Spillway opened to save New Orleans

ARMY engineers opened a key spillway along the bulging Mississippi River yesterday, deluging thousands of homes and farms in Louisiana’s Cajun country in order to avert a potentially bigger disaster in Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

About 25,000 people and 11,000 structures could be in harm’s way when the gates on the Morganza spillway were unlocked yesterday for the first time in 38 years.

“Protecting lives is the number one priority,” Major General Michael Walsh of the US Army Corps of Engineers said during a flyover of Mississippi flooding, before the decision was made to open the spillway.