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Posted By: Hal Brown

Date Posted: Oct 18, 2007

Description: Just north of Tunica, MS is a huge complex of penitentiaries built out on the river plain. The many different prisons here are a small reflection of the many layers of confinement going on here.....

Date Taken: Oct 18, 2007

Place Taken: Tunica, MS

Owner: Dan Nickens

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Category: 289, An Indirect Relocation

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Dan Nickens - Oct 18,2007 Viewers | Reply


	Just across the Mississippi River is a connection to the Atchafalaya River. Like a giant H, waters flowing from the Red and Atchafalaya Rivers parallel the Mississippi in this area with a connection in the middle. They weren’t always so interconnected.<br /><br />Originally the Red River flowed down to the Gulf. It then took a short cut and joined into the Mississippi. The Atchafalaya took over the old Red River valley (remember the song?) to make a course for itself. It was totally separated from the other two rivers.<br /><br />During the 1500s the Big M captured the upper course of the Atchafalaya River. The Atchafalya was forced to become a distributary of the victorious Mighty Mississippi. <br /><br />Rapidly changing water courses didn’t much matter back then because there wasn’t a huge city downstream and there wasn’t a lot of industry along the banks of the Mississippi. Further restricting the importance of the event was that there was a huge prehistoric log jam thirty miles long on the Atchafalaya that kept most of the flow from the Mississippi from being diverted.<br /><br />In 1831, however, someone by the name of Captain Shreve got the bright idea of digging a shortcut for his boat across the neck of Turnbull’s Bend at mile 314. Since Capt. Shreve didn’t bother to consult with anyone, he wasn’t concerned about the increase in flow into the Atchafalaya or the corresponding decrease in flow downstream on the Mississippi.<br /><br />In fact, the Mississippi was already on the verge of quickly swapping its channel to that of the Atchafalaya. The steeper gradient (the Atchafalaya is 15’ lower) would have cut 140 miles off the course of the river to the Gulf. That’s exactly what rivers love to do. It is a natural efficiency.<br /><br />Not content to be upstaged by Capt. Shreve, the Corpse of Engineers set to work during the 1800s to clear the pesky prehistoric log jam from the Atchafalaya. Eureka! By 1855 the Corpse had done it! The flow was freed.<br /><br />It didn’t take long to realize that removing the logs might have been a mistake. Water flow through the Atchafalya greatly increased and the Mighty Mo began radically to change course. In fact, the Atchafalya also started getting water from the Red River. The new course of the swollen river straightened itself out, built banks and levees. It even built a great delta that over the course of one hundred years mostly filled Grand Lake and Six Mile Lake.<br /><br />In the 1950’s some geologists looked at this and predicted that by the 1970s the Mississippi River would abandon its course through New Orleans, leaving just a sleepy, salty and progressively shallowing estuary up to Baton Rouge. Morgan City would become a great port and the home of the Morgan City Saints.<br /><br />Ack! The folks in New Orleans were none too pleased at the prospect of becoming a sleepy backwater. The Corpse of Engineers was engaged to straighten out the unnatural mess and change the course of the river and history too!<br /><br />In the 1960’s the Old River control structure was built to tame the wandering Mississippi river. Distributaries were cut off. The big river was blocked. The Corpse decided to allow only 30 percent of the river’s flow to go into the Atchafalya River because 30% is all that Morgan City deserved anyway.<br /><br />There was another big benefit the Corpse saw: flood control. The Corpse really likes to try and control floods. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t (as New Orleans was to learn early in this century).<br /><br />In 1973 there was a huge flood on the Mississippi. The control gates at Old River were opened wide and a torrent blasted through. The wildly raging waters threatened to destroy the control structure, which shook violently. The structure was damaged and was never rebuilt to its original specifications. Instead the Corpse built an overflow structure to relieve the pressure of the mighty Mississippi.<br /><br />Taking advantage of the difference in water elevations, a hydroelectric plant has been built between the two rivers (the Sydney A. Murray plant). In the end, the Corpse won a battle, the structure still stands, and New Orleans is still a port city. This is a monument to man’s temporary command of a once freely meandering river.<br /><br />The Mississippi River originated from a rift that formed as the continent of North America separated from the land mass of Pangea in the Early Middle Jurassic (180 million years ago). The Corpse has won a minor skirmish in geologic time, holding up the river for some 47 years. One can only imagine how that the battle might continue for another 470 years, or 47,000 years, or 5 million years. Who will determine the course of the river then?<br /><br />

Dan Nickens - Oct 19,2007 Viewers | Reply


	This is a great story of man struggling against nature. It is one of the major battles discussed in John McPhee’s 1989 book, The Control of Nature. He captures the warriors nicely.<br /><br />According to Mr. McPhee, Capt. Shreve was made a name for himself as a riverboat captain and inventor of the flat-bottomed, layer-cake decked paddlewheel boats that became the standard for the river (actually it was an evolutionary development, but aren’t most inventions?).<br /><br />Capt. Shreve also developed a “snag” boat. This was used to remove logs from the river that greatly impeded navigation. There are two types of problem logs for steamboats (many more for seaplane pilots!): the “planter,” or a rigidly embedded log pointing like a spear towards fragile hulls; and, the “sawyer” (as in Tom), a log that “saws” up and down in the current, usually rising up at just the wrong time to hit a hull (sawyers are known as “preachers” on the Yukon River because they are eternally bowing). All are called snags and Capt. Shreve’s contributions to boating safety were so important that he was named “Superintendent of Western Improvements” for the Corpse of Engineers.<br /><br />Why is the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of water works? Well, because they were so good at making levees during the War of 1812, Congress just let them continue and expanded their charter to cover battles of a non-military nature, including the War against the Mississippi.<br /><br />The Corpse had a very strong idea about how to win the war: make the river into a ditch. Despite a lot of good advice to the contrary, they set about building levees, and cutting off old distributaries, marshes and bayous (natural features that mitigate the effects of floods).<br /><br />As the river was channelized, water levels kept increasing. Levees had to grow too. The Corps thereby got to keep itself busy.<br /><br />In 1884 the Corps announced “Mission Accomplished: the river is tamed.” That was good until it flooded again, the levees were built higher, and “Mission Accomplished” was again pronounced in 1890. And again in 1891, and in 1897, and 1898, and 1903, and 1912, and 1913, and 1922, and 1927. Well, you get the idea.<br /><br />The flood following the pronouncement in 1927 was a duzzy. It breached levees from Cairo, Illinois to the Gulf, destroyed every bridge crossing the river and killed hundreds of people. New Orleans was saved only by blowing up a levee upstream. The devastation was not the result of a 100-year flood, only an explosion of levees.<br /><br />The Corpse told Congress it was time to get serious about “Accomplishing the Mission.” Congress promptly threw massive amounts of money to the Corpse through the Flood Control Act of 1928. More money was appropriated than had been spent on all water control projects from Colonial times and through all of American history.<br /><br />The flood had finally convinced the Corpse that just building bigger levees wasn’t going to work. It set to work building floodgates to divert water, dams for retention, severing river loops, and opening up the very tributaries it had previously closed. The idea was to give the river back some freedom, reversing 60 years of the Corps’ fine work.<br /><br />The biggest change was opening a spillway to Lake Pontchartrain so that New Orleans wouldn’t have to blow up any more levees to stay dry. Of course the Corpse couldn’t really give up raising levees. Levees were generally raised in the 1950s and again in the 1970s.<br /><br />The flood of 1973 showed how far the Corpse had to go. It was caused by rainfall only 20% above the normal amount.<br /><br />By now the Corpse had a big research facility to investigate why the flooding kept occurring. They recreated the entire course of the river on a 15-acre site in the world’s largest sandbox.<br /><br />Unfortunately the sandbox couldn’t recreate the reality. Unconsolidated sediments compress and settle over a remarkably short time. These sediments are miles thick in Louisiana. Subsidence is a geologic reality not easily matched by the sandbox. Rising sea levels make it all the worse.<br /><br />Katrina showed that there are more variables than just river water to consider. Even the Corpse geologists now concede the Mississippi will eventually change course, if not at Old River, then somewhere nearby.<br /><br />But the battle continues unabated. Mr. McPhee flew over the Old River Control Structures. Here is what he saw, “From 6,000’ overhead, they seem temporary, fragile, vastly overmatched by the natural world – a lesion in the side of the Mississippi butterflied with surgical tape.”<br /><br />It looked pretty substantial from 600’ in a SeaRey, but then I don’t live behind the levee.<br />

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