Designing the Bayous

Designing the Bayous PDF Author: Martin Reuss
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1585443751
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River Basin is one of the most dynamic and critical environments in the country. It sustains the nation’s last cypress-tupelo wetland and provides a habitat for many species of animals. Endowed with natural gas and oil fields, the basin also supports a large commercial fisheries industry. Perhaps most crucial, it remains a primary component of the plan to control the Mississippi River and relieve flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other communities in the lower river valley. The continuing health of the basin is a reflection not of nature, but of the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With levee building and clearing in the nineteenth century and damming, dredging, and floodway construction in the twentieth, the basin was converted from a vast forested swamp into a designer wetland, where human aspirations and nature maintained a precarious equilibrium. Originally published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily for internal distribution, this environmental and political history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an unflinching account of the transformation of an area that has endured perhaps more human manipulation than any other natural environment in the nation. Martin Reuss provides a new preface to bring us up-to-date on the state of the basin, which remains both an engineering contrivance and natural wonder.

Designing the Bayous

Designing the Bayous PDF Author: Martin Reuss
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1585443751
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River Basin is one of the most dynamic and critical environments in the country. It sustains the nation’s last cypress-tupelo wetland and provides a habitat for many species of animals. Endowed with natural gas and oil fields, the basin also supports a large commercial fisheries industry. Perhaps most crucial, it remains a primary component of the plan to control the Mississippi River and relieve flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other communities in the lower river valley. The continuing health of the basin is a reflection not of nature, but of the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With levee building and clearing in the nineteenth century and damming, dredging, and floodway construction in the twentieth, the basin was converted from a vast forested swamp into a designer wetland, where human aspirations and nature maintained a precarious equilibrium. Originally published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily for internal distribution, this environmental and political history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an unflinching account of the transformation of an area that has endured perhaps more human manipulation than any other natural environment in the nation. Martin Reuss provides a new preface to bring us up-to-date on the state of the basin, which remains both an engineering contrivance and natural wonder.

Designing the Bayous

Designing the Bayous PDF Author: Martin Reuss
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585443758
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River Basin is one of the most dynamic and critical environments in the country. It sustains the nation’s last cypress-tupelo wetland and provides a habitat for many species of animals. Endowed with natural gas and oil fields, the basin also supports a large commercial fisheries industry. Perhaps most crucial, it remains a primary component of the plan to control the Mississippi River and relieve flooding in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and other communities in the lower river valley. The continuing health of the basin is a reflection not of nature, but of the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. With levee building and clearing in the nineteenth century and damming, dredging, and floodway construction in the twentieth, the basin was converted from a vast forested swamp into a designer wetland, where human aspirations and nature maintained a precarious equilibrium. Originally published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers primarily for internal distribution, this environmental and political history of the Atchafalaya Basin is an unflinching account of the transformation of an area that has endured perhaps more human manipulation than any other natural environment in the nation. Martin Reuss provides a new preface to bring us up-to-date on the state of the basin, which remains both an engineering contrivance and natural wonder.

Designing the Bayous

Designing the Bayous PDF Author: U. S. Army Corps of Engineers
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781520770000
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Of all the natural resources that bless the United States, none is more important than its water. The nation's rivers and streams provide vital navigation links, hydropower, fishing, recreation, and water for domestic, agricultural, and industrial use. At the same time, they occasionally overrun towns and farms, destroy property, threaten livelihoods, and take lives. Perhaps nowhere in the country have the conflicting purposes of water development stimulated more studies, engineering responses, and public involvement than in Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin-which includes the largest river basin swamp in North America. Since the early nineteenth century, all levels of government have been involved. The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers' part in the basin's development includes providing flood control and maintaining navigable channels. Today, the Atchafalaya Basin serves as a major floodway to convey Mississippi River water to the Gulf of Mexico. In this history, Dr. Reuss tells the complicated, but fascinating story of how local, state, and federal agencies have attempted to reconcile conflicting visions for the basin. In so doing, he illuminates the interaction of politics, technology, and environment. Though focusing on one area of the country, this book addresses many themes associated with the development of water resources throughout the United States. Part I: Assuming Responsibility * Chapter 1 - Early Flood Control Efforts, Louisiana Style * Early Settlers and River Transportation * Clearing the Streams: The Beginnings of State Aid * The First Federal Flood Control Plan * The Beginning of Federal Assistance: The Swampland Acts * Chapter 2 - Interregnum: Growing Federal Involvement * The Humphreys-Abbot Report * The Civil War and the Atchafalaya Basin * Once More, the Levees * The Federal Role Increases * Commerce and Transportation in the Atchafalaya Basin * Chapter 3 - The Outlet Question * The Mississippi River Commission and the Outlet Question * Navigation Interests and the Outlet Question * Floods and Outlets * Chapter 4 - Apres Le Deluge: The Jadwin Plan * New Remedies for Old Problems * The Special Board * The Unwinding of the Jadwin Plan * Part II: Defining Responsibility * Chapter 5 - The Politics of Engineering * The Critics and the Corps * Dredging * Private Property and Public Good: Levee Rights-of-Way * Private Property and Public Good: Flowage Easements * Chapter 6 - Louisiana and Mississippi: The Battle Over Floodways * The Markham Plan * The Overton Act * Real Estate Problems * The 1938 and 1941 Flood Control Acts * Morganza Floodway Construction * Part III: The Burdens of Responsibility * Chapter 7 - The Old River Problem * Nature Takes the Low Road * Seeking Answers * Preparing the Plan * Authorization * Construction * Post-Construction Problems * Chapter 8 - Let the Public Be Heard: Reconciling Multiple Objectives * The Setting * Coordination or Confrontation? * Recreation * Growing State Involvement * Chapter 9 - Environmental Activists and the Corps of Engineers * The National Wildlife Federation-Corps of Engineers Agreement * Institutional Arrangements and Objectives * Impasse and Reorientation * Chapter 10 - Defending the Turf * The Environmental Protection Agency's Approach * The Fish and Wildlife Service Makes Its Move * Environmental Issues, Old and New * Chapter 11 - Denouement? * Real Estate Problems Again * Political Resolution - and Irresolution * New Controversies and Steps Toward Implementation * The Uncertain Future * Afterword: A Sense of Place, A Sense of Balance * Notes * Bibliography

Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous

Steamboats on Louisiana's Bayous PDF Author: Carl A. Brasseaux
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807129753
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
In an extraordinary feat of research and intrepid historical navigation, Carl A. Brasseaux and Keith P. Fontenot serve as guides through the labyrinthian and often harrowing world of Louisiana bayou steamboat journeys of the mid to late nineteenth century. The bayou country's steamboat saga mirrors in microcosm the tale of America's most colorful -- and most highly romanticized -- transportation era. But Brasseaux and Fontenot brace readers with a boldly revisionist picture of the opulent Mississippi River floating palaces: stripped-down, utilitarian freight-haulers belching smoke from twin stacks, churning through shallow swamps and narrow tributary streams, and encountering such hazards as shoals, sawyers, stumps, highwater and dry-bed seasons, and the remains of vessels claimed by those treacheries. For decades, steamboats transported goods, passengers, and mail between New Orleans and south Louisiana's vibrant interior agricultural region, bearing testimony to the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and tenacity of crews in conquering the challenges posed by a forbidding environment. Brasseaux and Fontenot marshaled a monumental array of information, including sources long-buried in courthouses, private collections, and the records of the Army Corps of Engineers. They offer data on some five hundred steamboats, keelboats, and barges known to have operated in the bayou country. This book is the first major study of a fascinating slice of the steamboat industry, showcasing a trade critically important to New Orleans's prosperity but largely forgotten in southern historiography until now. Encompassing economic, social, transportation, and environmental history, it captures the period just before the iron horse emerged as America's undisputed master of inland conveyance.

Beyond Control

Beyond Control PDF Author: James F. Barnett
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 149681116X
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. During 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. Such a map-changing reconfiguration of the country's largest river would bear national significance as well 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.

Rivers by Design

Rivers by Design PDF Author: Karen M. O'Neill
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The United States has one of the largest and costliest flood control systems in the world, even though only a small proportion of its land lies in floodplains. Rivers by Design traces the emergence of the mammoth U.S. flood management system, which is overseen by the federal government but implemented in conjunction with state governments and local contractors and levee districts. Karen M. O’Neill analyzes the social origins of the flood control program, showing how the system initially developed as a response to the demands of farmers and the business elite in outlying territories. The configuration of the current system continues to reflect decisions made in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. It favors economic development at the expense of environmental concerns. O’Neill focuses on the creation of flood control programs along the lower Mississippi River and the Sacramento River, the first two rivers to receive federal flood control aid. She describes how, in the early to mid-nineteenth century, planters, shippers, and merchants from both regions campaigned for federal assistance with flood control efforts. She explains how the federal government was slowly and reluctantly drawn into water management to the extent that, over time, nearly every river in the United States was reengineered. Her narrative culminates in the passage of the national Flood Control Act of 1936, which empowered the Army Corps of Engineers to build projects for all navigable rivers in conjunction with local authorities, effectively ending nationwide, comprehensive planning for the protection of water resources.

Two Centuries of Experience in Water Resources Management

Two Centuries of Experience in Water Resources Management PDF Author: John Lonnquest
Publisher: Government Printing Office
ISBN:
Category : Water resources development
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description


Southern Waters

Southern Waters PDF Author: Craig E. Colten
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807156523
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Water has dominated images of the South throughout history, from Hernando de Soto's 1541 crossing of the Mississippi to tragic scenes of flooding throughout the Gulf South after Hurricane Katrina. But these images tell only half the story: as urban, industrial, and population growth create unprecedented demands on water in the South, the problems of pollution and water shortages grow ever more urgent. In Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance, Craig E. Colten addresses how the South -- in an environment fraught with uncertainty -- can navigate the twin risks of too much water and not enough. From the arrival of the first European settlers, the South's inhabitants have pursued a course of maximum exploitation and control of the area's plentiful waters, investing widely in wetland drainage and massive flood-control projects. Disputes over southern waterways go back nearly as far: obstruction of fish migration by mill dams prompted new policies to protect aquatic life as early as the colonial era. Colten argues that such conflicts, which have heightened dramatically since the explosive urbanization of the mid-twentieth century, will only become more frequent and intense, making the shift toward sustainable use a national imperative. In tracing the evolving uses and abuses of southern waters, Colten offers crucial insights into the complex historical geography of water throughout the region. A masterful analysis of the ways in which past generations harnessed and consumed water, Southern Waters also stands as a guide to adapting our water usage to cope with the looming shortage of this once-abundant resource.

Divine Providence

Divine Providence PDF Author: Charles A. Camillo
Publisher: Department of the Army
ISBN: 9780160914058
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Provides a transparent depiction of the 2011 flood within the Mississippi River and Tributaries footprint. It also provides necessary historical context for greater understanding of key features of the project. It is the story of prudent foresight, heroic actions, agonizing decisions, and extreme personal sacrifice. On cover and on dust jacket: Listening. Inspecting, Partnering, Engineering. This print product is also available in print paperback format with ISBN: 9780160933431 that can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-022-00364-9 Related products: Federal Reinsurance for Disasters can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-070-07346-2 Toward a Unified Military Response: Hurricane Sandy and the Dual Status Commander can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01147-8 Home Builder's Guide to Coastal Construction can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/064-000-00055-1 Floods resources collection can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/environment-nature/natural-environment... Hurricanes, Typhoons & Tsunamis product collection can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/environment-nature/natural-environment..."

Divine Providence

Divine Providence PDF Author: Charles A. Camillo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Flood control
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description