Problems emerge with Mississippi River’s vital safety valves | Environment

Beside the murky waters off Pass Christian, shrimp boats docked in the distance, David Gautier is worried about a threat many miles away that he cannot control.

Gautier, 64, runs a seafood business on the waterfront of this historic town along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. But his concern has less to do with his home state than with neighboring Louisiana — or, more precisely, the flow of the water from the mighty river that runs through it.

“We don’t control that Mississippi River,” says the owner of Gautier’s At The Harbor. He adds later: “If it’s not managed correctly, it can be catastrophic.”

Gautier went years without oysters and only recently began to emerge from that hit to his business. The reason? They were killed off in 2019, the result of high Mississippi River water diverted through the Bonnet Carre Spillway near New Orleans.

The freshwater and nutrient pollution that eventually inundated the Mississippi Sound wreaked havoc on the region’s ecosystem and tourism industry. It is a dilemma that is only expected to worsen in the decades ahead due to projections showing more extreme weather, and its implications range far beyond the Mississippi Coast.

A series of giant safety valves along the Mississippi River have helped protect the New Orleans area from catastrophic flooding for nearly a century. But now there’s a problem — several of them, in fact, and they’re converging all at once.

The Mississippi Gulf Coast’s protests over the use of one of those valves, the Bonnet Carre Spillway, have grown louder and led to lawsuits, particularly after record openings in 2019. The Morganza Spillway on the opposite side of the river has been rarely used, but opening it more frequently draws concern from landowners, residents and port operations in its path.

If seasonal river flows increase as some projections indicate, in part due to climate change, the nation will have to figure out where to channel all the water — another illustration of how much of the country’s fate is tied to the river at the center of the world’s third-largest watershed.

Mississippi officials are careful to stress that they do not want New Orleans or anywhere else to flood. But they say solutions can be found, and the burden can be shared.

“This is a national problem, and it calls for a national solution,” said Gerald Blessey, the former mayor of Biloxi now helping lead a coalition seeking to draw greater attention to the issue.

‘Can’t afford it’

The long reach of the river is not always readily apparent, but its complex connections to surrounding communities, the rest of the nation and even the world are central to Louisiana’s existence.

The need for a reliable shipping channel, as well as the obligation to protect cities from flooding, has created a largely manmade system of managing the Mississippi, and any change to it can reverberate elsewhere.

The current system is now nearly a century old, and it has worked largely as designed. Built in the wake of the epochal 1927 Mississippi River flood, the modern network of levees, floodwalls and spillways has prevented the lower river from breaking its banks and allowed shipping to flourish, including for grain exports from the country’s Midwest to ports around the world.

A recent analysis by the Army Corps of Engineers determined that overall system, known officially as the Mississippi River and Tributaries project, has reduced or prevented $114 in damage for every $1 invested — an extraordinarily high number for a Corps project.

The Bonnet Carre has in particular been vital to south Louisiana. To keep the river from rising above 1.25 million cubic feet per second — or more than 550 million gallons every minute — the Corps opens it.

It is a surprisingly analog process, with cranes removing wooden beams — or “needles” — set across 350 bays to allow river water to gush through. The number of bays opened depends upon the amount of water that must be diverted.

The water then tumbles through the spillway itself, guided by levees through a channel for nearly 6 miles to Lake Pontchartrain. It eventually reaches the Rigolets, the Mississippi Sound and the Gulf.

For decades, the system did not pose a serious problem. It was expected that Bonnet Carre would have to be opened roughly once a decade, with the occasional influx of fresh water and nutrients actually helping replenish coastal ecosystems over the long term, as formerly occurred when the river ran wild and free.

For the first decades of the spillway’s existence, that prediction proved roughly accurate, though, as always, with lots of variation in weather patterns. Bonnet Carre was opened eight times between the completion of construction in the 1930s and the end of the century.

But since 2000, it has been opened seven times, and it looked as if it would again be necessary earlier this year. In the end, it remained closed thanks to river levels remaining just below the trigger.

The Corps had come under heavy pressure from Mississippi officials to use Morganza before opening Bonnet Carre. That did not happen, but, farther upriver, the flow of water diverted from the Mississippi River through the Old River Control complex to the Atchafalaya jumped significantly around that time, records show.

Corps spokesman Ricky Boyett said Old River, a set of structures that keep the Mississippi from changing course to the Atchafalaya, was operated as it normally would be regardless of the state of Mississippi’s concerns.

The record 2019 openings were the last straw for Mississippi. For the first time, Bonnet Carre had to be opened twice in a year, for a total of 123 days. An estimated 10 trillion gallons rushed through it.

The muddy, brown water drained from parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces brought with it harmful algae blooms and nutrient pollution. That was amplified by increased flow from the Pearl and Pascagoula rivers.

The result was a federally declared fisheries disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

Essentially all oysters that grow in the western Mississippi Sound died, shrimp landings were down sharply, and eggs and larvae from species such as speckled trout were harmed, said Kim de Mutsert, a coastal scientist at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Dolphin and sea turtle deaths were up significantly, Mississippi officials say. Skin lesions were also found on dolphins.

Many tourists opted to stay away. At one point, tourism was down along the coast by around 47% from the previous year, according to some measurements.

“Coast tourism tax revenue represents over 30% of the total tourism tax revenue of the entire state,” said Linda Hornsby, executive director of the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association. “We can’t afford it. We’ve got to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Mississippi communities filed two separate lawsuits against the Corps in the flood’s wake. One was dismissed, and the other resulted in only a partial victory, requiring the Corps to consult with federal fisheries officials on Bonnet Carre openings.

The organization leading the charge on the issue, the Mississippi Sound Coalition, has signaled its fight will continue. At a recent meeting in Gulfport, Mississippi Gulf Coast leaders spoke of their ongoing strategy to engage politicians and the public on the problem.

But addressing Mississippi’s concerns is not so simple.

‘Without destroying people’s properties’

Back in Louisiana, down Cajun backroads and far away from the Mississippi Coast, Ed Boyd sits on the tailgate of a pickup truck and recalls when the water rose.

It was in 2011, the last time the Morganza Spillway was opened, requiring the entire community of Butte La Rose to evacuate and hope for the best. The tiny outpost of fishing and hunting camps, signs out front carrying nicknames like “Dad’s Pad When Mom’s Mad” and “Recovery Room,” sits within the spillway.

Boyd and his wife packed up what they could and headed to Lafayette, but, in the end, it wasn’t as bad as feared. The Mississippi water channeled through the Morganza and into the Atchafalaya Basin submerged Boyd’s dock, but did not reach the house.

Boyd, now 76 and a former pastor at the Lafayette-based Asbury United Methodist Church, reflected on how attempts to manage Mother Nature always cause unintended consequences. He said he’s not opposed to seeing the Morganza opened more if reasonable calculations could be made to limit damage.

“As long as they could find some way of being able to estimate how much they could put in here without destroying people’s properties,” said Boyd. “But you see, the way it is now, everybody wants somebody else to get hurt besides them.”

The Morganza Spillway could be considered a sibling of Bonnet Carre. Located farther upstream at the town of Morganza, not far from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, it funnels water to the river’s west bank, directing it to the Atchafalaya Basin and eventually down to the Morgan City area.

It has only been used twice in its history, in 1973 and 2011, but every year the Corps must notify by mail the roughly 2,500 landowners within the floodway of the possibility. The federal government purchased “flowage easements” from the landowners when the spillway was built, but they continue to own the land.

Cattle can be seen grazing in the shadow of the Morganza structure, where the water flows when it is opened. Before opening it, the Corps must also work with local and state officials to encourage wildlife to relocate, including black bears. Releasing water gradually helps signal to wildlife to clear out.

‘You accept the risk’

The trigger for opening the Morganza — 1.5 million cubic feet per second — has only been reached once, during the floods of 2011. The 1973 opening was necessary because of the collapse of a wall at the Old River Control structures upstream, requiring emergency measures to keep the Mississippi from shifting course to the Atchafalaya.

The Corps can open Morganza based on a forecast of river levels reaching the trigger — and, in fact, could be obligated to do so. That’s because the spillway gates cannot be opened after they are overtopped.

In 2019, the trigger for Morganza was almost reached, but it ultimately fell just short. Mississippi officials point to that with bewilderment and disappointment, questioning why so much water must be funneled through Bonnet Carre while the Morganza stays closed.

Are there potential solutions? There may be, but politics and federal government cost-cutting are preventing them from being explored at the moment.

The Corps of Engineers had been engaged in a sweeping, five-year, $25 million “mega-study” on the future of managing the lower river. The issues are so multi-layered and complex that the plan was to have the “mega-study” open the door to other related inquiries — or “tiered studies” — to delve even deeper.

The mega-study was paused in June due to a lack of funding from the federal government. Corps officials hope it can eventually be restarted, and political leaders in both Mississippi and Louisiana have been pushing for funding for it.

“We consider this a generational opportunity for us to look at how we manage the lower Mississippi River and to make actual recommendations for improving how we manage it over the next 100 years,” Rick Raynie, Corps project manager, said recently at a gathering of scientists and other experts.

One key change that was being looked at involved altering the amount of water allowed to be diverted through the Old River Control complex to the Atchafalaya River. The amount of flow through the complex on an annual basis — 30% of the combined flow of the Mississippi and Red Rivers — is locked in place by congressional mandate.

It is unclear whether altering Old River flows would be enough to adequately address the dilemma of the Bonnet Carre. Corps officials say a later “tiered study” could look at how to best operate Bonnet Carre, Morganza and Old River as one system.

Any change will draw controversy.

The Port of Morgan City, for example, where water funneled through Old River and Morganza eventually ends up, is concerned that the accompanying buildup of sediment will prevent deep-water access to its docks, requiring costly, expensive dredging and jeopardizing billions in business.

Other potential solutions have been proposed in the past from scientists.

In one example, a study by Tulane scientists Ehab Meselhe and Chia-Yu Wu explored the possibility of building river diversions upstream from Bonnet Carre that could both replenish wetlands and ease pressure on river levels. They found that such a plan could be beneficial, though money and political will would be needed for it — a challenge at a time of budget cuts.

While not a solution, De Mutsert, the USM scientist, is at work on modeling that could determine the potential effects of future spillway openings on fisheries.

In Butte La Rose, feelings are mixed. There is a sense among some that additional water could actually help the Atchafalaya Basin’s troubled conditions.

But picking up and evacuating for more Morganza openings could be problematic, especially if the water rises high enough to flood houses.

“You accept the risk when you come out here,” Jules Langla, 79, who moved to Butte La Rose in 2020 with his wife for the Atchafalaya Basin’s tranquility and bass fishing, said from his living room overlooking Bayou La Rose.

“We would have enough time to get out. … But if it gets as high as our second floor here, that’s catastrophic.”

Farther north, Jacques LaCour drives his truck over a levee and past soybean crops growing in the fertile ground between the gates of the Morganza Spillway and the Mississippi, one portion of his extended farmland.

He tells the story of how, when he was younger, he talked his father into allowing him to plant corn there, known as Morganza’s forebay, which can flood when the river is high. They would usually wait until June to decide whether to plant there to allow enough time to know that year’s conditions.

But the river seemed low enough in March, and LaCour wanted to get the corn growing. His dad told him it was a bad idea, but allowed him to go ahead and try to plant 200 acres.

By June, the corn crops drowned.

“He was right. You never know what Mother Nature is going to do,” said LaCour, 62.

These days, he still plants in the forebay, but understands the risks. He also has about 400 acres on the other side of the spillway’s gates, which floods when Morganza is opened, but he only grows timber there. He grows sugar cane on other sections of land.

LaCour also serves as a commissioner for the Atchafalaya Basin Levee District and was part of a recent delegation that met with Mississippi Coast officials to discuss ways forward. LaCour said one question being posed is whether the Wax Lake Outlet, which connects to the Atchafalaya River near the coast, could be widened to more efficiently pass water through.

“Of course, our preference would be that we never need to open it again,” LaCour said of the Morganza while sitting on the back deck of the Old River Landing and boat launch he owns in the town of Batchelor. “But it’s there for a purpose that serves the greater good of the nation and the community here.”

‘Can’t fight each other’

At his spot on the dock in Pass Christian, Gautier describes his long family history in the seafood business. Originally from Pascagoula, the grandson of a state senator and entrepreneur, he grew up in the industry and learned it the hard way, doing the dirty work of unloading boats and supplying them with ice.

After college, he rejoined the family business and, along with his brother, eventually bought out his father, a World War II vet with degrees from Tulane and Harvard, but who chose to “work in a shrimp plant.”

“He always had a button-down with a tie on,” said Gautier. “He needed to go weld something in the back, he would just throw his welders over it.”

Gautier eventually left the family company for a time, but still dealt in seafood, particularly shrimp. He says he has always made special efforts to maintain the quality of the product, ensuring customers know the difference between fresh, local catch and cheap imports.

“If it’s produced and packed from the boat to the loading dock to the processor — if you do everything right, it can be as precious as the nicest shrimp in the world,” he said. “If you don’t take care of it, it’s just another commodity.”

Gautier, who had been living much of the time in Florida, bought the current business in Pass Christian in 2021 and moved back, giving him more time to see his two daughters, both of whom went to LSU and live in Baton Rouge. He didn’t give the Bonnet Carre much thought, believing the oysters would be back relatively soon.

It wasn’t until the fall of 2024 that he was able to bring in any oysters at all. The shrimp business was also difficult for a variety of reasons over the past few years. Gautier, who runs the business with his wife Ashley, said he has had to dig into his own money to maintain the company, keeping faith that it will eventually turn around.

He argues that more planning is needed when it’s clear a high-river year is on the way. Routing so much water through one outlet makes no sense to him.

“Everybody’s got to work together on it. We can’t fight each other on it,” said Gautier. “And that’s what’s going on.”