BUTTE LAROSE, La. (AP) - In the latest agonizing decision along the swollen Mississippi River, federal engineers are close to opening a massive spillway that would protect Baton Rouge and New Orleans but flood hundreds of thousands of acres in Louisiana Cajun country.
With that threat looming, some 25,000 people in an area known for small farms, fish camps, crawfish and a drawling French dialect are hurriedly packing their things and worrying that their homes and way of life might soon be drowned.
People in this riverfront community gathered at their volunteer fire station to hear a man dressed in Army fatigues deliver an ominous flood forecast.
Col. Ed Fleming leaned over a podium this week and warned that projections by the Army Corps of Engineers call for the station to be inundated by up to 15 feet of water. The crowd let out a collective gasp.
"From the ground?" an incredulous resident shouted at the meeting.
"From the ground," replied Fleming, head of the corps' New Orleans district.
A few skeptics in the audience scoffed at the projection, but many others were shaken. "It's over with," muttered Pierre Watermeyer. "That's it. There's no sense in pretending."
The corps could open the Morganza floodway north of Baton Rouge as early as this weekend, a move that would relieve pressure on the city's levee system.
Opening the spillway gates for the first time in 38 years will unleash the Mississippi on a wild ride south to the Gulf of Mexico through the Atchafalaya River and divert floodwater from the river into the basin's swamplands, backwater lakes and bayous. Several thousand homes would be at risk of flooding.
Even if engineers decide against opening the spillway, no one seems to doubt that a major flood is bound for Butte LaRose, Krotz Springs, the oil-and-seafood hub of Morgan City and other swampland communities in the Atchafalaya Basin.
The Morganza and the nearby Old River Control Structure were built in the 1950s to keep the Mississippi on its current course through New Orleans, one of the world's busiest ports. If the river rises much higher at New Orleans, the Coast Guard said Thursday that it would consider restrictions on shipping, including potentially closing the channel to the largest, heaviest ships.
For the people of this region, floods from rain-swollen rivers and hurricanes are a familiar hazard. Floodwaters damaged or destroyed many homes and fishing camps in Butte LaRose in 1973, the last time the corps opened the Morganza spillway. Many residents had to wait several weeks before they could return.
Maxim Doucet was born that year. His parents stayed put, even when the floodwaters started lapping at the rear of their grocery store.
Doucet has no intention of leaving town, either. The water didn't seep into the store when the flood gauge hit 27 feet in 1973, so Doucet can't believe the center of town will be submerged in 15 feet of water if the latest forecast for 29 feet proves accurate.
While most of his neighbors were packing up, Doucet deployed a team of workers and heavy machinery to erect a 6-foot levee around his home on the banks of the Atchafalaya River. A dump truck hauled in roughly 1,000 cubic yards of clay for a bulldozer and front-end loader to fashion a protective ring around the rear of Doucet's three-story house.
"I figured I'd give Mother Nature a run for her money," said Doucet, who owns a construction company called Monster Heavy Haulers. "Money is no object when you're trying to save your house."
On the other side of Butte LaRose's main street, Russell Calais nursed a beer as his family loaded all his belongings into moving trucks. Affectionately described by one of his daughters as "a typical bull-headed Cajun," he didn't know they would be coming to evacuate him and his wife, Judy.
"We didn't give him an option," said his daughter, Konie Calais Heard of Lafayette.
Calais said he had planned to wait until the floodwaters rose high enough to float his homemade boat, so he could patrol the neighborhood and protect his property.
"I made up my mind I wasn't going to leave," he said. "After I sat down and drank about 10 or 12 Coors, I said, 'Well, it's time.'"
Water may drive these families out of their homes, but it's also what will bring them back to repair and rebuild. Five generations of Pamela Guidry's family have called Butte LaRose home. Her father was a commercial fisherman. Her brothers catch crawfish for money. She worked at a seafood-packing business.
"I didn't want my kids growing up in a city. I wanted them to learn how to live the hard way," she said. "They had to learn how to survive on their own down here. Once you're out of Butte LaRose, you're out in society, out of our own little world."
Guidry said her family weathered the 1973 floods and the great flood of 1927 without any thought of leaving town for good.
"The water receded. They cleaned up. Their lives went on," she said.