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resident Biden is tapping former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu to coordinate the implementation of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, the White House announced Sunday. “In this role, Landrieu will oversee the most significant and comprehensive investments in American infrastructure in generations - work that independent experts verify will create millions of high-paying, union jobs while boosting our economic competitiveness in the world, strengthening our supply chains, and acting against inflation for the long term,” the White House said in a news release. In Sunday’s announcement, the White House touted Landrieu’s work shepherding New Orleans through its recovery following...

Full Title: Database showing lower New Orleans levee heights incorrect, officials say; overtopping unlikely Officials with the Army Corps of Engineers are disputing data in a corps database that shows numerous sections of Mississippi River levee in New Orleans and points downriver fall short of the 20-foot height at which forecasters expect the river to crest Saturday. Ricky Boyett, a corps spokesman, said late Wednesday that the corps’ New Orleans District office show levee elevations in the Lower 9th Ward at “between 20 and 21 feet.” He added that the agency’s modeling “does not show overtopping of the levees in...

A giant invasive rodent with the ability to destroy roads, levees and wetlands has been discovered in Stanislaus County. Weighing in at 20 pounds and measuring 2 feet, 6 inches long, plus a 12-inch tail, the nutria live in or near water. They're also incredibly destructive. “They burrow in dikes, and levees, and road beds, so they weaken infrastructure, (which is) problematic for flood control systems,” California Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Peter Tira said. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife is sounding an alarm about the invasive nutria. When nutria aren’t burrowing, they’re eating. They can consume 25 percent...

MANTECA, Calif. (KCRA) — A levee near Manteca was breached Monday night leading to mandatory evacuations in the area, according to San Joaquin County officials said. Mandatory evacuations were ordered for people living within the below boundary:.... The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning for the pictured area on Monday, Feb. 20, 2017, due to a levee breach south of Manteca. The warning is set to expire at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

Ray Nagin received a sentence of 10 years in federal prison for public corruption Wednesday, but the former New Orleans mayor continues to deny that he is guilty of any wrongdoing. “Well, you know, all of this was pretty surreal to me,” Nagin told the WDSU TV news station. “I still maintain my innocence. We’re going to appeal this thing.”

Removable flood walls would be set up for much of lower Manhattan, a 15-to-20-foot levee would guard part of Staten Island and gates and levees would shield Brooklyn as part of a nearly $20 billion plan Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed Tuesday to protect New York City from storms and the effects of global warming.Bloomberg’s proposals also include building dunes in Staten Island and the Rockaways, firming up the shoreline with bulkheads in various neighborhoods and considering building a levee and a new “Seaport City” development at the South Street Seaport that would echo nearby Battery Park City. The mayor also...

Property: Fair or foul, U.S. officials diverted floodwaters to farmlands to save cities as the mighty Mississippi spilled its banks. But there was a surprise: Farmers chose not to be victims. The weekend was full of disheartening news of tornadoes striking Missouri and Minnesota, as well as creeping floodwaters making their way down to the Gulf states in the worst flooding in at least two decades. But there was one unexpectedly heartening development: News photographs from tiny Vicksburg, Miss., where 2,100 people have been displaced, showed dozens of farm houses along the Mississippi River and its Yazoo tributary encircled by...

Could it happen this year? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is forcing the river down a path it no longer wants to travel. Had the river gotten the best of the engineers in 1973 the Mississippi would not be the same river today–it would have forced a new path down the Atchafalaya basin, a course that is some 20 feet lower than the river’s current main stem, and which offers a 150-mile shorter path to the Gulf of Mexico. Its course has changed dozens of times over the millenia, “sweeping back and forth like a garden hose,” and will...

LAKE PROVIDENCE, La. – Army engineers prepared Saturday to slowly open the gates of an emergency spillway along the rising Mississippi River, diverting floodwaters from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, yet inundating homes and farms in parts of Louisiana's populated Cajun country. About 25,000 people and 11,000 structures could be in harm's way when the Morganza spillway is unlocked for the first time in 38 years. Sheriffs and National Guardsmen were warning people in a door-to-door sweep through the area, and shelters were ready to accept up to 4,800 evacuees, Gov. Bobby Jindal said. Some people living in the threatened...

"I wouldn't say that this is going to be a disaster, but the modern Mississippi levee system has never been tested under flood conditions like this," he said. "It's probably going to exceed water levels not seen since the Great Flood of 1927: historically the largest ever measured."

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (AP) - A federal judge is giving the go-ahead to the Army Corps of Engineers' plan to intentionally break a Mississippi River levee in southeastern Missouri. The break could happen as early as this weekend to spare a flood-threatened Illinois town just upriver. Friday's ruling in Cape Girardeau turns back Missouri's bid to block the corps from blasting a hole in the Birds Point levee in Mississippi County, just south of Cairo, Ill. Missouri argued the floodwaters would ruin farmland and damage about 100 homes.

http://www.maroonspoon.com/wx/gustav.html Live coverage...levee is failing 350 feet of wall falling apart as we speak...

What residents were hoping they could avoid has happened in St. Charles. As feared, part of the Elm Point Levee has burst and water is rushing through right now at a rapid pace. Authorities say that the levee burst in two spots around 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday. One of those holes is reportedly the size of a football field. Several homes and businesses in the area are now flooded. Officials say that residents in that area voluntarily evacuated before the breach.    Google map link

(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama took his campaign to Miami, Florida, on Saturday with a message to the nation's mayors: I'll be your ally in Washington, Sen. John McCain will not. (snip) "Both Sen. McCain and I have traveled recently to the areas that have been devastated by floods. And I know that Sen. McCain felt as strongly as I did feeling enormous sympathy for the victims of the recent flooding. ... And I'm sure they appreciated the sentiment, but they probably would have appreciated it even more if Sen. McCain hadn't opposed legislation to fund levees and flood control...

Des Moines, IA (AHN) - The flooding of the Mississippi River has brought out to the open the fact that half of 31 levees between southern Iowa and St. Louis are dated and could no longer withstand the river's rampaging waters.According to the Army Corps of Engineers the majority of the levees were build three decades ago, while some were as old as 6 decades. With a National Weather Service forecast of more rains and higher waters on the river, the army engineers fear at least 18 of the levees would give way and this would result to worst flooding...

LAKE DELTON, Wis. - Storms overnight added to swollen rivers and caused new levee breaks that swamped Illinois farms and homes — part of a week of severe weather that's claimed 15 lives and is expected to continue in the nation's heartland, impacting food prices across the country. Three levee breaks along the Embarras and Wabash rivers in Illinois were causing widespread flash flooding of nearby areas — including Lawrenceville, a town of 5,000, and several smaller communities. About 200 homes are in the immediately affected area, with water up to the roofs of some of them. Between 50 to...

Despite more than $22 million in repairs, a levee that broke with catastrophic effect during Hurricane Katrina is leaking again because of the mushy ground on which New Orleans was built, raising serious questions about the reliability of the city's flood defenses. Outside engineering experts who have studied the project told The Associated Press that the type of seepage spotted at the 17th Street Canal in the Lakeview neighborhood afflicts other New Orleans levees, too, and could cause some of them to collapse during a storm. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent about $4 billion so far of the...

4 Investigates: Floodwalls stuffed with newspaper? 11:54 PM CDT on Thursday, April 24, 2008 Lee Zurik / WWL-TV News Anchor "It blows my mind." Those are the words St. Bernard parish president Craig Taffaro used to watch videotape Eyewitness News showed him, of floodwalls built to protect his parish. "That should be criminal," Taffaro continues. What he's talking about was witnessed by a St. Bernard Parish resident whodidn't want to be identified, but did have sharp criticism of the work done by a contractor hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "It's like putting a Band-Aid on the hole...

I've been hearing rumors for a couple of weeks now that New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin is considering running for Governor. I finally found a news outlet that confirms this rumor, thanks to freelance journalist Jason Berry, who appeared on Informed Sources last night to predict that Nagin will run for Governor. Hat tip to Library Chronicles. As an aside, is this Jason Berry the author of Amazing Grace, an account of Charles Evers' run for Governor in Mississippi back in 1972? But back to the issue at hand - Ray Nagin running for Governor of Louisiana. This makes...

One hundred twenty-two levees from Maryland to California are at risk of failing, according to a list released Thursday by the Army Corps of Engineers. There could be danger to people who live in communities near some of the levees as well as a chance that they will have to pay more for insurance, said Butch Kinerney of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's national flood insurance program. The list was released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by news organizations, including The Associated Press. If the Corps of Engineers determines a levee to be at risk of...