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Beyond Control - The Mississippi River's New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R876
Discovery Miles 8 760
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Beyond Control - The Mississippi River's New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico (Hardcover)
Series: America's Third Coast Series
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change,
unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures.
During the greatflood of 1973, the current scoured a hole beneath
the main structure near Baton Rouge and enlarged a pre-existing
football-field-size crater. That night the Mississippi River nearly
changed its course for a shorter and steeper path to the sea. Such
a map-changing reconfiguration of the country's largest river would
bear national significance aswell as disastrous consequences for
New Orleans and towns like Morgan City, at the mouth of the
Atchafalaya River. Since 1973, the US Army Corps of Engineers
Control Complex at Old River has kept the Mississippi from jumping
out of its historic channel and plunging through the Atchafalaya
Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond Control traces the history of
this phenomenon, beginning with a major channel shift around 3,000
years ago. By the time European colonists began to explore the
Lower Mississippi Valley, a unique confluence of waterways had
formed where the Red River joined the Mississippi, and the
Atchafalaya River flowed out into the Atchafalaya Basin. A series
of human alterations to this potentially volatile web of rivers,
starting with a bend cutoff in 1831 by Captain Henry Miller Shreve,
set the forces in motion for the Mississippi's move into the
Atchafalaya Basin. Told against the backdrop of the Lower
Mississippi River's impending diversion, the book's chapters
chronicle historic floods, rising flood crests, a changing strategy
for flood protection, and competing interests in the management of
the Old River outlet. Beyond Control is both a history and a close
look at an inexorable, living process happening now in the
twenty-first century.
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