June – 2011 – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Monthly Archives: June 2011

June 30, 2011 – 6:00 am

blowing the fuse

[Detonation at the Birds Point inflow crevasse, during the night of 2 May 2011.] As sand boils appeared in Cairo, the swollen rivers continued to rise.  The city was under mandatory evacuation orders, and the flood gauge was expected to reach 63 feet — not high enough to over-top the city’s levees, but high enough […]

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June 29, 2011 – 6:00 pm

sand boil

[The breach in Missouri River Levee 575, on June 14.] The breach at Hamburg — mentioned a few posts back — began with a “sand boil”, a geotechnical phenomenon shared by earthquakes and floods, in which subterranean water pressure becomes so strong that ground water erupts, typically bubbling like a gentle geyser, and bringing soil […]

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June 28, 2011 – 6:00 pm

patterns

[Flooding on the Indus river around Hyderbad, Pakistan, 19 August 2010; image via NASA Earth Observatory.] At Weather Underground, Jeff Masters reflects on the extreme weather of 2010 — which included monsoon flooding in China, the Pakistani floods (the most expensive disaster in Pakistan’s history), the Queensland flood (Australia’s most expensive natural disaster), Colombia’s record […]

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June 28, 2011 – 6:00 am

the mouse

[Just north of the Missouri River, another, smaller river has been smashing flood records, propelled by the same combination of snow pack and heavy rains.  In the oil boomtown of Minot, North Dakota, the Souris River (French for “mouse”, which has produced the local nickname “the Mouse”) has reached thirteen feet over flood stage — […]

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June 27, 2011 – 9:00 pm

dredging fort peck

[A dredger at work in one of Fort Peck Dam’s borrow pits; photographer unknown.  (Fort Peck, you will recall, was the first of the six major dams on the Missouri to be built.)  The dredgers, pontoon boats, and booster barges used in the pumping of fill material from upstream borrow pits to the Fort Peck […]

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June 27, 2011 – 12:00 pm

ditch 6

[The “Ditch 6” levee at Hamburg, Iowa; photographed by the Army Corps of Engineers on June 16.  Following the breach of levee 575 which prompted the evacuation orders for southern Hamburg, the Army Corps “immediately underwent further construction to raise the elevation of Ditch 6 levee”; the plastic sheeting protects the soft earth of the […]

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June 27, 2011 – 6:00 am

a partial atlas of mississippi floods

[I’ll be updating this atlas as I continue to post on floods; for now, there are two categories — blue, for Missouri floods, and yellow, for historical Mississippi floods.]

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June 25, 2011 – 7:00 am

six dams and six reservoirs

[Fort Peck Lake (top), Spillway (middle) and Dam (above), in northeast Montana; built between 1933 and 1940, Fort Peck is the world’s largest “hydraulically-filled” dam, which means that it was constructed by dredging suspended sediment from borrow pits and pumping it to discharge pipes at the dam site, where it settles onto the embankment.  (This […]

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June 23, 2011 – 12:00 pm

reluctant migration

In yet another great little piece at Domus, Fred Scharmen and Molly Wright Steenson look at the history and potential of the relationship between architecture and the field of interaction design, arguing that further disciplinary promiscuity would benefit both architects and interaction designers: “Instead of bringing together users through machines, what if interaction design were […]

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June 23, 2011 – 6:00 am

hamburg, iowa

[False-color satellite imagery of flooding along the Missouri River near Hamburg, Iowa: “On June 19, 2011, the AHPS reported, the Missouri crested slightly above the record level set for Brownville [Nebraska, about 15 miles downstream from Hamburg] in 1993. The record level was 44.3 feet (13.5 meters), and on June 19, the river briefly reached […]

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June 20, 2011 – 8:29 pm

“a coordinated infrastructural ensemble”

In a great little piece for Domus, Geoff Manaugh looks at what the “critical foreign dependencies” cable says about the nature of the contemporary nation-state: “The sites described by the cable—Israeli ordnance manufacturers, Australian pharmaceutical corporations, Canadian hydroelectric dams, German rabies vaccine suppliers—form a geometry whose operators and employees are perhaps unaware that they define […]

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June 18, 2011 – 2:17 pm

project design flood

[The “project design flood” is the maximum flood that the Army Corps of Engineers has engineered the Mississippi River’s flood control structures to accommodate; the image here (via America’s Wetland and Loyola University) shows those flows in cubic feet per second. I’ve been slow to link (though, as promised, the flood blogging is going to pick […]

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June 7, 2011 – 6:00 pm

2011

In NASA Earth Observatory’s latest image of the Mississippi River Valley, floodwaters from this spring’s historic flooding — “the floodwaters have been the highest on record at more than half of the gauges along the [levees] between Missouri and Louisiana” — are receding, and the river crested back on the 31st of May at Morgan […]

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June 6, 2011 – 6:00 am

cubit’s gap

[Cubit’s Gap, Louisiana] FASLANYC reports on the Mississippi as a “land-making machine”, vividly illustrated by the case of Cubit’s Gap: “…let’s consider the case of Cubit’s Gap, a major subdelta of the [Mississippi].  The gap formed in 1862 after an oyster fisherman (Cubit) and his daughters excavated a small ditch in the natural levee between […]

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June 4, 2011 – 6:00 am

“winds of drought, winds of flood”

[A NASA visualization of the 1993 summer wind patterns that caused that year’s Mississippi floods: “The arrows indicate wind trajectories, while color indicates wind height. The length of a line equates to wind speed (stronger winds get longer lines). Black arrows trace the low-altitude winds that carry moisture, the winds most relevant to the 1988 […]

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June 3, 2011 – 11:00 am

1993

[A Wal-Mart in Festus, Missouri, photographed on July 9, 1993.  The Great Mississippi and Missouri Floods of 1993 were the most costly in the history of the United States, causing some $15 billion in damages, and inundating vast swathes of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana.  In some […]

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June 3, 2011 – 6:00 am

red river landing

[Red River Landing, Louisiana] It’s not all that easy, actually, to rank the severity of the 20th century’s great Mississippi floods.  One reason is that Mississippi River flooding is often primarily on the upper Mississippi (1993) or the lower Mississippi (1973, 1983), which makes like-to-like comparison difficult.  Another is that there are so many different […]

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June 2, 2011 – 6:00 pm

morganza floodway

[1. The Morganza Spillway, the 3,900-foot control structure that sits at the north end of the Morganza Floodway, in drier times.  It “consists of a concrete weir, two sluice gates, seventeen scour indicators, and 125 gated openings”.] [2. A levee on the western side of the Morganza Floodway, near Krotz Springs.] [3. The southern terminus […]

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June 2, 2011 – 6:00 am

1973

[You may recall that our posting on floods began with an image quite like the two above.  That first image was, like these two, a false-color satellite image of the open Morganza Spillway; but where the first image was taken in May, the two above were taken on May 5, 1973 and April 6, 1977 […]

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June 1, 2011 – 11:00 pm

unusual flood typologies iii: devils lake

[Top, Devils Lake, North Dakota — a glacial lakebed which has been slowly rising since 1992: “Unlike with a river flood, this water does not naturally recede after a week or a month. It has nowhere to go: The lakebed is the result of a glacier that melted roughly 10,000 years ago, and its only […]

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