“The thing about Louisiana farmers and our people is we’re very resilient, but it’s a hard thing to tell a man that you’re going to destroy his crops,” said Michael G. Strain, the Louisiana agriculture commissioner.
The last time the Corps opened the spillway’s floodgates, in 2011, an epic flood inundated nearly 100,000 acres of agricultural land, forced a cattle evacuation and reduced production of oil and natural gas. In St. Mary Parish, about 100 miles southwest of Baton Rouge, nearly 50 homes and businesses were flooded. And it wreaked havoc on local wildlife, killing an estimated 1,600 whitetail deer and displacing the Louisiana black bear, a federally listed threatened species.
Mr. Strain praised the Army Corps’s handling of the current situation, saying that not opening the spillway would threaten the structure’s integrity and thousands of acres downstream. “If we did not do this, the flooding would be worse. It would be catastrophic.”
At the church in Sand Springs, flooded neighbors and some officials came up to Mr. DesBarres when the meeting was over and thanked him for speaking out. He said his three-bedroom ranch-style home has about seven feet of water inside.
He said he would work with elected officials to pursue an investigation into the Army Corps and its policy of waiting for rain on the ground that prevented it from lowering the reservoir long before the storm. “They failed miserably in their mission of flood control,” he said. “I get it that they had to do something so the water wouldn’t come over the dam. But that’s kind of late, isn’t it?”
Karen Keith, the Tulsa County commissioner who coordinated the meeting, said local officials also want answers about the agency’s policy.
“I would like to see an examination of the policy,” she said. “If we are in a spring where the weather pattern looks like it’s going to be a very wet spring, then let’s bring down that flood pool.”
