OL’ MAN RIVER
(rolling, rolling, rolling hard again….)

The mighty Mississippi is at it….rolling, rolling, rolling hard again….heading with a rush for the Gulf, and drowning everything in sight along the way. And its tributaries, like the wide Missouri (Old Muddy…because of its appetite for plenty of silt), are adding their fair share to that drama as well.

None of this is new, of course. It happens every year, except, this year, it seems like Ol’ Man River is being even more destructively perverse than usual, giving the Corps of Engineers and other “flood prevention” experts the willies….wondering about the best ways and means to try to keep him more or less….under control.

They’re not doing too well. Their efforts to ease his pressures on levees, by opening flood gates and blowing out parts of levees here and there, reminds us of one of those old time western movies in which the tough old town marshal tries to outmaneuver a liquored-up gunman from shooting up or torching his town. Despite his best efforts a lot of damage is done before he manages to put the drunken lout down.

That’s the way things seem to be today whenever the Mississippi goes on a rampage.

There was a time, long before humans began crowding in upon the flood plains of this great mid-continent drainage system, when the annual spring floods resulting from that drainage were relatively benign. That is, while its flood waters spread out far and wide all over those flood plains, their destructive impacts were mild, mainly because they were shallow waters with light currents because of that spreading, which soon receded and dried out, leaving behind rich and fertile sediments.

But as populations moved in and settlements became more and more crowded, growing into cities, those flood plains became more and more attractive, especially for farmers, and other folks who couldn’t afford to settle and build on the higher grounds. The old ox-bows which had acted as reservoirs for all those seasonal extra waters were soon taken over, and the river became hemmed in by levees. Its tributaries were partially dammed up along their courses, and the volume of drainage water controlled as much as possible. All of which giving the impression that we humans had finally gotten the upper hand over it all.

The problem with levees, however, is that these obstruct the river waters’ natural inclinations to spread out. Worse yet, unable to thus spread their silt loads, as before, these begin to build up raising the river bottoms ever higher, further requiring raising levees up to match that. Eventually, river waters find themselves elevated much higher than the surrounding flood plains. The hydrostatic pressures this creates sooner or later then cause sections of those levees to collapse, and when that happens, instead of a gentle process of inundation, there is a tsunami effect of almost biblical impact, with walls of racing waters tearing everything in their path apart… homes, trees, roads, bridges, etc., with nothing left standing behind them.

But now a more insidious impact is part of such events….pollution. Today, our modern world produces all sorts of toxic elements. When such floods occur, they bring not only their silts loads, but everything else they’ve swept up besides. Fuels and chemicals of one kind or another, sewage, plastic debris and other trash, along with the decomposing corpses of both animals and humans caught up by them. Thus, after such catastrophic deluges have receded and dried out, those residues left behind are often a worse menace than the raging waters ever were.

Which brings us to this question: Might there be better ways to “manage” such annually recurring flood events? Levees have their uses, of course, but what if Ol’ Man River were allowed to spread out in some places instead, as it did before we began hemming him in? And, what if, instead of opening flood gates here and there (drowning some places out because of that), all up and down its course we diverted those excess volumes of water to pre-determined and built holding reservoirs, and from these, with further distributing pipelines, sent these to other regions of the continent where water is not so plentiful? Might that not reduce the destructive impacts on these annual flood events?

When one considers the billions of annual costs all these rampaging floods cause, would creating such an infrastructure be any more costly? Might it not actually cost less? Surely our engineering skills and hydraulic expertise might be able to come up with something of that kind.

Meanwhile, Ol’ Man River will keep on rolling, rolling….rolling hard….heading with a rush down to the Gulf.

CENTURION