America's Achilles' heel: the Mississippi River's Old River Control Structure

Key point: The Mississippi would rather not go through New Orleans anymore, it only does so because the Corp of Engineers forces it to. That apparatus is about to get a severe test.

If you enjoyed this, you would enjoy reading the extended article by John McPhee about the control structure, linked to in the article above:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_T...

This and 2 other essays by McPhee were collected into a book, "The Control of Nature". The other essays, also quite long, were about debris flows in the LA basin, and about stopping an Icelandic volcanic flow which threatened a town and a port by spraying it with sea water. It's a fantastic book.

http://www.johnmcphee.com/controlofnature.htm

Huh, actually the Old River Control Structure being damaged and creating a massive disaster was the premise of an xkcd post, and the alt-text is about Jeff Masters having read good analysis on disaster scenarios

http://xkcd.com/748/

Anyone know what the long-term decade-scale plan is? Sooner or later we have to let the river move, because if I understand this correctly, over time it simply becomes arbitrarily harder to force through the same channel, without bound.

I think they're opening the Morganza spillway around 2:30 CT today. http://www.ustream.tv/channel/morganza

This doesn't sound promising: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/14/us-flooding-states...

Amazing

I posted this link yesterday - it is a well-written expose on a massive engineering product, that I didn't know anything about.