NEW ORLEANS — The Mississippi River is rising.
It’s still about 4 feet below flood stage in New Orleans, but it’s high enough to leak through the wooden pins on the Bonnet Carre spillway about 30 miles north of the city.
“Every year, what you’ll start to see is the rainy season as well as the snow melt in the areas Louisiana drains, 41 percent of the country, and as that water drains out, it comes right across our doorstep,” Army Corps of Engineers spokesman Ricky Boyett said.
When the river is high, the shad fish are running at the spillway.
Danny Simoneaux from Norco spent the morning scooping the fish out of the spillway with a net.
“Water’s running through the locks,” Simoneaux said. “Every time the river come up, shad run from the lake trying to get back to the river and we scoop them out for crawfish bait. That’s what we’re doing.”
When the fish are running like this, he can fill the back of his pick-up truck with shad in about an hour and a half, Simoneaux added.
“We’ve been out here for however long the river is been high, about a week and a half, two weeks and they were not running like this. They just started running like this. They’re going to be a lot of people out here this week. It’s going to be packed.”
Tuesday, St. Charles Parish closed the road that runs along the spillway because it’s starting to flood.
For now, the Corps of Engineers does not expect to open the spillway.
“The current forecast is we’ll start to see a fall and it will start falling down over this month timeframe, however, that doesn’t count what rain could hit a week from now,” Boyett said.
The Mississippi is now expected to start cresting on Saturday, then remain at 13.2 feet at the Carrollton Gage for at least 5 days before the river level starts to fall.
The official flood stage for New Orleans is 17 feet at the Carrollton Gage which is located Uptown across from the Army Corp headquarters.
Levees and floodwalls protect the area from river levels between 20 and 25 feet.
The last time the Bonnet Carre spillway opened was in 2020.
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