re: Is there a backup for the Old River control structure?

There's a good reddit post where a professor talks about that being the easiest, most detrimental terrorist attack they could do to our country. It'd pretty much make the Mississippi and NOLA useless for a time being Destroying the country's economy and impeding the transportation of goods for months to years. Pretty interesting stuff.

And that's not "worst case" scenario.

Most people don't know why everything south of Memphis isn't part of Mexico today:

It is a matter of record that Hernando Desoto, former Lieutenant to Cortez and Pizarro, camped on the Mississippi River bank at a site in what is now Tunica County, Mississippi, probably during March of 1543. There he witnessed a flood that did not peak for 40 days and he saw an immense expanse of water that he estimated was about 60 miles wide (Harrison, 1961, pp 51, 52). In his posthumous report to the Spanish King , this senior Conquistador and daring explorer undoubtedly advised his ruler that all the land to the southwest was the Mississippi River and that included all the land in the flood plain south of Tunica (or, say, Memphis). Such a report by a trusted and senior commander undoubtedly cooled the interest of the Spanish throne in conquering , and taking over, the flood-prone land described by Desoto. This shift in interest enabled the French, about 150 years later, to explore the lower Mississippi and, in 1699, to claim for the French Crown the area from its mouth to the latitude of Old River. The French Settlement, particularly the settlement of New Orleans, was flooded in 1718, even while the first levees were being built by Le Blond de la Tour.

From "If the Old River Control Structure Fails"

Water up north would spill out and cause major floods in Arkansas, Mississippi, etc before it was enough coming down to overwhelm the levees, ORCS, and the spillways. Even with really high snow melts they barely have to open the spillways up.

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I agree with it breaking during a high water event. I would love to see a model of this happening.

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There's a paper LSU put out in the early 80s studying what would happen if a 73 evet happened again and it failed. It's floating around on the interwebs.

No bueno.

To start, I10 and US 190 would be wiped out, as well as a shitload of important pipeline and infrastructure.

In addition to the flooding of Morgan City (as well as a number of other places in between), you would have an issue of drinking water for NO and other communities that use the river for drinking water.

It would require a shutdown of River Bend as the water would become too saline (and would also frick with most of the plants downstream that use river water to cool processes).

If The Old River Control Structure Fails

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You need to go visit this place. It worth the trip if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. There’s also a virtual tour on the website.

LSU Center for River Studies

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If you want to go old school, one can visit the Mississippi River Basin Model. It was all overgrown the time I went, but supposedly it's being fixed up some.

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If The Old River Control Structure Fails

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Has anyone updated this? It's 42 years old.

It’s never going to fail. But we will always have these threads because people can just say “we can’t control nature it will happen eventually.”

It won’t.

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It’s never going to fail. But we will always have these threads because people can just say “we can’t control nature it will happen eventually.”

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everything wears/breaks at some point. its life. im sure they upkeep it and do whats necessary to keep it running but at some point it will cease to work. hopefully theres enough warning for them to have something in place to fix it but there's not telling.