CHARLESTON, Mo. — Maj. Gen. Michael J. Walsh of the Army Corps of Engineers is likely to make a lot of people angry over the next few days.
But which group of people is not so clear. It will depend on whether he decides to flood farmland in Missouri in order to save a town in Illinois from the ravages of the rising Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
If the general gives the word, his team will blow up a two-mile stretch of levee, sending torrents of water across more than 200 square miles of Missouri farmland to take pressure off the levees that protect Cairo, Ill., to the north.
Missouri officials sued this week to block the corps from moving forward with the plan to swamp the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway. Cairo has about 3,000 people; the 130,000 acres of farmland is home to about 200 residents in 90 homes. On Friday morning, Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr. of Federal District Court in St. Louis ruled that the corps could go forward, if necessary.
General Walsh said he had sympathy for the farmers. “Many of the people who have lived in the floodway, I’ve known them for two or three years,” he said. “I know what this is going to do, if we open the floodway.”
But, he added, “when it comes down to a discussion of livelihood versus lives, the decision is a little easier to make.”
Col. Vernie Reichling, the corps commander of the Memphis District and General Walsh’s eyes and ears for the northern portion of the Mississippi River and Tributaries project, said, “We’re listening to the river.”
“It’s now an art — based on science, but it’s an art,” Colonel Reichling said.
As the river rises to historic levels, General Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the corps, is consulting with dozens of engineers, meteorologists and other experts on a decision that is complicated by the way the river is riding perilously close to the informal trigger point of 61 feet.
“If it was 68, that would be an easy decision,” he said. “If it was 58, I wouldn’t have to make the decision.”
If the river recedes rapidly, no action will be necessary. But if it stays near current levels, the risk to Cairo and other communities will remain high, and a decision not to act could leave residents of the economically depressed, largely African-American town feeling that they have been left to the vicissitudes of nature.
Cairo’s defenses can hold up against the pressure for only so long, Colonel Reichling said on a drive through the town to inspect the flood defenses.
“These are temporary restraining structures,” he said. “They’re not meant to permanently contain water.”
On Friday, the river stood at 59 feet, but it is expected to rise to a record 60.5 feet, still below the 61-foot mark, but some of the colonel’s experts are saying it may stay at that level for six or seven days. That creates problems of its own, further weakening the earthen levees and saturating the soil beneath.
“This has been the most amount of pressure that these systems have ever been under,” Colonel Reichling said. “We’re seeing a lot of seepage behind the berms.”
If General Walsh does order the levee breached, two barges loaded with 265 tons of explosives will make a 30-mile journey upriver from their current mooring in Hickman, Ky.
They will arrive at the Birds Point levee, where the explosives will be loaded into three sets of pipe spanning 11,000 feet buried in the soil. After laying a detonating cord, the corps team will prime them with C-4 explosives before installing the blasting cap and pushing the button — electronically, and from a safe distance. The operation will take 24 hours to complete.
The floodway is, in effect, a gigantic relief valve. The gap created by the controlled explosion on the west bank of the Mississippi would send water rushing at more than four million gallons per second into a basin bordered several miles to the west by a setback levee and encompassing some 200 square miles of farmland. The water would re-enter the Mississippi at the southern end of the basin by way of two openings that the corps will also blast. Using the floodway should reduce the height of the river above it by several feet.
General Walsh said this was not the most agonizing situation he had been in in his career in the corps. As the commander for the corps’ Gulf Region Division in Baghdad, he recalled, he managed construction of buildings in the villages where “we were always taking incoming fire” and a children’s hospital in Basra when “thugs and criminals were in control of the city.”
“We lost a number of folks while we were building that facility,” he said. Often, engineering decisions implicitly involve life-or-death decisions, based on safety tolerances and risk factors. “Almost every decision has that kind of connotation to it,” General Walsh said, but the Mississippi choice “is certainly a little bit more immediate.”
Russ Davis, chief of the Operations Division, said of the floodway: “Soldiers train to go to war, but hope they never have to. No one wants to do this.”
If General Walsh does order breaching of the levee, the result is likely to seem undramatic to those raised on action movies, said Paul N. Worsey, the director of explosives engineering education at the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla.
? “It’s not like a nuclear weapon going off,” Mr. Worsey said. “It’s going to look like a big a big burp, then there’s going to be a big lake. It may end up, when it goes, being a very big anticlimax — apart from all of the water rushing in.”
Even if the General Walsh does not act at Birds Point, the crisis will not be over: the massive bulge of water will move inexorably downstream, threatening points south.
“We won’t be out of the woods,” Colonel Reichling said. “That water is going to move down to Louisiana, and we’re going to have to fight it again.”
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