industrial – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: industrial

August 19, 2011 – 8:00 am

flooded oil

[One of the negative aspects of resource extraction in an area, such as the Atchafalaya Basin, designed as an outlet for floodwaters is the potential for floodwaters to overwhelm flood controls and widely distribute industrial contaminants used in the extractive process.  In the photos above (taken by the Gulf Restoration Network at the end of […]

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August 18, 2011 – 6:00 pm

the wagonwheel

[The “Wagonwheel”, an unusual circular pattern of canals just south of Yellow Cotton Bay, also owes its pattern to the combination of geology and extractive logistics.  Here, the oil companies’ canals depart from their typically linear vocabulary to follow the roughly circular limit of a raised salt dome.  Salt domes form when buried deposits of […]

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August 18, 2011 – 6:00 am

pipelines and straight lines

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 […]

By rholmes | Posted in floods, infrastructure, landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (2) | Permalink
August 14, 2011 – 10:12 pm

atchafalaya iii: the morgan city floodwall

[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 […]

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March 31, 2011 – 12:00 pm

a short aerial tour of the arrival of canadian oil in the united states

[“Cushing has fewer than 10,000 residents, but you can drive around for hours and still not see all the huge tanks there.”] Tuesday morning, I caught a portion of an NPR piece on the “pipelines and trucking corridors” that bring Canadian oil from the Alberta oil sands into the United States — and then promptly […]

By rholmes | Posted in geography, infrastructure, landscape, landscapes-in-search-of-an-architect | Also tagged , , | Comments (1) | Permalink