captions by vitac www.vitac.com hello. you re in the cnn newsroom this saturday, may 14th, i m fredricka whitfield. saving two of louisiana s biggest cities at the sacrifice of flooding homes and farmland. that s what will likely happen as the u.s. army corps of engineers opens the morganza spillway beginning an hour from now. while opening the gaelts would slowly divert floodwaters from baton rouge and new orleans, areas in yellow could get up to 20 feet of water, in green up to 15 feet. the morganza spillway hasn t been opened in nearly 40 years. but for the u.s. army corps of engineers, it s a necessary move to protect major cities. they re going to open it slowly so people and wildlife are not caught by surprise. there s a slow opening for a lot of reasons. one is from an engineering perspective. the water will come out of here pretty quickly. you don t want to scour the back side of this structure. from an environmental perspective, ofb yous think there are lots
weeks more of watching the mississippi grow and grow and spread. our meteorologist jacqui jeras is tracking it all in the cnn severe weather center. it just breaks your heart, doesn t it? they are going through a lot of misery in the upcoming weeks, too. and sometimes not knowing is one of the hardest parts. and it will be weeks that those spill gates are going to be open, not to mention, after all the gates close back up and the water finally begins to recede. we put this together on google earth for you to give you a better idea of where st. landry parish is. there you can see this is the morganza flood gates here and in the st. landry. that moves right along the river there. that s where the water is spilling into. they opened the gates here and it spills down this way and heads on towards the south and towards the west. a couple of these communities, by the way, didn t have to heed the evacuations. they have the little circle levees as they call them including the town of melvill