Download or read book Old River Control Auxiliary Structure written by Bobby P. Fletcher and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 Energy and Water Development Appropriations for 1982 written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 1476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Water Resources Development in Louisiana written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Engineer Update written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy and Water Development Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1982 Corps of Engineers Department of the Interior Water and Power Resources Service 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 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy and Water Development Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1982 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 1630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Federal Register written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 1256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Great Projects written by James Tobin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the earliest days of the republic, great engineering projects have shaped American landscapes and expressed American dreams. The ambition to build lies as close to the nation's heart as the belief in liberty. We live in a built civilization, connected one to another in an enormous web of technology. Yet we have all too often overlooked the role of engineers and builders in American history. With glorious photographs and epic narrative sweep, Great Projects at last gives their story the prominence it deserves. Each of the eight projects featured in this masterful narrative was a milestone in its own right: the flood-control works of the lower Mississippi, Hoover Dam, Edison's lighting system, the spread of electricity across the nation, the great Croton Aqueduct, the bridges of New York City, Boston's revamped street system, known as the Big Dig, and the ever-evolving communica- tions network called the Internet. Each project arose from a heroic vision. Each encountered obstacles. Each reveals a tale of genius and perseverance. James Tobin, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, explains the four essential tasks of the engineer: to protect people from the destructive force of water while harnessing it for the enormous good it can do; to provide people with electricity, the motive force of modern life; to make great cities habitable and vital; and to create the pathways that connect place to place and person to person. Tobin focuses on the indi- viduals behind our greatest structures of earth and concrete and steel: James Buchanan Eads, who walked on the floor of the Mississippi to learn the river's secrets; Arthur Powell Davis and Frank Crowe, who imagined a dam that could transform the West; Thomas Edison, who envisioned a new way to light the world; Samuel Insull, the organizational mastermind of the electrical revolution; the long-forgotten John Bloomfield Jervis, who assured New York's future with the gift of clean water; Othmar Ammann, the modest Swiss-American who fought his mentor to become the first engineer to bridge the lower Hudson River; Fred Salvucci, the antihighway rebel who transformed the face of Boston; and J.C.R. Licklider, the obscure scientist who first imagined the Internet. Here, too, are the workers who scorned hardship to turn the engineers' dreams into reality, deep underground and high in the sky, through cold and heat and danger. In Great Projects -- soon to be a major PBS television series by the Emmy Award-winning Great Projects Film Company -- we share their dreams and witness their struggles; we watch them create the modern world we walk through each day -- the "city upon a hill" that became our America.
Download or read book Holding Back the River written by Tyler J. Kelley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America’s most vital natural resource: our rivers. The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America’s rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. We need them for nourishing crops, for cheap bulk transportation, for hydroelectric power, for fresh drinking water. Rivers are also part of our mythology, our collective soul; they are Mark Twain, Led Zeppelin, and the Delta Blues. But as infrastructure across the nation fails and climate change pushes rivers and seas to new heights, we’ve arrived at a critical moment in our battle to tame these often-destructive forces of nature. Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling the heartland, getting to know the men and women whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. On the Illinois-Kentucky border, we encounter Luther Helland, master of the most important—and most decrepit—lock and dam in America. This old dam at the end of the Ohio River was scheduled to be replaced in 1998, but twenty years and $3 billion later, its replacement still isn’t finished. As the old dam crumbles and commerce grinds to a halt, Helland and his team must risk their lives, using steam-powered equipment and sheer brawn, to raise and lower the dam as often as ten times a year. In Southeast Missouri, we meet Twan Robinson, who lives in the historically Black village of Pinhook. As a super-flood rises on the Mississippi, she learns from her sister that the US Army Corps of Engineers is going to blow up the levee that stands between her home and the river. With barely enough notice to evacuate her elderly mother and pack up a few of her own belongings, Robinson escapes to safety only to begin a nightmarish years-long battle to rebuild her lost community. Atop a floodgate in central Louisiana, we’re beside Major General Richard Kaiser, the man responsible for keeping North America’s greatest river under control. Kaiser stands above the spot where the Mississippi River wants to change course, abandoning Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and following the Atchafalaya River to the sea. The daily flow of water from one river to the other is carefully regulated, but something else is happening that may be out of Kaiser and the Corps’ control. America’s infrastructure is old and underfunded. While our economy, society, and climate have changed, our levees, locks, and dams have not. Yet to fix what’s wrong will require more than money. It will require an act of imagination. “With meticulous research and insightful analysis” (Publishers Weekly), Holding Back the River brings us into the lives of the Americans who grapple with our mighty rivers and, through their stories, suggests solutions to some of the century’s greatest challenges.
Download or read book Annual Report FY of the Chief of Engineers on Civil Works Activities written by United States. Army. Corps of Engineers and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 1316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy and Water Development Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1980 written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 1266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Energy and Water Development Appropriations for written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 734 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications written by and published by . This book was released on with total page 1308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
