The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi | Hacker News Reader

The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi

hakaimagazine.com

104 pointssamclemens45 comments

Anyone interested in a long read about the Corps' work directing the flow of the Mississippi would do well to look at John McPhee's "Atchafalaya:"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya

Also a more-recent three-part blog series at Wunderground: https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Americas-Achilles-Heel-Mis...

Edit: I recommend reading both.

Thanks for this. The photos really round out the story.

>The head of the Army Corps’ flood fight efforts, Major General Charles C. Noble, gave the order to open the Morganza Floodway two days later to relieve pressure on the Low Sill Structure. The governor of Louisiana telephoned and asked if he had the authority to order that the Morganza Floodway not be opened. General Noble told him no. When complaints arose that he was not giving the promised five days' notice, he replied that the river didn't give him five days' notice.

River deltas evolve in ways that have no regard for real estate values.

Sediment builds up and constricts outflow until water finds another way through.

Levees and channelisation redirect sediment.

> River deltas evolve in ways that have no regard for real estate values.

Yes and no. See the Netherlands. You need to configure an entire nation for it though, and I don't think any other country can/is.

In Netherlands we have a new problem now to fix. There's a very efficient system of dikes, levies and pumps (large parts of the country are below sea level) to get rid of the water from the river Rhine and big rainfalls. But in recent years drought has become a big issue, and now we have to significantly alter this system so it is also able to retain water when necessary.

This Wikipedia page has a map that shows how the country would look like without dikes. Amsterdam for instance would be fully flooded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlan...

Referenced from this page is also the "Room for the River" project where indefensible lands are given up, and many places have been created where the river is allowed to flood its banks, so it becomes more manageable elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_for_the_River_(Netherland...

And within 50 years or less with no maintenance, all of those areas would be reclaimed.

Exactly. It's firstly a social problem: can you get a people to be convinced this is worth investing significant time and money in for very long stretches of time? Water management in the Low countries has now a 1500 year history, planning is not for years but centuries. Expenses are a multitude of what's spent in the Mississippi Delta. That's the stuff that is needed to control nature. The Dutch have nowhere else to go, so it's existential. The Americans have space enough and therefore no need to make sure of the value of real estate in the Mississippi Delta.

There is a good book that goes into some of the history and context around the river and how we got to this point.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

By: John M. Barry

Just moved to Baton Rouge. A few drops of rain and this whole town starts to pool. Very interesting region.

We do get a lot of rain and there are a lot of low areas. It was mostly "bottomland" before the woods were cleared out. Back in 2016, it basically rained for 15 straight days and flooded huge portions of north and east Baton Rouge. The past couple of weeks (start of August) have also been relatively wet, so that's likely why you're seeing excess water right now.

I love it, and I'm loving Baton Rouge.

It's interesting to venture close to the levee and note fresh water springs bubbling up from the pressure of the river flow. Then you realize you are standing below the surface of the river, which is reinforced by seeing large ocean going ships sail by above you.

Ask people about 2016 if you haven't already been told. That Amite River isn't one to be ignored, nor the Comite.

Mark Twain wrote a lot about the Army Corps of Engineering’s work on the Mississippi, as well as many other wonderful facts about this river and his experience as a steam boat pilot, in Life on the Mississippi, a uniquely informative and entertaining book.

That's really interesting. It had not occurred to me that hemming a river in by building levees would lead to a net loss of land, I would have naively guessed it was the other way round. But I can see how the loss of silt to the ocean would cause that.

Thanks to OP for sharing. I'd not heard of this source before and would never have found it on my own.

I think I first came across Hakai through a HN post. It's pretty niche but, in my opinion, it's an example of the kind of quality I wish more of our modern media had and what we should really be demanding in our news outlets.

Man interferes with Natural Course of River via engineering. Decides this was a bad idea. Solution? More engineering.

The West screws with water ways and goes dry. Solution? Screw with the Mississippi to send water out there where they screwed with water.

I don't even know where to begin.

First, all of humanity has screwed with waterways for our entire existence. The West, The East, The North, The South. Hell, Beavers do it. But the earliest human civilization was borne on rivers, and grew out of screwing with water ways. For irrigation, for navigation.

Every major river in the world that hosts civilization has been MASSIVELY screwed with for that civilization's survival - consistency and predictability is important for us to not DIE, never mind, thrive. That means managing seasonal flooding. That means maintaining a navigatable depth for shipping. That means (eventually, once we woke up) controlling waste flow and filtration, etc.

The Mississippi supports tens of millions of people and tens of billions of dollars of economic activity. OF COURSE, humanity was going to make it reliable. There were externalities. Now they're going to deal with those EXACTLY the same way as they did before - yes - with more engineering.

"Man decides to cure disease with medicine. The medicine doesn't work. Solution? More medicine! Lunacy!"

Well, yes, but DIFFERENT medicine. Just cuz they're both medicine (engineering) doesn't mean that this medicine (adjusting levee routing) is the same as this other medicine (originally having built the levees in the first place.

I mean, if the alternative is people slowly die of dehydration (and all western-US farms lose all their crops), or we have to fast-track depopulation of many western states, ruining peoples lives and wrecking economic output (that will ripple outward to affect the whole country, and then some)... yeah, let's absolutely definitely do something.

Water engineering is something that's been done for millennia. Sure, there are bad things that can happen, but modern civilization just doesn't work without water engineering. And I suspect you would not like the kind of civilization we'd have to stick with, if we weren't allowed to touch waterways. Even if you were ok with that, the vast majority of people would not be, and them's the breaks.

The cost of throwing up our hands and allowing the Mississippi to revert to its natural course would probably be in the trillions of dollars.

The only truly viable solution is a managed transition over the course of 50 years or more. We will fight that inevitability for as long as possible, and God help us if the ORCS fails.

Agree.

However, I remember being in Landscape Architecture in college and one of my professors was from Colorado and took every opportunity to go after the US Army Corps of Engineers and repeatedly related their failures as a case study in what not to do.

Ironically, a few later in 2005 (while I still in college) Hurricane Katrina blew through all of the US ACOE flood protections. Their plans failed catastrophically with levee breaches in over 50 places.

So yeah, we shouldn't throw our hands up, but the US ACOE doesn't have a great track record for making issues like this better.

but the US ACOE doesn't have a great track record for making issues like this better

Neither does anyone else.

When I survey the landscape for organizations with the experience and equipment to solve water problems in the US, ACOE is right at the top of the list. What organizations do you feel are better suited to these tasks up and down the Mississippi? Of out west in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico? Or down in Georgia-Florida? And so on.

These are all diverse and complex engineering challenges that impact wide geographic areas. Failure is to be expected. It's one of the maintenance conditions on infrastructure.

Maybe NOAA? Perhaps civilian oversight directing military construction would improve things. At least science and commerce are the core missions at NOAA, not just a side job.

I remember hearing about how screwed New Orleans was going to be in a meteorology class, eventually. It didn’t take too long. We all knew for decades in the earth sciences.

> Man interferes with Natural Course of River via engineering. Decides this was a bad idea. Solution? More engineering.

Wow, an ad hominem attack on engineering? That's a very special take to have on a site calles HACKER news!

Would you prefer we'd suffer nature and never attempt anything? That's not very hackish :)

Whether we like it or not, the Mississippi is sending a lot of clearwater down the gulf of Mexico, water that is needed elsewhere. The plan makes sense- and not just for the most visible parts like the Hoover dam.

Nothing is without risk: the risk of doing nothing may be more to your liking, but there will also be consequences, and some people will suffer. Of course, by doing nothing you may try to avoid personal blame - but it's akin to a trolley problem, and inaction can be morally guilty if you believe in utilitarianism.

IMHO the most important thing to do is to honestly study all the alternatives (including inaction) then choosing the one that makes the more sense - yes, even if it's action, and even if there may be some prejudice against engineering, or a bad precedent (that can and should be taken into account in the honest study)

> IMHO the most important thing to do is to honestly study all the alternatives

Like not farming in deserts? It's ironic to me that progressive states like California refuse to change their incoherent farming practices that have obliterated their water supply yet they're totally open to diverting rivers all over the country outside of California. I think this is what OP was eluding to. The water crisis doesn't need engineering. It needs a change in mentality first and foremost.

These arid Californian climates are very good for agriculture, that's why we need massive geoengineering projects to redirect rivers thousands of miles away to make it work.

*scratches head*

If I had any gold doubloons, I'd give you one for this answer.

While the context is wildly different, this type of incremental band-aid fixes of <insert thing> always reminds me of the 2004 movie The Butterfly Effect. The cycle of trying to fix something, making it worse (or other unintended/bad side effects appearing), try to fix the fix, repeat ad nauseum until everything breaks. I know there's a million (probably better) depictions of this pattern, but something about the bathtub scene in that movie will forever haunt me.

Someone gets seriously injured. Has surgery, lives! Years later has complications. Needs more extensive treatment. Lives! Years later later has even more complications, dies.

Is the moral of that story "never interfere" to you?

Nothing lasts forever. Maintenance is needed.

[edit to add timeline, per response comment]

Someone finds a marginal place to live, very few people live there. Improves the land somewhat. Later had complications and needs more treatment to ensure it's safe to live there. Dam breaks, a million people die.

Moral of the story, "Oops, this particular set of choices was a terrible idea, maybe we don't do that again".

"By a waterway" isn't a marginal place to live, historically. It comes with risk, but avoids a more immediate "oh shit there's no water here" risk.

But more generally, this sort of "just don't be stupid" mindset assumes a static world. How many places would we be able to pick if we wanted to avoid any possibility of hundred year disasters? Five-hundred-year disasters? Thousand-year disasters? And when it comes to decisions made hundreds of years ago, how would you unwind those so simply? Just up and move millions of people from a major city? Is that better than trying to mitigate risk?

> "By a waterway" isn't a marginal place to live, historically.

Exactly; living by the water has always been the best choice. The water doesn't even need to be drinkable.

GP's style of argument misses the important point that avoiding injuries is not a goal. The tribe that settles by the river and grows to a population of five million, but experiences flood-related losses of a million people once a decade or so, is better off than the tribe that stays in the desert and grows to a population of fifty.

Over time, as the bottom of the channel gradually rose, the river overflowed its banks. Dikes were built ever higher to prevent flooding, and in some places the river started to flow above the surrounding countryside. Today, in a stretch of about 1,100 miles, the Yellow River moves along 11 yards above the plain. But dikes do not control silting, and floods continue to occur on an ever larger scale. On more than 1,500 occasions during the [roughly 2100-year] history of imperial China the Yellow River burst its dikes, destroying farmland, killing villagers, and earning its description as "China's sorrow".

(The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674057341/ )

Saying you shouldn't live near the river because it occasionally drowns everyone nearby is saying you shouldn't own stocks because sometimes they go down. It's an argument that is completely insane.

The alternative to not living near the river is to live on higher ground (and use the land near the river for agriculture, parks etc.). Given that there is vastly more land on the higher ground than near the river, I don't see the problem with doing so.

New Orleans isn't marginal, though. Without exaggeration, that stretch of coastline is probably the most important collection of ports in the western hemisphere.

I wasn't trying to state a moral.

Just reminded of an older movie with a similar theme as parent comment, and thought I'd make a comment about it. That alright?

> Someone gets seriously injured. Has surgery, lives! Later has complications. Needs more extensive treatment. Lives! Later later has even more complications, dies.

> Is the moral of that story "never interfere" to you?

That is the moral most doctors tend to take from it, yes.

You want to consider what you're gaining from the first surgery. If you're 20 years old, steps two and three are unlikely to occur (not in any way related to the initial surgery), and you're gaining a lot. If you're 80 years old and in poor health, you just described a way of making your own life worse while pissing away most of your savings.

There's a lot of middle ground, though.

If you're 45 years old, and that surgery extends and improves your quality of life until you're 60 or 65, and then you need more surgery to keep things going for another 15-20 years, that's probably worth it, no?

Sure, there are plenty of cases where post-surgery life may not be worth it (but then that's entirely in the eyes of the beholder to decide), but that's not all there is.

I intended to imply there were years in between those incidents, apologies, I realize it wasn't clear.

This is how life was evolved. How you exist. 4 billion years of band-aid fixes, dead ends, cycle after cycle of living, trying, reproducing and dying. Beautiful, amazing, tragic, and full of terror. It's how the world works. Humans are just part of it.

You just described half the software development jobs I've had.

The idea that manipulating river flow is the reason for the current drought conditions is ridiculous.

Buffalo Commons, man.

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