Rerouting the Missisippi

[Liv]

mississippi_relocated.jpg (63.08 KiB) Viewed 2158 times

So with the Katrina anniversary just days away, everyone is talking about Katrina. Interestingly enough, some people are suggesting rerouting the Mississippi river to thwart off future disasters like what occurred in the lower 9th ward, and Saint Bernard's Parish during the New Orleans flood. The project, expected to cost 50 billion dollars is causing many to question whether the rest of America should pay for this modification to the continent, when we don't directly benefit from it. Mainly Conservatives are saying that. Conservatives, are generally against socialism, so no big surprise there. The New York Times has a cool photo essay on the whole thing here.

Ironically, I can't say I support this. I've lived in California, where the core of Engineer's hammered the Colorado river straight (as they say). The cement lined aqueducts drain the river and divert the water into Los Angeles, San Diego, and Southern California. Today, the Colorado river doesn't even make it to the ocean, but drys to a mud puddle in some urban barrio in Mexico.

Sure it's not the same thing, but still... Paying "that" kind of money to fix a problem by us "mucking" with nature, leaves me believing, maybe we should have never messed with it to begin with.

Either that, or reroute the river to N.C. and we will use the sediment to fill in the area between the coast, and the outer banks. I get a free lot for thinking of it!

Wonder what Mark Twain would say?

[Sanjuro]

Wonder what Mark Twain would say?

Probably something like this with tongue in cheek:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.