You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Flooding one zip code to save another.
This weekend the Army Corps of Engineers began slowly opening spill gates to reduce the water along the Mighty Mississippi. It’s a controversial decision that will ultimately destroy lives and property so that other lives and property can be save.
It’s a sad paradox of whom to harm and whom to save?
It’s like going to Vegas and playing a high stakes game of River Boat craps. The river is the house and the homeowners are holding the bones. You know average Joe citizen is going to lose, but how bad do you want them to lose. Do you want to play the pass line and maximize your odds and lose a little at a time, or do you want to put it on the center of the table on hard Sixes and let lady luck kick you in the groin.
Bet Big Win Big, so they say.
And that is what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing this weekend by placing their chips on the pass line of a table that is long as the Mississippi river.
The Corp is opening gates in the levy that have remained shut for almost 40 years. The gates are so old their rust has rust.
And it’s a crazy gamble. It’s like holding a 16 against the dealer’s ace. Do you take insurance, do you hit, do you stand?
There’s no right answer, only a cosmic burst of luck and hope.
The Corp is faced with a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” scenario.
Or as Mr. Spock told Captain Kirk while dying in the engine room of the Enterprise – “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”.
DATELINE: Morganza, Louisiana
Authorities have announced they plan to open as many as one-fourth of the spillway’s 125 floodgates in the coming days in an effort to spare the Louisiana cities of Baton Rouge and New Orleans from severe flooding.
By sparing some cities, others will be decimated.
“Really, we’re just waiting,” said Evie Bertaut of Morgan City, Louisiana, which sits on the banks of the Atchafalaya River. “Most people are getting their photographs together, things that you can’t replace in case you have to go.”
News reports were filled with people crying and cramming U-Hauls full of couches and washing machines and mattresses.
One man standing behind an over flowing pick up truck said; “If you don’t take it with you, chances are you’ll never see it again.”
That’s sad. Live your whole life and then in a minute, decide what to take and what to leave.
While most packed, one man was building a medieval type moat and wall around his home. It was crazy-surreal. He was duct taping plastic to the foundation of his home, like a tarp is going to keep out the Mississippi river.
Water rushing through the spillway could affect 3,900 people and 2,600 structures, Governor Bobby Jindal has estimated. The Corps has said seven Louisiana parishes — Pointe Coupee, St. Landry, St. Martin, Iberia, St. Mary and Terrebonne — will likely be affected. The spillway was last opened in 1973.
I guess it makes sense. You save a metropolis like New Orleans while blowing up a tiny town in some obscure bayou. You save the French Quarter and flood an alligator saturated bog. You rescue Baton Rouge and transform a swamp into a swampier swamp.
While it makes sense on paper, it also seems wrong.
The river is the river. The water is the water. The flow is the flow.
It makes me wonder if just letting nature take its course is the correct course of action. Letting the river go where it goes is the natural order of things.
I say let mother nature do what mother nature does. In a capitalistic society, in a pure market driven world, in a world where we are merely pawn in game of life, I say let the end result be determined by natural forces of nature. That means whatever happens happens. If that means New Orleans gets rocked through another rinse cycle then that’s what it means.
I understand the math, I understand that the choice is probably not easy but I also wonder if that is the right course of action.
If you can predict the tornadoes, do you put up a wind screen and deflect them away from Tuscaloosa to a city where less people will die?
When did we start playing God?
I say roll the bones. Some times lady luck smiles upon you and sometimes the winds of fortune tear down your shack.
That’s life.
And that is crazy.™