

America's Achilles' heel: the Mississippi River's Old River Control Structure - cypherpunks01
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

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jws
Key point: The Mississippi would rather not go through New Orleans anymore, it
only does so because the Corp of Engineers forces it to. That apparatus is
about to get a severe test.

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mturmon
If you enjoyed this, you would enjoy reading the extended article by John
McPhee about the control structure, linked to in the article above:

[http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_T...](http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146)

This and 2 other essays by McPhee were collected into a book, "The Control of
Nature". The other essays, also quite long, were about debris flows in the LA
basin, and about stopping an Icelandic volcanic flow which threatened a town
and a port by spraying it with sea water. It's a fantastic book.

<http://www.johnmcphee.com/controlofnature.htm>

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MaxGabriel
Huh, actually the Old River Control Structure being damaged and creating a
massive disaster was the premise of an xkcd post, and the alt-text is about
Jeff Masters having read good analysis on disaster scenarios

<http://xkcd.com/748/>

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skorgu
And a followup blog post recently: <http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/05/08/michael-
bays-scenario/>

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jerf
Anyone know what the long-term decade-scale plan is? Sooner or later we have
to let the river move, because if I understand this correctly, over time it
simply becomes arbitrarily harder to force through the same channel, without
bound.

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wglb
Whatever the plan, expecting successful negotiation with the river seems
unrealistic.

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ahi
I think they're opening the Morganza spillway around 2:30 CT today.
<http://www.ustream.tv/channel/morganza>

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javert
People in the chat are now saying 3 CT.

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anigbrowl
This doesn't sound promising: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/14/us-
flooding-states...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/14/us-flooding-
states-idUSTRE74D1L420110514)

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redwood
Amazing

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dreww
I posted this link yesterday - it is a well-written expose on a massive
engineering product, that I didn't know anything about.

