Blow that sucker!

Malcolm Gay has an article in The New York Times about plans to open a levee in Missouri:

As a huge storm settled over southeastern Missouri, the Army Corps of Engineers began the task of filling an 11,000-foot system of buried pipes with an explosive material to blow a two-mile-long gap in the Birds Point levee. The breach would inundate about 130,000 acres of farmland, to relieve pressure on the overburdened system of levees to the north.
“We’ve been told to go, but we’ve got two more cells of lightning that need to move through here before we start to pump,” Jim Lloyd, the corps’ operations team leader, said as he walked through the wind and rain. “We’re going to work through the night to get this loaded.” Mr. Lloyd, who had just left a briefing, emphasized that although Major Genera; Michael J. Walsh, who commands the Mississippi Valley Division of the Corps, had ordered that the explosives be loaded, he had yet to give the final word to blast the levee. “He’ll still have to make the decision,” Mr. Lloyd said, adding that although the explosives were extremely stable and would not be primed, the lightning was “going to complicate our lives something fierce.”
Earlier in the day, Missouri officials made a last-ditch effort to spare the levee when the state’s attorney general turned to the United States Supreme Court, asking it to overturn a day-old order from the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit that had allowed the Corps to proceed with the operation. The state was later denied.
But, even as the legal fight played out, General Walsh was directing the two barges stationed at a nearby staging area to prepare to move into the final position from which crews could begin injecting the levees with 265 tons of explosives to blast the earthen structure.
“It will be a heaving of soil; the levee will be excavated very rapidly,” said Nick Boone, a mechanical engineer who leads the corps’ blasting team. “On this upper end, it’s going to look like a waterfall. It’s an instant removal, and that’s the whole point: instant relief of the entire system.”
Blowing the levee will serve as a fiery coda to an agonizing round of deliberations that has played out here over the past several days, as General Walsh has weighed the interests of about two hundred people living in the floodway against the safety of Cairo, Illinois, a struggling town of around three thousand people that lies on a winnowed slip of land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The move is expected to drop water levels upstream by roughly four feet.
General Walsh has toured the affected region over the past several days, meeting with residents and studying data provided by his team of experts. All the while, the surging rivers have continued to rise. “ ‘Project Flood’ is upon us,” he said in a statement. “It is testing the system like never before.”
The problem is essentially one of drainage. With both rivers running high, they have backed up above the confluence, raising water levels upstream and causing major underseepage in Cairo, weakening the town’s defenses and prompting city officials there to call for a mandatory evacuation. “It’s a no-brainer, the ground’s softening,” said Mayor Judson Childs of Cairo, who on Monday leaves office to be replaced by a new mayor. “This could change from minute to minute.”
Illinois state troopers went door to door rousting residents and patrolling the empty streets. A crew of inmates from the Tamms Correctional Center continued to fill sandbags at the north end of town, and emergency vehicles raced along Washington Avenue. Otherwise, the streets were largely empty as residents appeared to heed the evacuation order, fleeing town in a diminishing stream of cars.
Pulling his truck onto Washington Avenue, Harry Williams said he had evacuated last night but returned to get some medicine for his father-in-law and check on his property. “I was worried about looters,” said Mr. Williams, who is staying with family north of town. “But it looks like they’re patrolling the town a lot better now.”
A few blocks down the road, Sebastian Thomas, lounging in a plastic lawn chair outside a self-service car wash, said the only thing that would make him evacuate was “about six feet of water. I’m going to stay here to help these women and children,” said Mr. Thomas, who said that many of the people squatting in the city’s abandoned buildings might not be aware of the situation. “A lot of these people are drug addicts and don’t know they’ve got options to get out of town, so I’m going to stay here and help.”
The rising water has cast a harsh light on relations in the region, where the interests of Missouri farmers have come into direct conflict with residents of this brutalized town of crumbling buildings, feral dogs, and poverty. Once home to 15,000 people, Cairo was a cultural hub, home to a thriving river trade. In recent years, however, the city has struggled with major population loss, poverty and a deteriorating infrastructure.
But while attention in recent days has focused on the conflict between Cairo and its agricultural neighbors to the south, corps members have repeatedly emphasized that they are concerned about the entire levee system. “What we’re looking at is what are the effects on the overall system,” said Colonel Vernie L. Reichling, the Corps’ commander for the Memphis District, adding, “The floodway was designed not just to protect Cairo, but the entire region.”
First conceived after the Great Flood of 1927, the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project is a system of levees, dams and floodways that protects a 35,000-square-mile stretch of land from Cairo in the north to the river’s Louisiana delta. The levee at Birds Point has been breached only once before, during the flood of 1937, when waters at Cairo reached 59.5 feet. That record was passed Sunday, as waters neared sixty feet, half a foot from their projected crest of 60.5 feet. To complicate matters, the National Weather Service is forecasting continued rains in the region, and corps analysts predict that the record crest could continue for more than five days, placing untold stress on the earthen levee and floodwall defenses that ring Cairo.
During the 1937 flood, engineers used dynamite to blast the earthen retaining wall, lowering the water level at Cairo by roughly three feet.
That figure gave little comfort to Bobby Byrne, who has grown corn, wheat, and soy on his 550-acre spread in the flood zone all his life. “I don’t figure it’s going to do what they think it’s going to do,” said Mr. Byrne, 59, whose family has owned the farmland since the 1800s. “When they blew it in ’37, the river was back up in a day. It didn’t take pressure off anything.?