A report on what happens when the three meet, aided and funded by politicians whose vision too often is clouded with their short-term reelection chances rather than the long-term public good.
September 2007
Volume 25 | Number 3
Warning: Army Corps of Engineers Project Ahead
By David Haddock
Imagine citizens who don’t know of their nation’s fifth largest river, much less its name. Imagine bureaucrats who acknowledge but disregard warnings of impending disaster along its floodplain. Imagine that, for political gain, legislators invest taxpayers’ money in projects that increase the peril. Welcome to the Atchafalaya.
Why should Americans care? Because the billions of dollars Congress already has spent and the billions more they are poised to spend in the Lower Mississippi Basin, most visibly around New Orleans, will not only prove to be a colossal waste; the projects jeopardize the lives of thousands of people who live there.
The Atchafalaya River is a distributary of the Mississippi. Tributaries bring water to a river; distributaries carry some away. Nearly everyone has heard of the Missouri River, a tributary. The Atchafalaya carries three times the water away from the Mississippi as the Missouri brings to it.
Before reaching the Gulf, the Mississippi travels twice as far as the Atchafalaya from the point where the rivers split. Thus, the Atchafalaya’s water moves faster, causing more erosion. As a result, in 1945 the Atchafalaya’s streambed cut so deeply into the Red River, a tributary of the Mississippi, that all of the Red’s water began to flow down the Atchafalaya. By pirating the Red, the Atchafalaya became the eighth longest river in the United States. Through a similar process, the Atchafalaya eventually will capture the Mississippi itself. It would have done that by 1975 if two decades earlier Congress had not ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to construct a dam across Old River, the connector between the rivers, freezing the prevailing water shares at one-third for the Atchafalaya and two-thirds for the Mississippi. As of the mid-seventies, the Mississippi has been rising (silting) as the Atchafalaya has been falling (eroding). Imagine, as nonfiction guru John McPhee wrote three decades ago, standing at the headwaters of the Atchafalaya and looking up three storeys at the Mississippi, the largest river in North America. Hydrologists have been sounding the alarm for much longer.
Why the danger? As the Atchafalaya erodes it threatens to undermine the Old River dams and drop a deluge into the Atchafalaya. A wall of water racing to the Gulf would scour farmlands and crush habitations—22,000 people live adjacent to the river banks.
