re: 1,800+ East Baton Rouge Parish homes may need to be raised because of 2016 floods

quote:

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History will bite you in the arse if you are not careful. The area of Burbank south of Gardere was once sugar cane fields. The area between Gardere and Lee Dr. was a swamp. The corner at Burbank and Nicholson was an oil field. At flood stage the Mississippi river still tries to find its ' outlet at the Vet school to get into Bayou Fountain, an ancient distributary of the River.

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Yeah but that would require a levee break scenario. If the levee broke in Baton Rouge south of the Istrouma bluff, the state would be so fricked that a couple of feet of elevation difference between houses along Burbank wouldn't matter. It's all flooding, and it's going to be a disaster all the way down into Ascension and beyond.

A big reason Bluebonnet/Springlake/U Club didn't flood in 2016 was because the back flow from the Amite River, which went into Bayou Fountain, flowed into the Spanish Lake Basin. The swampy area there retained a lot of the flood waters and gave the watershed time to crest and come back down before it caused real problems for homeowners there.

We need a man-made version of Spanish Lake in St. Helena Parish (Reservoir) to really control the lower Amite River. Something like that is needed to retain some of the flood waters before it causes a problem downstream. Just take the water and hold it long enough to take the edge off of major rain events.