floods – Search Results – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Search Results for: floods

June 29, 2011 – 6:00 pm

sand boil

[The breach in Missouri River Levee 575, on June 14.] The breach at Hamburg — mentioned a few posts back — began with a “sand boil”, a geotechnical phenomenon shared by earthquakes and floods, in which subterranean water pressure becomes so strong that ground water erupts, typically bubbling like a gentle geyser, and bringing soil […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on sand boil
June 28, 2011 – 6:00 pm

patterns

[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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged , | Comments (3)
June 28, 2011 – 6:00 am

the mouse

[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 — […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Comments Off on the mouse
June 25, 2011 – 7:00 am

six dams and six reservoirs

[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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in engineering, floods, geography, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , , | Comments (5)
June 23, 2011 – 6:00 am

hamburg, iowa

[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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged | Comments (2)
June 18, 2011 – 2:17 pm

project design flood

[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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)
June 7, 2011 – 6:00 pm

2011

In NASA Earth Observatory’s latest image of the Mississippi River Valley, floodwaters from this spring’s historic flooding — “the floodwaters have been the highest on record at more than half of the gauges along the [levees] between Missouri and Louisiana” — are receding, and the river crested back on the 31st of May at Morgan […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods | Tagged , | Comments (1)
June 4, 2011 – 6:00 am

“winds of drought, winds of flood”

[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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged , , | Comments Off on “winds of drought, winds of flood”
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged , | Comments Off on 1993
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods | Tagged | Comments (4)
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, landscape | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, landscape | Tagged , | Comments Off on mound crevasse
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”. […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Comments Off on unusual flood typologies ii: scabland
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods | Tagged , | Comments Off on suspension
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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, floods, landscape | Tagged , | Comments (1)
October 8, 2010 – 3:23 pm

golden gate estates

[An abandoned portion of the “Golden Gate Estates” — a massive land scam promoted by a Florida developer in the 1960’s — whose miles of canals and roads would have been the infrastructure for the largest subdivision in the United States if the land hadn’t been utterly unsuitable to development. The problem, of course, is that […]

By rholmes | Posted in asides, landscape, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)
September 21, 2010 – 7:47 pm

staging ground

[Detail from Andrew tenBrink’s “Staging Ground”; all images in this post are from “Staging Ground”; most of them can be clicked on for larger images with captions and more readable annotations.] “Staging Ground” is the thesis project of recent Harvard GSD graduate Andrew tenBrink.  In it, tenBrink explores a series of topics which make frequent […]

By rholmes | Posted in infrastructure, landscape-architecture, student-work | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)
May 24, 2010 – 5:00 am

“for every pile there is a pit”

We’re back from our week off with another installment of Reading the Infrastructural City; if you haven’t been following along, you can catch up on the series here and see the introductory post here. [Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI] The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural […]

By mammoth | Posted in landscape, mammoth book club, the-city-we-have, urbanism | Tagged , , , | Comments (7)
April 21, 2010 – 10:40 pm

recreational volcanism

[The Moscow Pool, built on the site of Stalin’s abandoned Palace of the Soviets, via Polis.] As volcanism is, for obvious reasons, in the news at the moment, perhaps this is the right time to think back to an article posted a few months ago at English Russia which suggests that Moscow is a city built […]

By rholmes | Posted in futures, landscape-architecture | Tagged , , | Comments (8)
February 22, 2010 – 2:29 pm

a glacier is a very long event

The following post, which is more a catalog of related items than a singular argument, has been written to engage the “Glacier/Island/Storm” studio BLDGBLOG is currently teaching at Columbia GSAPP, as a part of a timed release of material into the blogosphere coordinated across a bank of architecture, design, and technology blogs; you can find […]

By rholmes | Posted in architecture, landscape, landscape-architecture, speculative-architecture | Tagged , , , , | Comments (19)