Image via WikipediaMississippi Rising: Apocalypse Now?
The Mississippi River, its tributaries swollen by snowmelt and stormwater, is rising toward a flood level that could equal or exceed anything in its recorded history. The threat to Cairo, Illinois — just below the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers — is so grave that the US Army Corps of Engineers is about to blow up a levee just downstream at Bird’s Point, Missouri, to relieve the flooding in Cairo by deliberately inundating 140,000 acres of farms and towns. The emotional controversy that has arisen over this move obscures a real and rising threat to the economy of the United States.
It seems counterintuitive to blow a levee in the face of a flood, and it is capable of inciting riot to propose to flood farmland to save city blocks, the farm being in one state, the city in another. Tempers are rising. Missouri politicians are demanding that the Corps abandon its plan, and have filed suit in a Federal court to force it to do so. Illinois politicians insist that if the Corps does not act, Cairo will look like New Orleans after Katrina. Yet it has always been the plan of the Corps, which bears responsibility for “managing” and “taming” the mightiest American river, to use Bird’s Point as a floodway in an emergency. The plan is sanctioned by the 1928 Flood Control Act.
But the real threat posed by this historic, gathering flood may well lie several hundred miles to the south, where the Mississippi crosses the Louisiana border. There, as the Corps well knows but dare not discuss, this historic flood threatens to overwhelm one of the frailest defenses industrial humanity has offered to preserve its profits from the immutable processes of nature. This flood has the potential to be a mortal blow to the economy of the United States, and outside the Corp of Engineers virtually no one knows why. I explained it in detail in my book, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age.
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