Mississippi River Is Very Low Now

Please click on the photos to make them larger.  It helps me create the post with the smaller photos.  Gotta love Blogger!

I had lunch with Diana and Gwen at Elsie's Plate and Pie.  OMG!  We had seafood and chicken pot pies and two kinds of each, coconut cream, cherry, almond joy and chocolate.  Oh, My!  Can you say "gain 3 lbs dinner"?

So after lunch Frank brought me to the Mississippi River to shoot some photos of the river levels.  I was really shocked to see how low the river is now.

I took a photo of Frank standing down at the river's edge on the batture area and looking up to give you some perspective.  I was on top of the levee above those letters.  Finally, you get to see the letters!









I asked him to run back down the levee to take a photo of the letters.  They are really huge letters on the cemented area of the levee.  Here all you can see is the Rouge part of Baton Rouge.







And to give you a perspective view of how large the letters are, Frank is standing on the river batture looking up to me at the top of the E.  Can you see me way up there. That is a distance of about 42 feet.







Here is the April 2019 level showing the top bar of the E letter.  you can see the very top of the levee where I was standing yesterday in the photo below.

Here is the shot I have been taking of the flooded river showing the height of the water in relation to that E.  The city workers were power washing the steps when we were there and they have washed the evidence of the water levels on that E.  If you remember, the water was in the middle of the top bar of the E.  If you can make out the white markings on the cement just above the E, it is telling us that that is 42.8 feet.







We walked down the levee about a half mile to check out the Paperclip Landing and the USS Kidd, our WWII Destroyer Museum.  IF you remember the Paperclip had water up to near the bottom of that first level.  That is where the American Queen and Mississippi Belle steam ships that tour the River dock for the Baton Rouge tours.  We like to go down and talk to people coming off the steamboats. You can see the  walkway down to the second level at flood stage in April 2019 in the photo below

Here is the USS Kidd back in April 2019 when the River was at its highest.  It was completely floating and held in by the cradle positioned on the side we can't see.  

Here is a great view of the cradle.  It is basically a post pylon with a sheet of metal with a hole it in threaded on the posts.  The metal is attached to the  side of the destroyer.  The Kidd floats freely up and down the post as the river level changes.  This allows the Kidd to float up as the water rises and drop into a stationary cradle when the water level goes beyond the underside of the ship.

And here is the view of the batture around the Kidd.

In the shots from April2019 the water was to the 4th step on the cemented area of the levee.  

Hope you have enjoyed the photos over the last few years.  We are fascinated with the Mississippi River beauty and activity.  And keep in mind, there is no connection the localized flooding we experienced in 2016 and the river levels.  The Mississippi River does not flood Baton Rouge.  We flood from the smaller tributaries  being overwhelmed by rains.  

So that is your Natural History Lesson for today!

Designing Modern Quilts - I Am Going to Be Rich and Famous

I m going to link to Nina Marie's Off the Wall post.  go see what a lot of other people are doing creatively this week! I love her birdhouses and lilies piece.  It is amazing.

I have been very interested in watching a friend of mine design modern quilt.  He doesn't make them all, but some he does.  And I have been talking to several of my blogging friends and my art quilting friends, Carrie and my quilting friends about design and design elements.

I have decided to take an online class from Jane Dunnewold about Elements of Composition.  She teaches art at a University in San Antonio (I think it is SA) and is a painter and a quilter and an artist.

That hasn't started yet, but i am getting stoked!

On my own, with encouragement from my Modern Friend of Paragraph 1, I have been playing with several programs today and made this design from one of my photos.

I hope you are mightily impressed........I am!














I was able to create a simple block, and when it went together I could play with it to change the colors and orientation of the blocks.  Bingo.

Loving it!

The Mississippi River – Flood and Low Waters

  It is so drastic to see the differences in the River I live near.  The Mississippi has long standing tradition of floods and low waters.  Towns and cities were often at the mercy of the raging waters until the levee system was built in the 1900's.  Now we seek to control the river for our benefit, commerce - shipping and chemical plants.  By the time the water reaches New Orleans down river from us, the water is full of  chemicals from hundreds of plants along the river.  Many of these plants intake water to cool their processes and discharge back downstream changing the water temperatures.
Such is progress and modern times.  Feast or famine, as they say.  Good and bad.
Here are pictures from the 2008 flood



These are pictures from the recent flood May of 2011. This is next to the River Boat Structure we were on Sunday.    In fact, here it is on Sunday…..
Big difference!  See the trees caught in the bottom of the one on the right?  Those were some pretty large logs.





Here is the Baton Rouge sign on Sunday with Low Waters. 

And here it is during the 2011 flood in May last year. Well, I couldn’t find that photo, but the Kidd is on the other side of the River Boat Structure and those levee steps are the same height as the one by the Baton Rouge sign.  You couldn’t see the Baton Rouge on the levee because the water was too high anyway!
glen

Bike Riding Blues

Today was not just a great day.....it was an AWESOME day to be on bikes and with friends!

Searching for something?

I am going to break this up into several posts because the pictures are so fabulously full of color and fun.

My lens seems not
to be opening, hmm

We started out as we start out many of our rides, at the State Capitol Building Downtown.  We rode around looking at the incredible views of the lake and the flowers and the area surrounding the Capitol Building where Huey P. Long (Uncle Huey) is buried.  I must say, he does live in a beautiful place now!

Then we headed downtown to North Blvd, where we have the Mystic Krewe of Mutts Parade actually, and listened to some jazzy Jazz.  There were two stages set up and the performers alternated between the two so the spectators had to move between them about 50 feet.  We had a place backstage and had a bird's eye view of everything, shade and all.  The temps were perfect, warm in the sun and breezy wonderful in the shade.  We did stop for a sugar free snowball and it was soooo good!

Johnny Winters is playing right now, but Frank and I didn't stay, we had dogs to attend to.  Dan and Amber did stay to hear him play.  I guess they ate the festival food for dinner: hot cajun sausage, grillades, cotton candy, Boudreaux's Daquaris and gumbo with potato salad dolloped in it.  Can't get more Cajun Blues than that!

When we hit the Mississippi River Structure we saw the water was really dramatically low if you think about the flood.  I will do a comparison in a later post, I took some specific pictures for that.  Here we are all together, I made them take a group shot, even though some of them did not want to.  Yes, it was the pretty one.  You can see me, I have the  red helmet hair!  And the totally gorgeous skinny body that looks like it belongs to someone else!

This is a great picture of the Old State Capitol.  It used to be closer to the Mississippi but the river has changed course a bit and now it just sits on what appears to be a hill overlooking the river.  It is stately and functions as a really great interactive history museum.

I love my camera, it does panoramic shots.  And here are some nearly 360 degree panos of Baton Rouge skyline and the Mississippi River.  We were standing on the River Boat Structure out in the river.  What you see there is the USS Kidd from WWII.

I sure hope your day was a beautiful as mine!  

Celebration!

Hair is learning to be in a different routine.  But it looks good already.  It will take a few cuttings to get it even again.  Don't read into the last post that there was ever any argument with my wonderful Senora Celia.  She is an accomplished stylist.

For our anniversary today, we have reservations at Tsunami overlooking the Mississippi River.  It is a rooftop restaurant in the Shaw Center downtown  About 7 stories up.  This is the old water tower from the top and from ground level.

 Tsunami is a sushi place and neither of us eat sushi.  So we had chicken teriyaki and pork loin something or other.  But we went for the view.  The best part of the meal was the molten lava chocolate cake with cold ice cream and fruits of the luscious variety!

 

Then I spent some time playing with the fountains and seeing what the water looked like in the camera lens. 

Frank is on the other side of the water wall, if you can see him.  If not, here he is:

Happy 39th Anniversary!

Are you looking for 39 more?

glen

Bonnet Carre Spillway

The actual big news this weekend was the opening of the other spillway, the Morganza Spillway.  The  Morganza is above Baton Rouge and the Bonnet Carre is between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.  New Orleans is downriver from Baton Rouge. 
Frank and I went to the Exterran Picnic in Destrehan at Ormond Plantation on Saturday.  One of the big draws for me to go was the proximity of Bonnet Carre.  I wanted to see it.  At Bonnet Carre, it was the atmosphere of a carnival.  Cars were parked up and down the River Road, people were riding motorcycles and bicycles, walking.  All either heading toward or from the Spillway weir.  The Army Corps of Engineers had set up a tent at the site, I guess to make sure no idiots fell in, and they were answering questions, offering information and keeping the peace.
The board said that on Saturday there were 264 bays open, and the total flow of water through the weir was 258,000 cfs or cubic feet per second.  The incredible thing to see was how fast the water was rushing by.  Such power. 
On the River Road are the large refineries, Norco is where they all line the levee and use the Mississippi River to move their product and provide electricity for their production.  Here are three you can just about touch from the road.
Motiva, Shell Chemicals and Hexion.  Dow is across the water.

Here you are looking at the Spillway Weir from the river side.  This structure was completed in 1931 in response to the Great Flood of 1927.  Prior to 1927 the Mississippi River Commission thought they only needed the levees as flood controls. 

The Bonnet Carre weir structure is 32.8 miles from New Orleans.  It is 7000 feel long with 350 bays of 20 feet each.  There are 20 timbers in each bay.  The Spillway is opened approx. every 10 years. 

This is the top of the weir.  It has a rail that holds two cranes to lift the timbers.  The timbers are then placed on top of the rails to facilitate their replacement in closing the structure.
See the timbers across the top?  I will show you the front in a minutes.  Where the timbers end that bay still has the timbers in place.  The water always leaks through the weir providing some water to the spillway and thus Lake Pontchartrain all the time.  However the water level and pressure behind the weir is not usually this great. 

Look at the bay with the timbers in place here:

The Bonnet Carre Spillway was built at the site of the Bonnet Carre Crevasse, a 3000 foot wide break in the levee.  The water flows into the spillway for  nearly 6 miles before reaching Lake Pontchartrain which eventually drains out to the Gulf of Mexico through the Rigoletes (pronounced rig-o-lees).  We used to swim there as kids.

Here is the Weir from the other side. What you can’t see is the tremendous power of that water as it rushes through.  And it is muddy and brown, like we are used to seeing our rivers and swamps.





  The guage says  22 feet

On the way home we crossed the Spillway on Hwy 61 which is the old way people would go from New Orleans to Laplace and eventually to Baton Rouge.  The Spillway there is dry and is used for recreational activities.  This is the boat launch area now underwater.  And to see just how much water here is the picnic shelter we used when we met my brother’s family there about 8 years ago.

I have added some pictures of the water in the Spillway along Hwy 61 as we headed home. 
Frank keeps using the word “historic”  and I guess this is an historic event.  The Morganza Spillway has only been opened once before and now to have two of them opening is pretty historic. 
I will have more on the Morganza if I can.  It is north of us and accessible only by a  small highway road.  They were closing the area on Saturday, so they didn’t want tourists like they have at Bonnet Carre. 

For more information on the Spillway go to:
http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/05/corps_set_to_open_28_spillway.html

And for some great photos go to:
http://www.pbase.com/septembermorn/bonnet_carre_spillway