re: Mississippi River could change its course forever during one major flood

Unless youre willing to change the hydraulic gradient of an entire river, any fix the corps comes up with is going to be short term and just big enough until a really big flood comes along. Then either the whole structure fails catastrophically, or it fails in a random spot, causing no shortage of terror for the residents who now have the Mississippi in their back yards.

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one major flood could cause it to fail and if that happens, there's literally no going back.


I don't believe this

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What makes you think that once the river changes course, you'll be able to bring it back through Baton Rouge and New Orleans? That's an absolutely tremendous amount of flow to deal with there. There would be no attempt to fix the problem until the water level goes down tremendously, which would take about 2 months. That's a lot of time for it to carve quite a deep trough into the bottom of the Atchafalaya River basin, likely resulting in its permanent foothold. If the Corps could tame its new path and redirect it back through BR and NOLA, I'd have my faith in the federal government completely restored.

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The third and fourth largest refineries in the United States (Marathon Garyville and XOM Baton Rouge) would go offline, reducing US refining capacity by over a million barrels per day.

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The loss of P66 Alliance, Valero St. Charles, PBF Chalmette, Valero Meraux, Shell Convent, and Shell Norco would reduce capacity by an additional 1.25 MM bbl/d.

For perspective, that would be 2.25 MM bbl/d out of the total US refining capacity of about 18.6 MM bbl/d, or about 12%. This would lead to massive shortages of gasoline and diesel in the US, which could cripple our economy (and consequently the global economy as well). It may also cause the price of crude produced in the US to plummet. The super majors would survive, but all of the smaller US-based companies invested in the shale plays may go under depending on how the market lines out.

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The economic impact would be felt on a global scale. It may not be the apocalypse but it would be significant.

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Someone want to explain to me why Louisiana is poor?

Yes that's a rhetorical question.

The real question is, why isn't everybody asking this question and why hasn't anything ever been done about it?

Because refining doesn't produce the same profits that raw crude provides.

Also, taxing that base into oblivion would guarantee their immediate departure.

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And you have to cut out a huge chunk of profits to line the pockets of the Louisiana politicians and powerful families

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Corruption isn't unique to Louisiana

The top doesn't nearly take as much as the bottom.