[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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 — […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
[Before the 1928 Flood Control Act, the Mississippi River flood control plan consisted of two basic elements: levees and outlets. Earthern levees would hold the water back. When necessary, outlets would be utilized to divert flood waters. In an emergency, more levees could be created with sandbags; more outlets could be created by blowing levees […]
[The unusual agricultural pattern of eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” can be traced to a (series of) massive glacial outburst flood(s) which cut the deep into the region’s volcanic basalt, leaving fertile plateaus and barren, rocky valleys. Mammoth looked at that event, the Missoula Floods, in a post last year, “a glacier is a very long event”. […]
[In the summer of 1916, a pair of cyclones — one coming from the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall in Mississippi, the other coming from the Atlantic and landing in Charleston, South Carolina — poured torrential rains (“all previous 24-hour records for rainfall were exceeded”) across the southeast. Western North Carolina was hit especially […]
[Friant Dam, on the upper San Joaquin in California, filled to the top in spring of 2006. Though the dam held, downstream flooding ensued. When a dam does fail, as the Teton Dam did in 1976 or the Toccoa Creek Dam did in 1977, the flash-flooding that occurs can be deadly, resulting in relatively high […]
[“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 […]
[Flaming Gorge Reservoir on the Green River in Utah; the reservoir’s primary dam is highlighted in red. In anticipation of record summer floods, the reservoir’s waters are “being released as fast as [they] can flow”, making space in the reservoir to hold snowmelt. Downstream, rafters are finding that typical rafting trips of two-and-a-half hours are […]
