Page 12 - Levy System News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Evacuation orders. we have provided transportation and shelters. we are shelter be the grand isle right next door at the la fukushila fousche. >> we have only been on the ground a couple of 40urs john and people have said will the levies hold up? how confidence are the people in the area with the levy system? i have interviewed the army corps of engineers. they are confident. are you? >> yes. billions of dollars have gone in. we are much better protected than at the time katrina hit. mother nature is to be respect but we have fortified levees, walls, pump stations. all of our pump operators wi...

Martha: jonathan, thank you very much. cargo, as we said, is now slowly beginning to move again on the mississippi river. a 15-mile stretch was completely closed to shipping yesterday, which has a huge impact on the economy there. we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for every day that those barges cannot make it down the river. the coast guard fears that the wakes from those shipping vessels could increase the pressure on their already severely strained levy system. so today, coal and timber and iron and steel and more than half of the nation's grain supply, this is ...

Flood zone yesterday, and from up above it gives you a great appreciation for the levy system. the traces, the path of the mighty mississippi. it is first and foremost a flood wall. as martin savage tells us tonight, when the roads are underwater it can also double as an access trail to places like eagle creek, mississippi. martin? >> reporter: yeah, we just want to show you one other thing before we get rolling. that's look at the scene behind us. it looks like an idealic canal, perhaps, north of vicksburg. then have the camera pan onto the left, and you realize we're on the street. it's the ...

The ship there of the coast guard against the pier it's tied up. normally it would be tied up where the white circles are out there. because the water is so high, they can't tie it up there because it would buck in this way towards the coastline. so instead they've tied it up over there. now the guys say when they were working here the other day, putting out the sandbags, over here, you can't see the fence. you can see the back end of the fence over here. if you come to the left, the fence is underwater as the water gets deeper. they saw something swimming over here between the basketball cour...

show you its powerful punch in many forms. right here the pace of change is slow yet certain. last night we showed you the spillway from above a helicopter ride. the gates open toded to the gates open toded t divert wr away from mississippi. now the water is rising slowly as you see it. you see the rails that go up behind my shoulder. nose are normally dry. that's the edge of the river. it's rising more slowly than the engineers originally predicted. the folks were told by the mississippi crests near here next tuesday many of the homes could be underwater. dwayne moved here four mont...