Okay. It is Miss. Hwy. 149 now, but for all of us who grew up around Louise and Wolf Lake, we know it as Highway 49. Thursday evening at 6:43 p.m. MDOT (Mississippi Department of Transportation) posted on its website that the highway had been closed from near Whittington Flood Control Channel and Erickson Road, which runs alongside Wolf Lake.
Think about that. That road was already elevated ... the bridges well above the water ... east and west flood control levees to contain the water in the canal ... and the road is closed because of flooding.
We were through that area last Saturday and, although we went the backroads out by the Yazoo airport and not Hwy. 149, I remember enough trips over that road going to Granny Walker's in South Mississippi every weekend to remember how much the water would have to rise to cross over that road.
The positive, I suppose, is that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Thursday that he had been told by the flood predictors to expect a lood elevation of 107 feet around Wolf Lake. While that's not good for everyone, it is good news for folks like Harold Horton and his sister, Hilma Horton Nibben. At 107 feet, the home they grew up in safe ... and higher, though, and it is not.
I wrote in an earlier blog that I simply couldn't wrap my mind around this flood. Now that MDOT has closed what we knew as U.S. Highway 49 West because of rising water, what little I had begun to grasp has slipped away in the flood.
Unimaginable.
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