Louisiana Flood Forces Choices on River Family, Threatens Ruin

Amy Thomasson, 38 and a single mother of three, spent her last night on the Louisiana land her family has farmed for more than 45 years packing photographs, furniture and clothes. A thunderstorm silhouetted the levee across the street that keeps the Atchafalaya River from her front yard.

Herb and Judith, her parents and next-door neighbors, had pulled the wedding photos of their three daughters from the dining room wall and quietly wrote off the crops growing in their fields that form part of the Morganza spillway. The fields will soon be swallowed by water diverted from the Mississippi River by the Army Corps of Engineers.