Although I am by no means an expert on it, the Mississippi River has long fascinated me. It is the eighth largest river in the world in terms of mean discharge. One of my favorite songs, Heart of the Night, invokes the Mississippi. And I finally visited the confluences of the Mississippi and the Missouri River and Ohio River last October.
Several years ago I posted on Louisiana's plan to divert it. I followed that one up with a discussion of the Old River Control Structure Complex about 45 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. The complex was built by the Corps of Engineers to keep most ( c. 70%) the Mississippi's flow in the current channel and prevent it from doing what it would like to do (excuse the anthropomorphism): discharge into the Atchafalaya River, which would leave Baton Rouge and New Orleans useless as ports. Not a good situation, except for the river. A good discussion of this situation can be found in John McPhee's excellent book, The Control of Nature.
In June 2010 I posted on historian Douglas Brinkley's plan to 'save the Gulf' by freeing the Mississippi.
One of the things that has intrigued me since I learned of it as a graduate student is the physical model of the Mississippi Basin the Corps built near its Waterways Experiment Station facility in Vicksburg, MS. The model (shown here; picture from the article mentioned below) is quite large, on the order of several hundred acres. As luck would have it, when I finally got around to making a trip to that area, the place was off-limits to the public. I was told I would have to get special permission to schedule a visit.
Imagine my surprise when Josh Wallaert, Assistant Editor of Places, emailed me about a story about the model by Kristi Dykema Cheramie, The Scale of Nature: Modeling the Mississippi River. It is a wonderfully-written and thoroughly-documented history of the model from its inception in the late 1930s by Major Eugene Reybold (pictured below; from the article).
From the story:
Reybold came up with a radical idea: a large-scale hydraulic model that would enable engineers to observe the interactive effects of weather and proposed control measures over time and "develop plans for the coordination of flood-control problems throughout the Mississippi River Basin." Only a physical model of all lands affected by the Mississippi River and its tributaries could meet the three major goals of the Army Corps:
... to determine methods of coordinating the operation of reservoirs to accomplish the maximum flood protection under various combinations of flood flow; to determine undesirable conditions that might result from non-coordinated use of any part of the reservoir system, particularly the untimely release of impounded water; and to determine what general flood control works were necessary (levees, reservoirs, floodways) and what improvements might be desirable at existing flood control works.
Reybold understood that such a project would require a paradigm shift in the Army
Corps of Engineers. His colleague John Freeman ran a small hydraulics laboratory, the Waterways Experiment Station, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but had been denied funding for more comprehensive research. "Field experience," said Secretary of War Dwight Davis, "is undoubtedly of much greater value than laboratory experiments could possibly be." [10] Nevertheless, Freeman’s laboratory drew the attention of young, ambitious engineers who could see the benefit of fluid mechanics modeling. Reybold worked with the Experiment Station to construct a small section of the exceptionally steep Kanawha River as a pilot model. He knew that if he could simulate historic flood events and produce accurate flood hydrographs of the Kanawha, he could build support for a model of the entire Mississippi River Basin. Reybold’s plan worked; in 1943 the Corps of Engineers approved his proposal to build a comprehensive model.
The model is no longer used, since replaced by sophisticated computer models.
What I've presented here is just a brief snippet, a teaser, if you will. There is a lot more there; it's an excellent read.
"Society requires artifice to survive in a region where nature might reasonably have asked a few more eons to finish a work of creation that was incomplete." — John McPhee, The Control of Nature, 1989 (from the story)
"And the river she rises
Just like she used to do.
She's so full of surprises
She reminds me of you."
-- Heart of the Night by Poco (written by Paul Cotton)
Comments