The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has opened the first bay of the Morganza spillway

CommuterIE

Live: http://www.cnn.com/video/flashLive/live.html?stream=stream2&hpt=T1

Story: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/05/14/flooding/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1

Basically they are flooding a massive rural area with at least 25,000 residents losing their homes to save urban areas such as New Orleans...

Do you think they are right? Or should nature be allowed to just take it's course?

dubhthach

Well naturally alot of that land would have flooded in normal natural condition of the river. The problem is the building of the Levee system over the last 60 years has seriously affected the natural flood plain. Due to the presence of the levees you got development which should never have occurred in the flood plain of the Mississippi river.

There are 1.2 million people in Metro New Orleans. To put it coldly it's alot easier to deal with 25k people spread over a large area then it is to deal with 1.2million in a small area.

tharlear

Yes there are right to flood this area. The area in question is a flood relief zone.
The people who farm there and life there knew before hand that they were building/farming an area that would be flooded to protect the levee system

Over topping causes that back side of levees to be damaged and the levees to fail. To prevent this the corps of engineer has zoned areas to be relief zones. They flood these zones to protect the system, and large urban areas. These zones were flooded every year before the levee system was built. They are designated as flood relief zones, some have spill ways to allow the corps to flood them. Some do not have spill ways and the corps blows the levees to (they actually blow up the levee) to allow water into the relief zones.

The last time still spill way was opened was in the 1970s. The system is working as it was designed.