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Beyond Control: The Mississippi River’s New Channel to the Gulf of Mexico (America’s Third Coast Series)

Amazon.com Price:  $21.27 (as of 02/05/2019 16:44 PST- Details)

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Description

Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and Regulate structures. All through the great flood 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. One of these map-changing reconfiguration of the country’s largest river would bear national significance in addition to disastrous consequences for New Orleans and towns like Morgan City, on the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. Since 1973, the USA Army Corps of Engineers Regulate 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 point European colonists started 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 internet 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 have a look at an inexorable, living process happening now in the twenty-first century.

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