 12,000, and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico, flooding swamps and croplands.
A sliver of land north of Morgan City, about 70 miles long and 20 miles wide, was expected to be inundated with 10- to 20-feet of water, according to Army Corps of Engineers estimates. It will take hours and days for the water to run south, and wasn’t expected to reach Morgan City until around Tuesday. Still, the city has already taken steps to shore up its levee.
The corps employed a similar cities-first strategy earlier this month when it blew up a levee in Missouri — inundating an estimated 200 square miles of farmland and damaging or destroying about 100 homes — to take the pressure off the levees protecting the town of Cairo, Ill., population 2,800.
The disaster was averted in Cairo, a bottleneck where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers meet.
This intentional flood is more controlled, however, and residents are warned by the corps each year in written letters, reminding them of the possibility of opening the spillway, which is 4,000 feet long and has 125 gate bays.
The spillway, built in 1954, is part of a flood plan largely put into motion in the 1930s in the aftermath of the devastating 1927 flood that killed hundreds.
It is set to be opened when a flow rate of 1.5 million cubic feet per second is reached and projected to rise. Just north of the spillway at Red River Landing, the river had reached that flow rate, according to the National Weather Service.
To put things in perspective, corps engineer Jerry Smith crunched some numbers and found that the amount of water flowing past Vicksburg, Miss., would fill the Superdome, where the NFL’s New Orleans Saints play, in 50 seconds.
This is the second spillway to be opened in Louisiana. About a week ago, the corps used cranes to remove some of the Bonnet Carre’s wooden barriers, sending water into the massive Lake Ponchatrian and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
That spillway, which the corps built about 30 miles upriver from New Orleans in response to the flood of 1927, was last opened in 2008. May 9 marked the 10th time it has been opened since the structure was completed in 1931. The spillways could be opened for weeks, or perhaps less, if the river flow starts to subside.
In Vicksburg, Miss., Warren County Sheriff Martin Pace said at least five neighborhoods have taken on water.
“We’re patrolling subdivisions by boat,” Pace said Friday.
Deputies are also living at Eagle Lake, a community north of Vicksburg that was evacuated and is now isolated. And U.S. Highway 61, a major north-south route has been cut off by water, affecting thousands of people, Pace said.
Meanwhile, farmers along the lower Mississippi had been expecting a big year with crop prices skyrocketing, but now many are facing ruin, with floodwaters swallowing up corn, cotton, rice and soybean fields.
In far northeastern Louisiana, where Tap Parker and about 50 other farmers filled and stacked massive sandbags along an old levee to no avail. The Mississippi flowed over the top and nearly 19 square miles of soybeans and corn, known in the industry as “green gold,” was lost.
“This was supposed to be our good year. We had a chance to really catch up. Now we’re scrambling to break even,” said Parker, who has been farming since 1985.
Cotton prices are up 86 percent from a year ago, and corn — which is feed for livestock, a major ingredient in cereals and soft drinks, and the raw material used to produce ethanol — is up 80 percent. Soybeans have risen 39 percent. The increase is attributed, in part, to worldwide demand, crop-damaging weather elsewhere and rising production of ethanol.
While the Mississippi River flooding has not had any immediate impact on prices in the supermarket, the long-term effects are still unknown. A full damage assessment can’t be made until the water has receded in many places.
Some of the estimates have been dire, though.
More than 1,500 square miles of farmland in Arkansas, which produces about half of the nation’s rice, have been swamped over the past few weeks. In Missouri, where a levee was intentionally blown open to ease the flood threat in the town of Cairo, Ill., more than 200 square miles of croplands were submerged, damage that will probably exceed $100 million. More than 2,100 square miles could flood in Mississippi.
When the water level goes down — and that could take many weeks in some places — farmers can expect to find the soil washed away or their fields covered with sand. Some will probably replant on the soggy soil, but they will be behind their normal growing schedule, which could hurt yields.
Many farmers have crop insurance, but it won’t be enough to cover their losses. And it won’t even come close to what they could have expected with a bumper crop.
“I might get enough money from insurance to take us to a movie, but it better be dollar night,” said Karsten Simrall, who lives in Redwood, Miss.
Simrall’s family has farmed the low-lying fields in Redwood for five generations and has been fighting floods for years, but it’s never been this bad. And the river is not expected to crest here until around Tuesday.
“How the hell do you recoup all these losses?” he said. “You just wait. It’s in God’s hands.”
The river’s rise may also force the closing of the river to shipping, from Baton Rouge to the mouth of the Mississippi, as early as next week. That would cause grain barges from the heartland to stack up along with other commodities.
If the portion is closed, the U.S. economy could lose hundreds of millions of dollars a day. In 2008, a 100-mile stretch of the river was closed for six days after a tugboat collided with a tanker, spilling about 500,000 gallons of fuel. The Port of New Orleans estimated the shutdown cost the economy up to $275 million a day.
This weekend, Nicolas Cage was arrested for domestic abuse charges in New Orleans after a drunken fight with his wife. New York magazine couldn’t help making the comparison to Charlie Sheen, perhaps as an apology for being late to the “female battery” outrage train after all major media outlets glossed over that particular section of Sheen’s history.
The only problem? Nic Cage was not involved in a “domestic assault.” He and his wife were drunkenly arguing about which house they lived in (LOL), he “grabbed her arm,” the cops came, and Nic screamed “Arrest me!” until they finally did. His wife is not pressing charges. Dog the Bounty Hunter bailed him out of jail.
But more worrisome than this pseudo-slander against Cage is the claim from within our own ranks that Nicolas Cage has somehow become as fake and overblown in his real life as he reliably is in his films. From Mary Elizabeth Williams’ article, “Nicolas Cage: Even his arrest is a bore“:
For years now, Cage has been parlaying his loose cannon charisma and credibility as an acclaimed actor into an increasingly dreadful body of work. His fans — and they are still many — argue that there is a method to Cage’s cinematic histrionics, that those who criticize his unorthodox performances miss the bravery of them. But I think Cage is, at this point, the Stella Artois of acting: the thing so terrible and tasteless, people assume it has to be great … He’s now become as obviously false as the CGI that so often threatens to upstage him, a middle-aged man doing a parody of his younger, over-the-top self, like an inside-out version of his Charlie Bodell in “Peggy Sue Got Married.”
I would be one of those people that argue that Cage has a subversive method to his madness. In films where he is forced into a cookie-cutter role — be it action hero (“Gone in 60 Seconds,” “Ghost Rider,” “Con Air”), love interest (“Trapped in Paradise,” “The Family Man”) or detective/journalist/guy figuring stuff out (“Knowing,” “Wicker Man,” “Bangkok Dangerous,” “National Treasure”) — he hams it up to the point of self-parody.
And even then, he’s never phoning it in. If you’ve ever seen the “Wicker Man” mashup, or the one for “Vampire’s Kiss,” it’s impossible to claim that Cage is somehow boring to watch, even in terrible films.
But Cage can play it equally subtle, something people missed when they prematurely judged Werner Herzog’s ” The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans,” assuming Cage would spend the entire film frothing at the mouth. With the exception of an early scene involving a loaded gun as a sex toy, Cage keeps its relatively restrained throughout: letting viewers hold their breath for his inevitable freak-out, which comes in the film’s last 15 minutes.
As for his personal life, I admit that an egomaniac blowing through his money and getting in trouble for drunken brawls is yawn-worthy. But Nicolas Cage manages to do his celebrity insanity with a panache that puts Sheen and his ilk to shame. When a Nevada bank said Cage owed them $2.5 million, what did he do? He went to Vienna and held a press conference calling for the end of international crime.
What? Yes. Amazing. That is winning, my friends.
And even after the news of his bankruptcy was made public and he was forced to put his German castle on the market, Cage had a mausoleum constructed for himself in New Orleans, where he also owns several haunted houses. The mausoleum, by the way, is shaped like the Louvre.
The examples are endless: naming his son after the role Hollywood would never give him (Kal-El or the birth name of “Superman“); the after-hour street brawls in Romania (screaming “Respect me!”); the mere existence of his other son Weston, who has this amazing “Marilyn Manson-meets-WWF wrestler” thing going on. (And his own clothing line!)
Call Nicolas Cage what you want: a hack, a megalomaniac, a legitimately crazy person who believes in ghosts and can’t remember what haunted house he lives in. But boring? Never. Only Nic Cage could have taken that role from “The Rock” opposite Sean Connery and turned what was essentially the role of the straight man (He’s a scientist! He doesn’t know about guns!) into a work of art. His real life is no less weird or entertaining, making him the furthest thing from a “false” celebrity you can get. (Except for his hairpieces, since Nic’s real follicles haven’t been seen since “Leaving Las Vegas.”)
And boring? You’d have to bury him in his pyramid tomb first.
Some call it Carnival. Others, Fat Tuesay. Most Americans, however, know today’s celebration by its French name: Mardi Gras. The annual New Orleans bacchanal will reach its ostentatious climax in the French Quarter this evening. But Mardi Gras isn’t just a Louisiana affair. People in cities all over the world are celebrating the occasion, from Rio de Janeiro and Sydney to Venice and Cologne. We’ve collected some of the best images from this international event.
I called from New Orleans to speak with my sister in Pennsylvania, to check on my mother’s condition. It was Thanksgiving week and we were all headed home; our mother had been hospitalized again.
“Dad says to ask the voodoo priestess what she can do,” my sister said, speaking as if all the words were foreign to her.
I felt it in my gut: Mom’s life was coming to an end. My father wasn’t a religious man. If he’d ask me to speak to a minister or priest, it would have been just as heartbreaking.
Although we often accepted UPS packages for each other, I had never consulted my neighbor the priestess before, aside from the standard chicken foot above my door for luck. I didn’t know where to begin. “I’m looking for something for my mother,” I said, as if picking out something for her to wear. And then I had to tell her the details of my mother’s terminal illness. I wasn’t used to saying it out loud. My family spoke mostly in euphemisms about things like this; 9/11 was “the incident,” Katrina was “the storm,” and my mother’s aplastic anemia was “her condition.” The priestess suggested healing salts, or a special candle, but my mother’s compromised immune system made those options forbidden.
“We could do a gris-gris bag,” she suggested. “You’ll have to bring nail and hair clippings.”
“How do they work?” I asked. I knew it was a kind of talisman, but it was surprisingly expensive, considering my mother would be providing the main ingredients. The priestess explained that the bag would contain crystals and special roots and my mother’s hair and nails. My mother would be able to squeeze it and meditate, but it would have only the power my mother chose to give it.
That’s what I had been afraid of. For months my mother had seen specialists. She had to wear a mask in public in order to avoid common germs — so she had stopped going out. My father drove her hundreds of miles for transfusions. At one point there was the possibility of a marrow transplant, but they worried her body was too weak to survive. She had stopped believing in things quite a while ago.
The day before Thanksgiving, in the tiny hospital where, more than 40 years earlier, she had given birth to me, I told my mother about the gris-gris bag.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. She could still scold me.
“I only went because Dad asked me.”
The next day, after a store-bought turkey in the kitchen in which she once resided, we returned. Mom asked how the meal was; it seemed the hospital food might have been better than what we had fed ourselves. Then she handed me a square of folded tissue paper, held together with a paper clip and a scrap of paper on which she had written “for Ken.” Inside were finger nail and hair clippings.
“I asked the nurse to help me,” she said. Did she hope that this might somehow help her, or was it because it was something my father had asked us both to do? I suspected the latter.
I returned to New Orleans, and for weeks drove with the clippings tucked safely into one of the dashboard storage cubbies of my car. Finally, I delivered them to the priestess and went about my daily life, in spite of daily reports of my mother’s lack of progress. I canceled a Christmas trip because I was too ill to be in the same room with her. We all planned to be home for Easter, but by March she was in the hospital again. My sister called and I knew from her voice that it wasn’t good. Mom had met with the doctors and decided to forgo any additional treatments. They expected her to go quickly.
It was several days before I could find a flight, taking three small planes. I tucked the gris-gris bag into my carry-on, although I felt my mother’s decision made the bag’s power moot. I didn’t know if I would even mention it was there.
Mom was in and out of consciousness, sometimes sitting upright with a beautiful, lucid smile, while at other times she was confused and hallucinating. I spent the night in the chair next to her, or resting my head at her side, as if I really was her newborn child again. It was hard to know what to say, or what she would understand.
“Remember my dog Brando?” I asked. She said yes. “He says hello,” I said. She smiled. Was she thinking that he actually was now talking, or perhaps wondering why I was claiming that he did? “Remember the gris-gris bag I was going to make?” She nodded, and I held it out in front of her. She was too weak to hold even something that small on her own. She smiled again and stared at the spot it occupied in space, like a child just beginning to wonder at the world. Everyone was surprised by how pretty it was, with a single crystal dangling like an earring from the tie that kept it closed. I told my dad to make sure it went with her when she was cremated.
In the hospice, over the next several nights, I slept in a room down the hall. I canceled my return flight, and somehow my mother continued to hold on. One afternoon she sat up and cried, “I don’t understand why I’m still here!” and pulled the bed sheet over her head. We took turns soaking a sponge in Coke and lowering it to her mouth to suck on. It was the only food she wanted. At her request, I asked for more morphine, and the nurse said, “Is it for pain or is it to speed things along?”
“She’s in pain,” I said, understanding the code.
After five days, we decided that she might not go unless her children left first. When I said goodbye, she rose out of bed to hug me, and we both knew we would never see each other again.
“Are you driving?” she asked. She was worried that I might not get home safely.
“No,” I told her. “I flew.”
But she continued to cling to life. Was it Easter? The doctors asked if there was something she might be waiting for. Then it struck me — my parents’ 49th anniversary would arrive at the end of the week. When my father called that Thursday, just a few hours short of their anniversary, to tell me that she was gone, I was too stunned to speak. Her death, so long in coming, now seemed completely unexpected. My father continued speaking to me on the phone, but no words were coming on my end. Finally he said, “I’m going to go now. OK?”
364 days later, my father joined my mother.
We had never spoken about the gris-gris bag again. I hope it did go with her, purified by fire, rather than tossed aside by a nurse cleaning her room. But sometimes I wish I still had her gris-gris bag to hold onto.
Ken Foster is the author of a memoir, “The Dogs Who Found Me,” a collection of stories, “The Kind I’m Likely to Get,” and essays, “Dogs I Have Met.”
Ken Foster is the author of a collection of short stories, "The Kind I'm
Likely to Get," and the editor of two anthologies, "The KGB Bar Reader" and "Dog Culture: Writers on the Character of Canines."
More Ken Foster.
Officers shot an unarmed man in the back and then burned his body in a car and doctored a report to conceal their crimes in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a federal prosecutor said Monday at a trial that will test the government’s push to clean up the troubled New Orleans police department.
While prosecutors insisted Katrina offers no excuses, attorneys for the five current or former officers charged in Henry Glover’s death have urged jurors to consider the 2005 storm when judging their actions.
The jury of five men and seven women is expected to begin deliberating Tuesday after hearing 12 days of testimony and up to eight hours of closing arguments Monday.
Police officers and civilians alike had to take desperate measures to survive after Katrina, but the storm can’t excuse a murder, the barbaric act of burning a corpse or police covering up for other officers, Justice Department prosecutor Jared Fishman said.
“Hurricane Katrina did not mean that it was open season to shoot looters,” Fishman said. “Hurricane Katrina didn’t turn petty theft into a capital offense.”
Glover was apparently driving a stolen truck and retreiving looted suitcases from outside a strip mall when a former officer, David Warren, shot him once from a second-floor balcony on Sept. 2, 2005.
“Henry Glover only wanted to leave New Orleans,” Fishman said. “Henry Glover never got that chance.”
Rick Simmons, one of Warren’s attorneys, said his client feared for his life and had a split second to react when he shot at the 31-year-old.
“It’s just a tragedy, but it’s not my client’s fault,” Simmons said.
Simmons said post-storm conditions must be factored into deciding whether his client acted reasonably under the circumstances. He also urged jurors to remember two words when they judge the defendants: “They stayed,” he said, alluding to the fact that many other officers abandoned their posts after the storm.
Lt. Dwayne Scheuermann and Officer Gregory McRae are charged with burning Glover’s body and beating men who had driven the dying man to a makeshift police compound in search of help. Lt. Travis McCabe and former Lt. Robert Italiano are charged with writing and submitting a bogus report to make the shooting appear justified. Their attorneys were scheduled to deliver closing arguments after a lunch break.
A total of 20 current or former New Orleans police officers have been charged this year in a series of Justice Department civil rights investigations, including a deadly police shooting on a bridge that killed two residents and wounded four others less than a week after Katrina’s Aug. 29, 2005, landfall. The probe of Glover’s death was the first of those cases to be tried.
Besides its criminal investigations of alleged police misconduct, the Justice Department also is conducting a thorough review of the department’s polices and procedures at the invitation of Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
All of the officers charged in the Glover case testified during the trial. McRae admitted he burned Glover’s body by tossing a flare into the Chevrolet Malibu owned by one of the men who drove Glover to the police compound. Scheuerman said they merely were instructed to move the car away from the compound and claimed he didn’t know McRae planned to burn it.
McCabe and Italiano denied they participated in a cover-up or lied to the FBI about what they knew about Glover’s death.
One of the counts against Warren in an 11-count indictment says Glover’s shooting death involved circumstances constituting murder, but U.S. District Judge Lance Africk said Monday he will tell jurors they can also consider the less serious charge of manslaughter.
One of Warren’s attorneys, Julian Murray, urged the jury not to compromise, saying his client’s life is ruined with any sort of conviction.
“They didn’t prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “They didn’t even come close to it.”
President Barack Obama is aiming to underscore his commitment to a region weary of calamity as he travels to New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Obama ends his Martha’s Vineyard vacation Sunday and heads to the Gulf, five years to the day from when Katrina roared ashore in Louisiana. Eighty percent of New Orleans was flooded when the storm tore through protective levees.
More than 1,800 people along the Gulf coast died in the storm, mostly in Louisiana.
After years where halting progress mixed often with setbacks and despair, the city was getting back on its feet when the BP oil spill dealt another blow. The exploded well spewed more than 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf before it was capped in mid-July.
Obama is to speak Sunday afternoon at Xavier University, a historically black, Catholic university that was badly flooded by the storm. The White House says he will discuss what’s been done and remains to be done in rebuilding from Katrina, and also talk about an oil spill cleanup that’s been complicated by conflicting assessments of how much oil remains and its long-term effects.
For Obama, one challenge is to reassure residents who remain skeptical of government promises after witnessing former President George W. Bush’s response to Katrina, which was criticized as out-of-touch and hamhanded. Although criticism of Obama’s response to the Gulf oil spill rarely reached the level of anger directed at Bush, some still saw it as lacking in speed and coordination. Obama has work to do to change that perception.
Moreover, Obama arrives as many residents of the Louisiana coast chafe under the moratorium on deepwater oil drilling he ordered in the wake of the spill, which is costing New Orleans’ oil-industry-dependant economy. And many residents would like to see a greater federal commitment to restoring the coast’s rapidly eroding wetlands which provide the first line of defense again hurricanes.
The one-day visit to New Orleans is the start of a grueling period for Obama, who must set a fall agenda amid punishing economic news. Crucial midterm elections loom in November.
Tuesday marks the formal end to combat missions in Iraq, and Obama is to address troops in Ft. Bliss, Texas, and deliver an Oval Office speech. The next day he plunges into Middle East diplomacy, hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for individual talks and a joint dinner ahead of direct negotiations Thursday between the leaders.
And once Congress returns after Labor Day, more battles await as Obama tries to push his legislative agenda.
Workers stand atop the Morganza Spillway in Morganza, La., Thursday, May 12, 2011, as water seeps through, bottom, during an aerial tour of areas that may be affected by flooding if the spillway is opened. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)(Credit: AP) 
How could this face lie to you? 
