Download or read book If the Old River Control Structure Fails written by Raphael Gabriel Kazmann and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
Download or read book Old River Control Structure Louisiana written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Beyond Control written by James F. Barnett Jr. and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-03-16 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Beyond Control written by James F. Barnett, Jr. and published by . This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed chronicle of how the wild Mississippi will eventually deliver a cataclysm
Download or read book Saving Louisiana written by Bill Streever and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2001 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the Mississippi River's Old River Control Structure to the pipeline canals of the Gulf's oil fields to the capitol in Baton Rouge, Saving Louisiana? follows scientists, conservationists, and politicians, as they persistently ask the same question: Can Louisiana's coastline be saved? For some experts, technical uncertainty impedes progress. For others, bureaucracy and special interests block what they see as the right path. Still others believe that the real challenge lies in determining what society really wants, so that ecosystem restoration becomes a balance of dollars against choices. Saving Louisiana? builds a story of doubt and discord that captures the technical and human drama of ecosystem restoration and management"--Publisher website (March 23, 2009).
Download or read book River Mechanics written by Pierre Y. Julien and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 527 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completely updated and with three new chapters, this analysis of river dynamics is invaluable for advanced students, researchers and practitioners.
Download or read book Downstream Toward Home written by Oliver A. Houck and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2014-10-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rivers have played a remarkable role throughout our national history. The outcome of battles, the fate of pioneers, and the survival of early settlers were inextricable from the course and temperament of surrounding rivers. Depicted in songs, art, and fiction, these waterways found a place in the American psyche and continue to wind through the imaginations of modern adventurers. In Downstream Toward Home, Oliver A. Houck recounts his thrilling, meditative, and humorous experi-ences on these oft-neglected tributaries and streams. Spanning more than sixty years and exploring more than thirty-two.
Download or read book Selected Water Resources Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Proceedings of the Conference on Coastal Erosion and Wetland Modification in Louisiana written by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Office of Biological Services and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Artificial Structures and Shorelines written by H. Jesse Walker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the result of an initiative of the Commission on the Coastal Environment of the International Geographical Union. The initial concept from which the plan has proceeded was presented at the 24th International Geographical Congress in Japan in 1980. AUTHORSHIP AND COVERAGE All of the articles in this volume have been written by specialists familiar with the coastal segment discussed. Nearly all have been prepared by citizens of the country (and, for that matter, even each subregion) considered. In the case of exceptions (e.g. Suriname), the authors have conducted fieldwork on the coast of the country they treat. In order to preserve the "on-the-spot" integrity of the volume, it was decided not to fill in the blanks along the world's coastline with library researched chapters. Thus, coverage is variable. Nearly every coastal country in Europe is represented whereas for Africa and South America there are major gaps. In addition, there are 2 instances of overlap. In the case of England (with a shoreline of nearly 3,000 km) a complementary chapter on Lincolnshire (with a shoreline of only 155 km) is included. The other case is the general article on the Baltic Coast of the USSR which is supported by chapters on Estonia and Lithuania.
Download or read book River Flow 2006 Two Volume Set written by Rui M.L. Ferreira and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2006-09-14 with total page 2278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rivers are complex entities. In addition to being valuable wildlife habitats, they support human activities by providing water for human usage, renewable energy and convenient transportation. Rivers may also pose threats to riverine communities, in the form of floods and other natural or man-induced hazards.Contemporary societies recognize their re
Download or read book Designing the Bayous written by Martin Reuss and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-02 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Change in the Course of the Lower Mississippi River written by David Bruce Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book River Bend Station Operation written by and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selected Water Resources Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 984 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Large Rivers written by Avijit Gupta and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large Rivers: Geomorphology and Management explores an important topic in geomorphology and sedimentology: the form and function of major rivers. Our knowledge of the big rivers of the world is limited. It is currently difficult to recognise large rivers of the past from relict sedimentary deposits or to structure management policies for long international rivers. This exciting book brings together a set of papers on large rivers of the world, as a unique introduction to a demanding subject. The book includes thirty chapters and is organised into three sections. The first part is on the environmental requirements for creating and maintaining a major river system. The second is a collection of case studies on 14 large rivers from different continents, covering a range of physical environments. The third section includes chapters on the measurement and management of large rivers. First book to offer in a single volume state-of-the-art knowledge on management and geomorphology of large rivers of the world A pioneering study, pushing the boundaries of our knowledge related to big rivers Includes comprehensive case studies covering the major large rivers of the world including Amazon, Mississippi, Nile, Congo, Indus, and Mekong Written by a leading team of distinguished, international contributors Large Rivers: Geomorphology and Management is essential reading for postgraduate students and researchers in fluvial geomorphology, hydrology, sedimentary geology, and river management. It is also of relevance to engineers and environmental consultants in the private and public sectors working on major rivers of the world.
