"The Control of Nature"

[fiefoe]

The always eye-opening John McPhee. Why don't people talk about Atchafalaya more when they talk about Katrina?

• Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions.
• For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya’s conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans.
• The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.
• Atchafalaya. Complicating the scene, the old meander bend had also served as the mouth of the Red River.
• The Corps would have to build something that could give the Atchafalaya a portion of the Mississippi and at the same time prevent it from taking all.
• The Corps was thereby ordered to preserve 1950. In perpetuity, at Old River, thirty per cent of the latitude flow was to pass to the Atchafalaya.
• as trim and trig , the Treaty of Ghent
• Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.” Cano, for his part, is somewhat less flattering on the subject of Twain. He says it baffles him that Twain has “such a big reputation for someone who spent so little time on the river.”
• Just why the Army should be involved at all with levee systems, navigation locks, rock jetties, concrete revetments, and the austere realities of deltaic geomorphology is a question that attracts no obvious answer.
• But now that Old River is valved and metered there are two million nine hundred thousand potential complainers, very few of whom are reluctant to present a grievance to the Corps.
• In southern Louisiana, the bed of the Mississippi River is so far below sea level that a flow of at least a hundred and twenty thousand cubic feet per second is needed to hold back salt water and keep it below New Orleans, which drinks the river.
• an almost academic effort is required to visualize a slab of water six stories high, spread to the ends of perspective. That is how it was in 1973.
• Up the valley somewhere, during the ’27 high water, was a railroad bridge with a train sitting on it loaded with coal. The train had been put there because its weight might help keep the bridge in place, but the bridge, vibrating in the floodwater, produced so much friction that the coal in the gondolas caught fire.
• failure was the par expectation with respect to the river—a fact generally masked by the powerful fabric of ambition that impelled people to build towns and cities where almost any camper would be loath to pitch a tent.
• Where the flow departed from the Mississippi now, it followed an arm of the cutoff meander. This short body of water soon became known as Old River. In less than a fortnight, it had been removed as a segment of the main-stem Mississippi and restyled as a form of surgical drain.
• Other states, in aggregate, got twenty million more. Since time immemorial, these river swamps had been the natural reservoirs where floodwaters were taken in and held, and gradually released as the flood went down.
• The new owners drained much of the swampland, turned it into farmland, and demanded the protection of new and larger levees. At this point, Congress might have asked itself which was the act and which was the swamp.
• Even at normal stages, the Mississippi was beginning to stand up like a large vein on the back of a hand.
• James B. Eads, probably the most brilliant engineer who has ever addressed his attention to the Mississippi River. As a young man, he had walked around on its bottom under a device of his own invention that he called a submarine. As a naval architect in the Civil War, he had designed the first American ironclads.
• What would make a channel deep enough for ships? The government wouldn’t finance him, so Eads bet his own considerable fortune on an elegant idea: he built parallel jetties in the river’s mouth. They pinched the currents. The accelerated water dug out and maintained a navigable channel.
• Atchafalaya. The interventional skill of human engineers, which would be called upon in the twentieth century to stop the great shift at Old River, did much in the nineteenth to hurry it up.
• In 1885, one of General Sands’ predecessors said, “The commission is distinctly committed to the idea of closing all outlets … It has consistently opposed the fallacy known as the ‘Outlet System.’”


• But in 1927 the results of the experiment at last came clear. The levees were helping to aggravate the problem they were meant to solve.
• There was now a Great Wall of China running up each side of the river, with the difference that while the levees were each about as long as the Great Wall they were in many places higher and in cross-section ten times as large... So often compared with the Great Wall of China, the levees had more in common with the Maginot Line. Taken together, they were a retroactive redoubt, more than adequate to wage a bygone war but below the requirements of the war to come.
• Every shopping center, every drainage improvement, every square foot of new pavement in nearly half the United States was accelerating runoff toward Louisiana.
• Of course, after 1973, the flow lines were recomputed and the levees had to be raised. When the river would pool against the stratosphere was only a question of time.
• A work of engineering such as a Maillart bridge or a bridge by Christian Menn can outdo some other works of art, because it is not only a gift to the imagination but also structural in the matrix of the world... The auxiliary structure at Old River contains too many working components to be classed with such a bridge, but in grandeur and in profile it would not shame a pharaoh.
• They know that in 1852 the Yellow River shifted its course away from the Yellow Sea, establishing a new mouth four hundred miles from the old. They know the stories of catastrophic shifts by the Mekong, the Indus, the Po, the Volga, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
• This is planned chaos. The more planning they do, the more chaotic it is. Nobody knows exactly where it’s going to end.”
• Southern Louisiana is a very large lump of mountain butter, eight miles thick where it rests upon the continental shelf, half that under New Orleans, a mile and a third at Old River.
• As waters rise ever higher between levees, the ground behind the levees subsides, with the result that the Mississippi delta plain has become an exaggerated Venice, two hundred miles wide—its rivers, its bayous, its artificial canals a trelliswork of water among subsiding lands.
• Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the city’s subsidence.
• The carport becomes a porch, with hanging plants and steep wooden steps. A carport that is not firmly anchored may dangle from the side of a house like a third of a drop-leaf table.
• After the canals are dredged, their width increases on its own, and they erode the region from the inside.
• wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inches of additional water will inevitably surge.
• He is a graduate of the illustrious forestry school of the State University of New York (Syracuse), his advanced degree is from Harvard, and—to continue the escalation—he knows how to get from here to there in the swamp.
• The Atchafalaya—this most apparently natural of natural worlds, this swamp of the anhinga, swamp of the nocturnal bear—lies between walls, like a zoo.
• As the overflow swamp of the only remaining distributary in the delta—the only place other than the mouth of the Mississippi where silt can go—the Atchafalaya is silting in.
• When I meet other fishermen, ninety per cent of the time we speak French.” If he doesn’t know them, he knows where they live, because each town has its accent.
• Roughly five thousand people take crawfish from the swamp, annually trapping twenty-three million pounds.
• It is of such regal and formidable demeanor that it attracts tourists. It is a wall that imagines water—a sheet of water at least twenty feet thick between Morgan City and the horizon... proportion inverse to the seawall’s great size, the seawall betokens a vulnerability the like of which is hard to find so far from a volcano.
• The first Tarzan movie was filmed in Morgan City. The Atchafalaya swamp was Tarzan’s jungle.
• This threat to navigation could be called an American Maelstrom—a modern Charybdis, a Corryvreckan—were it not so very much greater in destructive force. In Dugie’s words, “Any rig on the right side of the river is in trouble.”