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Search Results for: floods

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.]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, geography, infrastructure | Comments (1)
May 26, 2011 – 6:00 am

a century of significant floods

[“During the 20th century, floods were the number-one natural disaster in the United States in terms of number of lives lost and property damage. They can occur at any time of the year, in any part of the country, and at any time of the day or night. Most lives are lost when people are […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged | Comments Off on a century of significant floods
May 24, 2011 – 6:00 am

floods

The next week or two will be dedicated to floods. This may be entirely obvious, but I think it is worth beginning by noting that floods are not good, and floods are not fun.  We’re not talking about floods because we enjoy flooding.  Floods are, however, a constant — as we are reminded by the […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)
October 7, 2014 – 3:11 pm

the dredge underground

[The DredgeFest Louisiana tour enters the Morganza Spillway; I am pretty sure that Tim took these pictures.] In the recent August issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine, Jennifer Reut wrote a generous profile of the Dredge Research Collaborative and DredgeFest: It seems almost inevitable, after two successful DredgeFests and several massive coastal floods, that this group […]

By rholmes | Posted in dredge, events, landscape-architecture, press | Tagged , , | Comments Off on the dredge underground
November 13, 2013 – 1:41 pm

dredgefest louisiana

Things have been terribly quiet here at mammoth this fall. (Assuming that by “here” we mean “here, on the blog”; they’ve been quite busy if by “here” we mean “here in Ohio and Virginia”, which is where I’ve physically been. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to recap those adventures soon — there’s been quite a […]

By rholmes | Posted in dredge, events, futures, landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on dredgefest louisiana
July 23, 2012 – 6:00 pm

landscape ontology

[A landscape in the process of becoming a different landscape: In late 2010, the waste reservoir of a Hungarian aluminum oxide plant burst, releasing millions and millions of gallons of caustic red sludge. The meter-high toxic mudslide quickly moved downhill through two nearby villages, burying buildings, poisoning fields and killing 10 people. The image above […]

By rholmes | Posted in landscape, landscape-architecture, the-expanded-field | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on landscape ontology
March 27, 2012 – 8:43 pm

unknown unknowns

0. Everyone’s favorite Donald Rumsfeld quotation: “[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.” (As evidence […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5)
March 6, 2012 – 6:00 am

“landscape infrastructure” at harvard gsd

[“Reclamation and slope stabilization on a volcanic ash hillside” in Japan; photograph by flickr user GeoJuice.] If I weren’t going to be in California March 23rd and 24th, I’m pretty sure I’d be in Boston at the GSD’s “Landscape Infrastructure” symposium, which promises a fascinating range of discussion on “the future of infrastructure and urbanization […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, events | Tagged , | Comments (1)
January 19, 2012 – 6:00 am

emergency interventions

[One of the five sites for OPPTA’s 2012 competition, “El Monton”, “an accumulation of stratified waste classified as public space” by the city of Lima, in the impoverished riverbank neighborhood Márgen Izquierda del Río Rímac; images via OPPTA.] OPPTA, the “observatorio panamericano”, is holding an international ideas competition under the theme of “emergency interventions”, looking […]

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September 21, 2011 – 9:08 pm

behind the scenes

While there is a lot that has gone unfortunately unposted this summer (our drafts queue is more than a little bit out of control) — at least in part due to Rob’s failure to contain the floods series (which is finished, by the way, with yesterday’s final post on de-damming the Dutch delta) to anything […]

By mammoth | Posted in asides, meta | Comments Off on behind the scenes
September 20, 2011 – 6:00 am

IHNC Lake Borgne Surge Barrier

[The site of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal (IHNC) Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, at the intersection of the Gulf Intercoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet; more detail on this Army Corps of Engineers project map.] [Building a bigger wall: the Surge Barrier was the largest design-build project in the history of the Army […]

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September 13, 2011 – 6:00 am

“the climax of the riverboat era”

Over the course of this summer’s discussion of floods, we’ve talked a great deal about channelization and levees and dredging and the other acts of industrial landscaping that have produced the riverine landscapes of the Mississippi watershed. Those acts, though, are multi-purposed: they are executed to control floods, yes, but they are usually also intended […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, geography, infrastructure | Tagged , , | Comments (2)
August 13, 2011 – 6:00 am

william least heat-moon and the infrastructural missouri river

The following is a guest post from Nam Henderson, a long-time mammoth commentator and Archinect contributor.  Nam blogs at Thoughts on Everything Under the Sun or I am a Guilty Secularist, and this post first appeared there.  While I don’t agree with everything the author Nam writes about, William Least Heat-Moon, has to say about […]

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August 1, 2011 – 9:21 pm

atchafalaya ii: old river control

[The Auxiliary Structure at Old River Control; photographed by the Army Corps of Engineers, Team New Orleans. Various circumstances have conspired to keep me from finishing the Floods series last week like I had hoped; there are still a few posts yet to come, and several of them will be part of this mini-series within […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, floods, infrastructure | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, infrastructure, infrastructure-without-architects, landscape | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5)
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Comments Off on flooding, previously
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged , , | Comments (5)
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods, landscape | Tagged | Comments (3)
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, […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure | Tagged , | Comments (5)
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (4)