Corps considering change to water flow into Atchafalaya

• By RICHARD BURGESS
• Advocate Acadiana bureau
• Published: Jul 5, 2009 - Page: 1A

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A mass of concrete and floodgates near the head of the Atchafalaya River acts as a faucet of sorts to control how much water flows out of the Mississippi River into the vast Atchafalaya Basin swamp.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has kept a careful hand on that faucet for fear the larger Mississippi River might change course down the Atchafalaya.

After resisting years of calls from farmers, crawfishermen and conservationists for more or less water — depending on who is asking and when — the corps is considering the possibility of change.

The impetus is the idea that the colossal load of sediment flowing down the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers could play a key role in rebuilding the state’s shrinking coast.

“There might be an opportunity to maximize the effect of those two river systems,” said Nancy Powell, chief of the corps’ New Orleans district hydraulics and hydrologic branch. “It’s kind of exciting.”

Powell keeps  a watchful eye on the corps’ Old River Control Structure near Simmesport, where the federal agency raises and lowers giant gates to regulate how much of the Mississippi River is allowed to flow into the Atchafalaya.

The Atchafalaya is fed by the Red and Mississippi rivers, and if the relationship were not managed, there is little doubt the Mississippi would choose to take the route of the Atchafalaya, which offers a shorter path to the Gulf of Mexico.

The corps operates under a 1950s congressional mandate that only 30 percent of the Red and Mississippi rivers should flow into the Atchafalaya — freezing in time the distribution that existed at mid-century.

The ability to regulate water flowing into the Atchafalaya Basin has led to repeated calls that the corps wield that power for reasons other than keeping the Mississippi in check.

“You have a control system in place to manage it, but you are not managing it,” said Paul Kemp, vice president of the National Audubon Society’s Gulf Coast Initiative. “We see it as a place to achieve big ecological improvements very quickly with minor water changes.”

The corps has agreed only a handful of times to increase the flow into the Basin.

“Those have been what we consider short term, small-scale changes,” Powell said.

She said what the corps is now researching is the possibility of larger, long-term alterations.