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

Monthly Archives: July 2011

July 23, 2011 – 6:00 am

willow fascine mattress

[Before the use of articulated concrete mats was standardized, the Army Corps often relied on a variety of other methods of revetment construction.  The weaving and placement of willow fascine mattresses, as seen above, was one such earlier practice; the installation process is remarkably similar to and prefigures the process for concrete mats.  Images via […]

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July 21, 2011 – 8:46 pm

casting fields

[Map of revetments under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers’ Team New Orleans, on the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers; image produced by mammoth using data from the Army Corps.] I’ve already talked a fair about the idea that the Mississippi River is, at this point in its history, an artificially-constructed system that should […]

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July 19, 2011 – 6:00 pm

hamburg, iowa (2)

[Flooding on the Missouri River, up and downstream from Hamburg, Iowa.  The distinct spray pattern produced by burst levees is visible in at least three locations, while the raised outline of the emergency Ditch 6 levee can be seen on the western edge of Hamburg, protecting the city from the insistent floodwaters.  Imagery captured by […]

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July 18, 2011 – 8:00 pm

a quick and unnecessary defense of density against some chart

Grist recently cross-posted an article by Per Square Mile’s Tim De Chant which mines an old (2009) study from the Journal of Urban Economics to argue that “only the steepest increases in density could reduce car usage”.  Unfortunately, I think that’s entirely the wrong conclusion to draw from the study. Here’s the key graph that […]

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July 15, 2011 – 6:00 am

dike field

[A dike field in the Mississippi River near Greenfield, Mississippi; via bing maps.] In the Mississippi River, dike fields are constructed in order to direct the river’s flow to a central channel, scouring it and reducing the need for dredging.  Though their primary purpose is to thus maintain navigability for shipping, dike fields tend, as […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, floods, infrastructure, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments (1) | Permalink
July 14, 2011 – 8:00 pm

flooding, previously

As I’m gathering projects, proposals, practices, and places to be covered before I wrap up our summer flood-blogging extravaganza (which I expect to do by the end of the month), I thought it worth looking back at a handful of notable posts from mammoth‘s past that concerned flooding.  Hopefully some of these, since they are […]

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July 13, 2011 – 8:00 pm

the waterways experiment station

[The Waterways Experiment Station, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, is currently the home of the Army Corp’s Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory.  (It also is the entity which operated the Mississippi Basin Model, and the research into flood control and river hydrology which was once conducted physically on that model and its sister models is now conducted, primarily […]

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July 7, 2011 – 6:00 am

san francisco bay model

The San Francisco Bay Model was, like the Mississippi Basin Model, built by the Army Corps of Engineers to study the flow of water — in this case, simulating “the rise and fall of tide, flow, and currents of water, mixing of salt and fresh water, and… trends in sediment movement”, permitting the study of […]

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July 6, 2011 – 6:00 am

the mississippi basin model

[The Mississippi River Basin Model today, via Bing Maps.] At Places, Kristi Dykema Cheramie writes about the one of Mississippi flood control’s most fantastical landscapes, the Basin Model — “a 200-acre working hydraulic model [replicating] the Mississippi River and its major tributaries — the Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri Rivers”, on a small tract of land […]

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July 1, 2011 – 6:00 am

magnitude

[Cahokia mounds, photographed by Ira Block for National Geographic; the mound immediately above is “Monk’s Mound”, the largest (ten stories tall) of the Cahokia mounds.] Around a month ago, FASLANYC ran an excellent post that described the Mississippian mound culture as a potential source of inspiration for a reconsidered Louisiana delta urbanism.  In the post, […]

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