re: Escalating Floods Putting Mississippi River’s Old River Control Structure at Risk

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Like literally? OMG, I can’t even deal right now.

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With no levee, the 2016 flood would have been a non-event

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Dr. Jun Xu, explains how South Louisiana is on the verge of one of the worlds most detrimental natural disasters in history.

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I'm not a civil engineer, but as a trained surveyor, I've worked with many and I know my fair share of hydraulics, soil and water engineering principles and design methods, etc., and real world examples of success and failure implementing it all. You do not want to arm wrestle with the force of water- especially moving water. Make no mistake, the Mississippi is one giant laboratory of the science of hydraulics. Think of a hydraulic line on a tractor that has a weak spot- what happens? The fluid under pressure- hydraulic forces- expose that weakness without delay, and exploits it with extreme force. That tiny stream of fluid that is sometimes not visible to the naked eye will inject poisonous fluid into just about anything it hits and keep going (including human flesh) and keeps flowing until full displacement has been achieved. If there's a weak spot in the Missisippi's "hydraulic line" (and somewhere there is) then one day, whenever those laws of physics that want to "displace" find it, we will never stop it. And make no mistake about this either: while those forces are present, they're waiting, and they are ruthless: They do not think, they only act. One time I was working on a 400 acre topo project to design a neighborhood development. One of the surveyor/engineers on the project, who was a crabby old bastard that I had an immense amount of respect for and who had just about seen it all, had to remind a younger EIT that his grand ideas of solving some very real and problematic drainage issues on the parcel via "overcoming" what the water wanted to do, was not only a more expensive option (and a lazy one from a design standpoint), but it could very well be an act of futility: One can never tell what will happen when the sky opens up for months on end and tests the design data sitting on the engineer's computer screen. Not when we're talking about the quintessential definition of the word dynamic, that is, water, that is fluids under pressure, aka, hydraulic power. A basic premise is that you work with the water and not against it, and you exhaust all efforts to stick to that premise. When- and only when- you've exhausted those options do you attempt to overcome nature's mouthpiece; because while throwing all that man has in his engineering arsenal may work to overcome it, it might very damned well NOT work, and even if it does, don't trick yourself into ever thinking you've truly dominated it. Truth is, you've only come to a peaceful, albeit tentative, agreement for it to "stay put." And it's that "tentative" part that matters when winning battles means jack diddly chit when the history books tell of who won the war: regardless, time is against you and water has all the time in the world to wait for its singular moment to show who's running the show. No matter how heroic and diligent the upkeep and mitigation measures are, one single weak point, one single COE worker who skimped on a QC check because of a bad case of "the Fridays," is all it takes for the ruthlessness of water under pressure to skull drag our arses into submission once again. I'll never forget his lecture to that EIT in a real world setting that even the greatest of engineering schools can't reenact in a lab or classroom, and that I was lucky enough to be within earshot of hearing a master of civil engineering tell of his respect and awe for what hydraulic fluid, aka pissed off water, can do to the best of engineering feats. We have a long way to go before we absolutely free ourselves from the crushing force of water like the Mississippi River, and I doubt we ever truly do.






We could boil it.

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hen some even smarter baws decided to start building house on slabs at ground level.




Saves me a trip up the stairs.


Worth it

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Where we had our camp there was an old home pace from the early 19th century. You couldn't tell it was any higher with the naked eye but it was the only spot in that area that never flooded.

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The river dumps about 500 million tons of sediment into the Gulf. A year. That's not counting what it deposits along the way.

That's a small mountain.

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