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Gambling along its shores is worth up to $13 million a month in tax revenues, says Allen Godfrey, deputy director of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. And that doesn't take into account local sales taxes on the 6,700-plus casino hotel rooms on the river, or the income of about 13,000 employees who work the riverfront casinos, he says. The recent historic floods have proven another of Twain's observations: "The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise ..." Anderson, the Corps spokesman, says the flooded river is carrying almost 2.4 million cubic feet of water per second. "That's 25 Niagara Falls per second," he says. "Enough water to fill up the (New Orleans) Super Dome in less than a minute." And it is not just water. The Mississippi drains some of the nation's most productive farmlands. Its banks have become "one of the most densely populated industrial sectors in the entire world," says Sandlin. All of that agricultural and industrial runoff finds its way into the river. And much of it will settle in the rice paddies, pastures and seafood-breeding bayous of the Lower Mississippi. At the same time, the Mississippi has been harnessed to produce power. Hydroelectric accounts for about 7 percent of Xcel Energy's capacity in Minnesota, says company spokeswoman Patti Nystuen. It buys 4.4 megawatts of that capacity from the City of Hastings. With the Mississippi running so high, you might think those plants would be going like gangbusters. You'd be wrong. "It's just the opposite," says Tom Montgomery, director of public works for the city of 22,000. The high waters are too much of a good thing, he says. Normally, the city has about a 12-foot drop across its hydroelectric dam, and requires at least a 4 1/2-foot drop to generate power. But with the water so high, that drop is only around 4 feet Clyde Dufour's problem is much the same. Dufour, owner of Highway 1 Fish Market in Simmesport, normally takes in between 14,000 and 15,000 pounds of river fish a day, mostly catfish and the various species of carp
-- Asian, buffalo, grass and German. But the waters are too high and fast to set the hook nets. "Now I'm not picking 1,000 pounds a day," he says. He's not catching any crawfish at all. Like many in the area, the 53-year-old Cajun blames some of his woe on the Corps' decision to open portions of the Morganza Spillway
-- relieving pressure on the structures protecting the population centers of Baton Rouge and New Orleans, while flooding the rich fishing grounds of the Atchafalaya Basin. "They hold the water, then they let it all come on us," he says. "If they would let it go gradually through all the time, it would never have went against the levees even." Tom Hymel, a fisheries specialist with Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, says today's pain will be tomorrow's gain. "When you get this big rise like this, it flushes those areas out," says Hymel, who works closely with the region's shrimpers. "Later on it's going to be highly productive in crawfishing. ... It's going to be a bonanza for sport fishing." But Dufour is worried about the here and now. "Next month, I don't know how I'm going to pay my bills, I'll be honest with you," he says. "I've got 10 employees. I'm going to have to let go some of this. ... and I've got about 20, about 30 fishermen fishes for me, and each one of them got one or two deckhands with them. It hurts a lot." As sad as it is for some, Sandlin says, the nation has chosen its course
-- and the Mississippi's. "If we took out all of the controls ... I think the river, we'd find it almost impossible to live with," he says. "So we have this sort of enormous artificial construction now that we're kind of stuck with."
[Associated
Press;
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