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Show RTVER Early in the twentieth century, the Army Corps of Engineers were given charge of the Mississippi River Valley. They were allowed a virtual carte blanch to tinker with the river, and tinker they did. Flood control and creating and maintaining a navigable channel were the prime aims of the Corps' new battle with the Old Man. The great levees were built and the bed of the river was forced into a narrow, mile-wide ditch, eliminating the swamps and backwaters that naturally regulated the annual runoff. Above St. Louis, the Corps built twenty-seven locks and dams, and the engineers controlled the flow of the lower river with wing dams and revetments. At the confluence of the Red and the Atchafalaya, millions of dollars were spent to build a series of dams and waterways now known poetically as the Old River Control Structure. The consequences of these improvements were largely unforeseeable, and some of the results proved disastrous. The river has been compressed into a narrow channel that flows relentlessly toward the sea, unable to distribute the load of sediment it carries from half the continent. It blasts this sediment into the Gulf of Mexico and the coast of Louisiana (built of these very sediments) is rapidly deteriorating. Though tamed by the millions of dollars spent on the Old River Control Structure, the river threatens to wash all the concrete away, find a new outlet to the Gulf, and leave New Orleans high and dry. The levees themselves are able to protect some communities, but all that water has to go some place, and in flood years the excess water inundates lower Mississippi and Louisiana. There's something wildly presumptuous about the Corps of Engineers' attempts to domesticate the Old Man. The river has been flowing through the Mississippi Valley since the last ice age, through flood and drought, bound only -179- |