Where Water Is an Old Friend, Until It Turns Into a Nemesis

The Army Corps of Engineers opened a portion of the Morganza Spillway on Saturday afternoon to relieve pressure on the levees from a bulging Mississippi River, and millions of cubic feet of water began rushing into the Atchafalaya Basin.

The corps expects to open more of the spillway in the coming days, allowing the water to rise steadily throughout the basin. In a day, maybe two, it will start to engulf this little river community in Cajun country.

Russell Melancon, 55, grew up pulling catfish, bass and crawfish from the Atchafalaya River and the swamp that surrounds it. He married here and is raising a son here.

And now, the place he loves is likely to drown. It could take a month or more for the water to seep back into the swamp behind the house he built with cypress boards and sweat.

Copperhead snakes might slither into the rafters. Alligators will take up residence on sheds. Gardens fat with tomatoes will be gone, and mosquitoes will swarm in such thick clouds that even he, a Cajun with skin as thick as one of those alligators, might not be able to stand it. So why live in a swamp that everyone knew was likely to flood one day?

As Mr. Melancon crated the belongings of three generations of family on Friday and got ready to pack his relatives into campers and cars, the answer was plain as the sticky Louisiana day.

“It’s where we was raised. Where my daddy was raised. Where we make our living,” he said. “Why you are here is something you never even think about. You are this place.”

In what is surely the nation’s slowest-moving natural disaster, the flooded Mississippi has been working its way south through cities and farmland, leaving people homeless and crops in ruins as it hits record levels.

It will end here in southern Louisiana, where the corps decided on Friday to open part of the levee system that holds back the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers. It was the only way, the engineers said, to take the pressure off the levees that protect New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

The move will divert that water into what is essentially the big bathtub that is the Atchafalaya Basin, a stretch of water and land 20 miles wide and 150 miles long and like nowhere else in the United States.

“You can’t have the Cajun culture without the basin,” said Oliver A. Houck, a professor at Tulane Law School who fought to preserve the basin when he was general counsel and vice president of the National Wildlife Federation.

To the north, the water is mostly saturating farmland, leaving it possibly richer in nutrients. But here in the southern half of the basin, home to descendants of the Acadians who settled in the 1700s and where countless Louisiana residents have passed their childhoods fishing and playing among its bayous and backwater lakes, several thousand people could lose everything.

“My husband still doesn’t believe it, but it’s really coming now,” said Deborah LeBlanc, 56, who lives next door to Mr. Melancon, her brother-in-law.

With the rest of the extended family, Ms. LeBlanc spent the weekend finishing up the details of moving their intertwined lives.

The outdoor dogs and Barbecue, the miniature horse, were sent to live with friends whose land is protected by the levee. The shed where Ms. LeBlanc’s father spends his days making catfish nets was dismantled. She even made her son take out her new air-conditioner.

“I asked God today if I’m coming back, and he said yes, so I guess I’ll believe that,” she said. “I can’t see living anywhere else.”

Unlike the Mississippi, which has been walled and manipulated by manufacturing and transportation and other byproducts of urban growth, the Atchafalaya has been allowed to run wild, lacing through the longest stretch of river swamp in the country.

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting from Morganza, La.

Record Water for a Mississippi River City

He was staring at a calm puddle of water in which his house sat. A man standing beside Mr. Buck’s mailbox was casting a fishing line into a neighbor’s yard.

“It never came this far,” said Mr. Buck, a 21-year-old college student. “The farthest it ever came was the backyard of that house back there.”

The city of Vicksburg sits safely on lofty bluffs, except where it does not. The Kings neighborhood, where Mr. Buck lives in the north part of town, is one of the places where it does not.

Sunday in Kings was, for the most part, as it is in any other neighborhood, full of lawnmowers, barbecues and men standing around talking about nothing in particular. The difference was the muddy lake that was slowly consuming the neighborhood from the back.

Variances in elevation that would have gone unnoticed a few weeks ago now separate those who are nervous but dry from those whose houses are submerged nearly to the eaves. The water was not rising, residents said, so much as it was spreading, quietly. And the river that had pushed the water here was churning ferociously.

Around 10 a.m. on Sunday, according to officials from the Army Corps of Engineers, the river broke the record elevation set here during the flood of 1927, rising to 56.3 feet, 13 feet above flood stage and 1.2 feet below the predicted crest on Thursday. It was flowing by at a rate of nearly 17 million gallons a second, which is the highest rate it is likely to reach in its entire race down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Those numbers may be nerve-racking for those along its banks, but the weekend also brought some relatively good news: the failure of a predicted rain storm to appear has resulted in a lower estimated crest downriver at Natchez.

Furthermore, the Yazoo River, engorged with Mississippi backwater, had been projected to overtop its levees at some point this weekend, flooding 285,000 acres of delta farmland and threatening some anxious country towns. But the overtopping, designed into the system as a sort of relief valve, has not happened yet.

If the Mississippi comes in a few inches lower than predicted as it passes Vicksburg, the overtopping may not happen at all.

“It’s going to be really close,” said Robert Simrall, the chief of water control for the Vicksburg district of the corps.

These yardsticks are more or less irrelevant for the residents of Kings. While the river has been indifferent to income, folding over multimillion-dollar homes and valuable farmland in the delta along with single-wide trailers in Kings, the consequences for rich and poor vary considerably.

“Out of the whole community, I would say it’s probably three families with flood insurance,” Mr. Buck said.

The worries here are as much about the water as what it will bring in the weeks it sits here. Snakes, of course. Just about everyone in the neighborhood knows someone who has recently seen an alligator, or killed one, or lost a dog to one. More acute is the worry about who might come to their homes if they have to evacuate, and what those people might do or take.

The traffic was slow along Washington Street here, as gawkers pulled off on the increasingly narrow shoulder, emerging in Sunday clothes to take pictures of an old brick church that itself was undergoing something of a full-immersion baptism.

“This is ridiculous,” said Tawanna Bush, a 36-year-old waitress at a Cracker Barrel restaurant, looking at the top third of her uncle’s house. “Is it a sign?”

“Yeah, it’s a sign,” said Jackson Floyd, 49, offering the practical fatalism of those who have known hard luck. “It’s a sign that it’s time to move and get another house.”

Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting.

Gas drilling 'contaminates water'

 9 May 2011 Last updated at 21:21 GMT By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News Rising prices has led to a sharp increase in shale gas extraction schemes

Shale gas drilling operations increase the risk of nearby drinking water becoming contaminated with methane, a study has suggested.

Researchers found, on average, methane concentrations 17 times above normal in samples taken near drilling sites.

Growing demand for energy has led to a sharp increase in shale gas extraction around the globe, prompting concerns about the impact of the technology.

The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We found surprising levels of methane in home-owners' wells that were close to natural gas wells, " co-author Rob Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Change at Duke University, North Carolina, explained.

"We found that within a kilometre of an active gas well, you were much more likely to have high methane concentrations," he told BBC News.

The team from Duke University collected samples from 68 private water wells in the north-eastern states of Pennsylvania and New York.

Fire water

"We found some extremely high concentrations of methane: 64 milligrams of methane per litre of drinking water, compared with a normal level of one milligram or lower," Professor Jackson observed.

Professor Jackson said he had witnessed contaminated water being set alight

"That sort of concentration is up at a level where people worry about an explosion hazard."

Videos are available on the web that appear to show people setting fire to water pouring out of a tap, and Professor Jackson said that he had witnessed such an spectacle himself.

He agreed that the main concern at present was not from drinking the water, but from the risk of an explosion.

However, he added that the team were calling for a medical review of chronic, low-level exposure to methane.

"I could not find any peer reviewed literature on the health effects of low level methane on people," He observed.

The BBC's Roger Harrabin shows how to get fuel from hard rock

Professor Jackson said that the simplest explanation of how the gas ended up in people's water supplies was down to "leaky gas well casings".

"If there are cracks or imperfections in the gas well, especially in the vertical section nearer the surface, then methane and possibly fracking fluid/waters," he said.

"That is the simplest and most likely explanation.

"There are other possibilities; some people have proposed that methane can migrate to the surface through fissures that are opened in process of fracturing the rock. To me, that is less likely."

Professor Jackson was keen to point out that the study's drinking water samples revealed no evidence of contamination from fracking fluids, of which about five million gallons are used to unlock the gas in each well.

As well as the PNAS study, the team has also published a paper outlining a number of research recommendations, highlighting areas they feel needs to be done in order to gain a stronger scientific insight into the impact of the technique.

These include:

Initiate a medical review of the health effects of methaneConstruct a national database of methane and other chemical attributes in drinking waterEvaluate the mechanisms of methane contamination in drinking waterRefine estimates for greenhouse gas emissions of methane associated with shale gas extractionSystematically sample drinking water wells and deep formation watersStudy disposal of waste waters from hydraulic fracturing and shale gas extraction

In the UK, MPs are expected to publish a report shortly that considers the impact of shale gas extraction and what role it can play in terms of delivering future energy security.

The Energy and Climate Change Select Committee inquiry will also assess what are the risks and hazards associated with drilling for shale gas?

The combination of rising energy prices and concern about future energy supplies has seen the technology being embraced by nations around the globe.

"Ten years ago, people did not really know about this source of gas," said Professor Jackson.

"The boom in the United States started in the Barnett Shale (found in Texas, and considered to be the largest onshore gas reserve in the US) and it has only been in recent years that we have realised how much gas is out there and economically available.

"it is the combination of energy economics and the emergence of new drilling and fracturing technologies that have made it cheap enough to do."