floods – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Category Archives: floods

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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June 1, 2011 – 6:00 pm

mound crevasse

[Mound Crevasse; the explosive force of the 1927 levee break remains visible in the blast-like pattern of lakes and shredded terrain that is clearly visible in this current satellite image.] If you look closely at the Army Corps’ map of the 1927 Mississippi floods from a couple posts back, one of the major patterns that […]

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May 28, 2011 – 5:00 pm

artificial crevasse

[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 […]

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May 27, 2011 – 1:00 pm

the mississippi river flood of 1927

[Map prepared by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey (the fore-runner of today’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in 1927, after the Great Mississippi Flood of that year.  The map shows “flooded areas and the field of operations”.  The great devastation produced by the 1927 flood — it flooded an area approximately equal to the […]

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May 27, 2011 – 6:00 am

unusual flood typologies ii: scabland

[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”. […]

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May 26, 2011 – 5:00 pm

suspension

[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 […]

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May 26, 2011 – 10:00 am

unusual flood typologies i: dam failure

[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 […]

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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 […]

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May 25, 2011 – 8:00 pm

“waiting for the chute to open and the bull to come out bucking”

[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 […]

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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 […]

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