Douglas Brinkley: To Save the Gulf, Free the Mississippi
[The writer is professor of history at Rice University and author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.]
...Back in 1932 the Army Corps mistakenly raised the Mississippi River levies and built concrete jetties for flood control. The net effect of these engineering boondoggles - built ostensibly to improve navigation and reduce the need for dredging - has been to destroy Louisiana's incredible wetlands; already a landmass the size of Delaware has disappeared. The Corps flood control programme has deprived the wetlands of their annual replenishing sediment. Instead, hundreds of tonnes of sediment a year drift far out over the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico for naught. Now, as the oil pours in, the wetlands have no natural means of replenishment. They are becoming a toxic dump.
Mr Obama, if serious about the recovery of the gulf, needs to harness the Mississippi by either ordering the Corps to build a Hoover Dam-like structure around the river's mouth to redirect the flow - which would have to be approved by Congress - or immediately issuing a White House executive order that the Corps open the floodgates and build diversion canals through southern Louisiana. Both can be sold to the American people on grounds of national security. If Mr Obama does either of those things he will save the entire Mississippi delta, where so much of our seafood and wildlife abundance lives, from ruin....
We have to harness the natural process of the Mississippi sediment, which need to be infused into the Louisiana wetlands as a prerequisite to saving the great shrimp, crab and fish nurseries. The stricken citizens of Louisiana need to know that he will start the Herculean process of saving America's wetlands in earnest. In a simple bumper-sticker slogan: open up the floodgates, Mr President.
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)
...Back in 1932 the Army Corps mistakenly raised the Mississippi River levies and built concrete jetties for flood control. The net effect of these engineering boondoggles - built ostensibly to improve navigation and reduce the need for dredging - has been to destroy Louisiana's incredible wetlands; already a landmass the size of Delaware has disappeared. The Corps flood control programme has deprived the wetlands of their annual replenishing sediment. Instead, hundreds of tonnes of sediment a year drift far out over the outer continental shelf of the Gulf of Mexico for naught. Now, as the oil pours in, the wetlands have no natural means of replenishment. They are becoming a toxic dump.
Mr Obama, if serious about the recovery of the gulf, needs to harness the Mississippi by either ordering the Corps to build a Hoover Dam-like structure around the river's mouth to redirect the flow - which would have to be approved by Congress - or immediately issuing a White House executive order that the Corps open the floodgates and build diversion canals through southern Louisiana. Both can be sold to the American people on grounds of national security. If Mr Obama does either of those things he will save the entire Mississippi delta, where so much of our seafood and wildlife abundance lives, from ruin....
We have to harness the natural process of the Mississippi sediment, which need to be infused into the Louisiana wetlands as a prerequisite to saving the great shrimp, crab and fish nurseries. The stricken citizens of Louisiana need to know that he will start the Herculean process of saving America's wetlands in earnest. In a simple bumper-sticker slogan: open up the floodgates, Mr President.