People, animals flee Mississippi River flooding

YAZOO CITY, Mississippi—People and animals sought higher ground on Thursday to escape the flooding from the Mississippi River and its tributaries as water flowed over levees and the Coast Guard planned to halt traffic on one of the world’s busiest commercial waterways.

In Louisiana, 12,000 acres (4,856 hectares) of corn and soybeans were flooded. The US Army Corps of Engineers considered whether to open the Morganza spillway, which would flood thousands of homes and acres (hectares) of farmland but help to protect Baton Rouge, New Orleans and the oil refineries in between.

Chris Bonura, a spokesman for the Port of New Orleans, said the Coast Guard plans to close a 190-mile (306-kilometer) stretch of river from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico when the water reaches the 18-foot (5.5-meter) level at a gauge in Carrollton, which could happen by Monday.

The mouth of the Mississippi would become crowded with ships with nowhere else to go, though some might be diverted to other ports. Massive ships that carry US corn, soybeans and other crops out of the country would be unable to move.

Shipments of Venezuelan heavy crude oil that come in by tanker to a refinery in Chalmette would be locked out of the river, though most refineries on the river are fed by pipelines.

In the poverty-stricken Mississippi Delta, meanwhile, people waited uneasily to see how high the water would get. About 600 homes in the Delta have flooded in the past several days as the water has risen toward some of the highest levels on record.

Swollen by weeks of heavy rain and snowmelt, the Mississippi River has been breaking high-water records that have stood since the 1920s and ’30s. It is projected to crest at Vicksburg on May 19 and shatter the mark set there during the cataclysmic Great Flood of 1927.

Foster reported from Bunche’s Bend, Louisiana. Associated Press writers Alan Sayre in New Orleans and Emily Wagster Pettus in Vicksburg and Shelia Byrd in Jackson contributed to this report.