September 13, 2011 – 6:00 am
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 [...]
September 2, 2011 – 6:00 am
[The fluctuating terrain of the lower Mississippi River Delta, from the USGS's map of "land area change in coastal Louisiana from 1932 to 2010". Loss is in red; accumulation is in green. The map is seen via Free Association Design, where you can see the map in more detail, including the rapidly accreting area of [...]
August 24, 2011 – 6:00 am
[Lafitte Outfall Canal, one of the three massive concrete slits that drains New Orleans into Lake Pontchartrain in severe rainfall.] [Orleans Canal] [The London Avenue Canal; photograph at I-10 crossing.] [Photographs of New Orleans' outfall canals, by reader Ramiro Diaz (and supplemented with Google Maps imagery). Diaz works with Waggonner Ball Architects, a New Orleans-based [...]
August 18, 2011 – 6:00 am
The history of the Atchafalaya Basin — and much of the history of the greater Mississippi Delta region — is marked by an important transition in the 19th century from an agricultural economy (which had developed with the appearance of European settlers, including the Acadians who became the Cajun) to an extractive economy (initially also [...]
August 14, 2011 – 10:12 pm
[The twin Atchafalaya river ports of Morgan City (on the east bank) and Berwick (on the west bank), captured in false-color by the "Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer" on NASA's Terra earth-imaging satellite, May 27, 2011 -- after the second opening of the Morganza Spillway.] Old River Control sits at the northern end [...]
[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 [...]
[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 [...]
[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 [...]
[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, [...]
[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 [...]
[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 [...]
[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.]
[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 [...]
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 [...]
[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 [...]
[Nerea Calvillo's "In the Air" -- "a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air" -- Visualizar '08] A brief interruption to the flood-blogging (which will resume shortly, with more on 1927 and crevasses) to note that I’ll be speaking in Madrid at Visualizar ’11 “Understanding Infrastructures”. The [...]
[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 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 [...]
["Enroute high" aeronautical chart of the airspace around Washington, DC, via the US Division of the International Virtual Aviation Organization and SkyVector.com. American airports rely on obsolete ground-based air traffic control,a system whose "imprecision obliges controllers to keep more distance between air traffic, reducing the number of planes that can fly in the available space" [...]
