River at BR expected to hit flood stage Friday
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As swollen rivers in Missouri, Arkansas and Ohio spilled over their banks, the Mississippi River at Baton Rouge crept upwards Saturday, with forecasters saying it would reach flood stage at 35 feet on Friday.
In Baton Rouge, the river is forecast to crest at 39 feet on April 8, 4 feet above flood stage, Laurie Hall, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service’s Lower Mississippi Forecast Center in Slidell, said Saturday.
Although river levels will be above flood stage, that isn’t as dire as it sounds. Flood stage is the level at which the river would be out of its banks if the Mississippi River didn’t have its massive levee system.
At 36 feet, river traffic and industrial activity on the river side of the levee will be curtailed, Hall said. A foot higher and the river would lap at the top of the lowest spots of the levee at LSU, Hall said.
A flood warning has been issued by the National Weather Service for the lower Mississippi River region, affecting East Baton Rouge, Pointe Coupee and West Feliciana parishes.
With as much as a third of the Mississippi’s flow diverted at the Old River Control Structure into the Atchafalaya River, boaters were seeing higher water levels in the basin that are typical of springtime.
Two unlucky Louisiana men were in a boat that flipped near Bayou Pigeon and spent Friday night in a buttonwood tree in the swamp.
Fred Hawkins, of Baton Rouge, was fishing Saturday morning in the basin with his dog, Blue, when he heard the men’s faint shouts for help and set out to find them.
Hawkins said he found the men — Mike and Reese, from Tickfaw, who did not give their last names — five feet up from the water level in the “biggest tree they could find.”
“They were wet, cold and anxious to get back to land,” Hawkins said. “With the snakes and alligators, they were in dire straights out there.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
