re: Lower Mississippi River to be dredged to 50 feet. (not a river pilot thread)

quote:

---

WHEN MUD AND SANDBARS were choking off the Mississippi— America’s highway—from the ocean, James Buchanan Eads had the solution. But to implement it, he had to overcome an adversary even more implacably hostile than the river itself: the Army Corps of Engineers.

---

quote:

---

The Corps had tried a variety of solutions over the previous forty years.

None had succeeded.

Only recently the Corps had given up and pronounced the sandbar a permanent, immovable barrier. It planned to outflank it by building a canal to connect the river to the Gulf. The canal idea had gained nearly universal support throughout the Mississippi Valley, especially in New Orleans.

So Eads’s words were controversial, even inflammatory. He called for constructing jetties—two parallel piers stretching far out into the Gulf. They would narrow the river and increase its current, which Eads believed would be enough to cut a new channel through the bar.

He had watched this very thing happen in St. Louis in 1837. Sandbars had grown into tree-covered islands so big that they threatened to cut the city off from the river.

Robert E. Lee, then a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, built a jetty into the river that directed the force of the main channel against the islands.

They quickly melted away.

Now Eads wanted to do the same thing at the Mississippi’s mouth, in defiance of the canal advocated by the Corps and its chief.

---

quote:

---

I don't know where they have been placing dredge spoil from the passes. But from Belle Chasse to BR they typically pump the spoil to the side(s) of the channel (but still in the river).

I'd like to know how many pipelines (if any) will have to be replaced to accommodate the deeper channel - and who will pay to replace them.

---