Musical landmarks spared deluge

Record flooding along the Mississippi River threatens to inundate at least two Louisiana refineries and hundreds of oil and gas wells, officials have warned.

“This is a very serious flood,” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal told reporters.

Army engineers plan to open a major spillway by Saturday in order to divert water away from New Orleans and ease pressure on the Mississippi as it approaches the Gulf of Mexico.

Floodwaters as deep as 20 feet will inundate areas west of the river which house about 24,000 people and 13,000 structures. Mr Jindal urged residents to begin evacuations now.

The state’s fuel team has identified two refineries, over 1,750 oil and gas wells and 135 operators in the affected areas.

“Safety is a top concern on these structures as the Spillway is opened,” Mr Jindal’s office said in a press release.

“Flooding in the lower Mississippi valley, where 11 refineries process up to 2.5 million barrels a day, is causing problems for the US oil and oil product markets,” analyst Nic Brown of Natixis said in a note.

“Some refineries may need to be closed temporarily, while the transportation of both crude and oil products may also be impacted.”

The Mississippi River rose to levels not seen in Memphis since the 1930s, swamping homes in low-lying neighbourhoods and driving hundreds of people from their homes.

But officials were confident the levees would protect the city’s world-famous musical landmarks, including Graceland and Beale Street, and that no new areas would have any serious flooding.

As residents in the Home of the Blues waited for the river to crest at a projected mark just short of the record set in 1937, officials downstream in Louisiana began evacuating prisoners from the state’s toughest jail and opened floodgates to relieve pressure on levees outside New Orleans.

In Memphis, authorities have gone door-to-door to 1,300 homes over the past few days to warn people to leave, but they were already starting to talk about a labour-intensive clean up, signalling the worst was probably over.

“Where the water is today, is where the water is going to be,” Cory Williams, chief of geotechnical engineering for the Army Corps of Engineers in Memphis, said.

Exactly how many people heeded the warnings was not immediately clear, but more than 300 people were staying in shelters and police stepped up patrols in evacuated areas to prevent looting.

Aurelio Flores, 36, his pregnant wife and their three children were among 175 people staying in a gymnasium at the Hope Presbyterian Church. His mobile home had about four feet of water when he last visited the caravan park yesterday.

“I imagine that my trailer, if it’s not covered, it’s close,” said Mr Flores, an unemployed building worker. “If I think about it too much and get angry about it, it will mean the end of me.”

Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley made some of the recordings that helped him become king of rock ’n’ roll, was not in harm’s way. Nor was Stax Records, which launched the careers of Otis Redding and the Staple Singers. Sun Studio still does some recording, while Stax is now a museum.

Graceland, Elvis Presley’s former estate several miles south of downtown, was in no danger either.

“I want to say this: Graceland is safe. And we would charge hell with a water pistol to keep it that way and I’d be willing to lead the charge,” said Bob Nations, director of the Shelby County Emergency Management Agency.

Talking about the river levels, he later added: “They’re going to recede slowly, it’s going to be rather putrid, it’s going to be expensive to clean up, it’s going to be labour-intensive.”

The main Memphis airport was not threatened, nor was FedEx, which has a sorting hub at the airport that handles up to two million packages per day.

Forecasters said it appeared that the river was starting to level out and could crest near 48 feet, just shy of the all-time high of 48.7 feet.

The river was moving twice as much water downstream as it normally does, and the Army Corps of Engineers said homes in most danger of flooding were in places not protected by levees or floodwalls, including areas near Nonconnah Creek and the Wolf and Loosahatchie rivers.

About 150 corps workers were walking along levees and monitoring the performance of pumping stations.

Levees in the Memphis area are 58-foot high on average, and the floodwalls downtown are 54 feet.

At Beale Street, the thoroughfare known for blues music, people watched and took photos as water pooled at the end of the street. Beale Street’s world-famous nightspots are on higher ground.

At Sun Studio, where Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and a multitude of others also recorded, tourists from around the world continued to stream off buses and pose beneath the giant guitar hanging outside.

Because of heavy rain over the past few weeks and snowmelt along the upper reaches of the Mississippi, the river has broken high-water records upstream and inundated low-lying towns and farmland.

The water on the Mississippi is so high that the rivers and creeks that feed into it are backed up, and that has accounted for some of the worst of the flooding so far.