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The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- i_am_proteus 4y agoAnyone interested in a long read about the Corps' work directing the flow of the Mississippi would do well to look at John McPhee's "Atchafalaya:" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya
- syntheticnature 4y agoAlso a more-recent three-part blog series at Wunderground: https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mississippi-Rivers-Old-River-Control-Structure https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mis... Edit: I recommend reading both.
- i_am_proteus 4y agoThanks for this. The photos really round out the story. >The head of the Army Corps’ flood fight efforts, Major General Charles C. Noble, gave the order to open the Morganza Floodway two days later to relieve pressure on the Low Sill Structure. The governor of Louisiana telephoned and asked if he had the authority to order that the Morganza Floodway not be opened. General Noble told him no. When complaints arose that he was not giving the promised five days' notice, he replied that the river didn't give him five days' notice.
- m-watson 4y agoThere is a good book that goes into some of the history and context around the river and how we got to this point. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America By: John M. Barry
- mwexler 4y agoThanks to OP for sharing. I'd not heard of this source before and would never have found it on my own.
- kiliantics 4y agoI think I first came across Hakai through a HN post. It's pretty niche but, in my opinion, it's an example of the kind of quality I wish more of our modern media had and what we should really be demanding in our news outlets.
- Geonode 4y agoJust moved to Baton Rouge. A few drops of rain and this whole town starts to pool. Very interesting region.
- meddlin 4y agoAsk people about 2016 if you haven't already been told. That Amite River isn't one to be ignored, nor the Comite.
- cmpb 4y agoWe do get a lot of rain and there are a lot of low areas. It was mostly "bottomland" before the woods were cleared out. Back in 2016, it basically rained for 15 straight days and flooded huge portions of north and east Baton Rouge. The past couple of weeks (start of August) have also been relatively wet, so that's likely why you're seeing excess water right now.
- Geonode 4y agoI love it, and I'm loving Baton Rouge.
- excitom 4y agoIt's interesting to venture close to the levee and note fresh water springs bubbling up from the pressure of the river flow. Then you realize you are standing below the surface of the river, which is reinforced by seeing large ocean going ships sail by above you.
- balentio 4y agoMan interferes with Natural Course of River via engineering. Decides this was a bad idea. Solution? More engineering. The West screws with water ways and goes dry. Solution? Screw with the Mississippi to send water out there where they screwed with water.
- ziddoap 4y agoWhile the context is wildly different, this type of incremental band-aid fixes of <insert thing> always reminds me of the 2004 movie The Butterfly Effect. The cycle of trying to fix something, making it worse (or other unintended/bad side effects appearing), try to fix the fix, repeat ad nauseum until everything breaks. I know there's a million (probably better) depictions of this pattern, but something about the bathtub scene in that movie will forever haunt me.
- njarboe 4y agoThis is how life was evolved. How you exist. 4 billion years of band-aid fixes, dead ends, cycle after cycle of living, trying, reproducing and dying. Beautiful, amazing, tragic, and full of terror. It's how the world works. Humans are just part of it.
- majormajor 4y agoSomeone gets seriously injured. Has surgery, lives! Years later has complications. Needs more extensive treatment. Lives! Years later later has even more complications, dies. Is the moral of that story "never interfere" to you? Nothing lasts forever. Maintenance is needed. [edit to add timeline, per response comment]
- ziddoap 4y agoI wasn't trying to state a moral. Just reminded of an older movie with a similar theme as parent comment, and thought I'd make a comment about it. That alright?
- pixl97 4y agoSomeone finds a marginal place to live, very few people live there. Improves the land somewhat. Later had complications and needs more treatment to ensure it's safe to live there. Dam breaks, a million people die. Moral of the story, "Oops, this particular set of choices was a terrible idea, maybe we don't do that again".
- BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 4y agoRiver deltas evolve in ways that have no regard for real estate values. Sediment builds up and constricts outflow until water finds another way through. Levees and channelisation redirect sediment.
- brnt 4y ago> River deltas evolve in ways that have no regard for real estate values. Yes and no. See the Netherlands. You need to configure an entire nation for it though, and I don't think any other country can/is.
- vidanay 4y agoAnd within 50 years or less with no maintenance, all of those areas would be reclaimed.
- brnt 4y agoExactly. It's firstly a social problem: can you get a people to be convinced this is worth investing significant time and money in for very long stretches of time? Water management in the Low countries has now a 1500 year history, planning is not for years but centuries. Expenses are a multitude of what's spent in the Mississippi Delta. That's the stuff that is needed to control nature. The Dutch have nowhere else to go, so it's existential. The Americans have space enough and therefore no need to make sure of the value of real estate in the Mississippi Delta.
- rapnie 4y agoIn Netherlands we have a new problem now to fix. There's a very efficient system of dikes, levies and pumps (large parts of the country are below sea level) to get rid of the water from the river Rhine and big rainfalls. But in recent years drought has become a big issue, and now we have to significantly alter this system so it is also able to retain water when necessary. This Wikipedia page has a map that shows how the country would look like without dikes. Amsterdam for instance would be fully flooded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlan... Referenced from this page is also the "Room for the River" project where indefensible lands are given up, and many places have been created where the river is allowed to flood its banks, so it becomes more manageable elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_for_the_River_(Netherlands) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_for_the_River_(Netherland...
- SamBam 4y agoThat's really interesting. It had not occurred to me that hemming a river in by building levees would lead to a net loss of land, I would have naively guessed it was the other way round. But I can see how the loss of silt to the ocean would cause that.
- smm11 4y agoBuffalo Commons, man.
- jwarden 4y agoMark Twain wrote a lot about the Army Corps of Engineering’s work on the Mississippi, as well as many other wonderful facts about this river and his experience as a steam boat pilot, in Life on the Mississippi, a uniquely informative and entertaining book.