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pharmacy where you can purchase The Atchafalaya. A river fully one-third as big as the Mississippi, and perhaps someday just as big.

http://ccritz.com/index.asp As a person who thinks about things as opposed to just doing them, I generally understand human catastrophes. Human catastrophes are typically the result of thought – the result of some kind of understanding of the world. Any understanding of the world is necessarily limited, and when people act enough on such limited apprehensions, catastrophes are a common result.

Not that long ago, the Mississippi River was thought of as the source of the water for southern Louisiana. And it is. And since southern Louisiana is prone to flooding – flooding being an excess of water – the thought was that flooding could be controlled by controlling the river. I understand systems of thought like this perfectly well, and I understand how people fall right into them. The Mississippi is now tightly behind levees, which have not been breached since 1927. And yet if you look at a map comparing the Louisiana coastline of 1927 with that of today, you see that the entire southern part of the state is falling into a permanent state of flood – vanishing bit by bit into the ocean. The total loss is around 30 square miles every year – an area larger than Manhattan island getting bitten off from the coastline every year.

This was not happening until the river was effectively encased behind levees. So what happened? The problem, as so often, lies in the basic premise. Stand on the bank of the river and watch the river flow by: it is easy to apprehend that the Mississippi is the source of the area’s water. It is less easy to apprehend that the Mississippi is also the source of the area’s land. When the river does not flood the land – and it is currently not allowed to – it drops no sediments on it. Over time the goopy land compacts and subsides, and the ocean eats away at it, and there is less and less land every year. Lower Louisiana is getting flooded by the sea because we do not allow the Mississippi to flood it anymore.

Human beings have lived with floods for thousands of years, but someone apprehended that they were inconvenient at best and extremely dangerous at worst, and now not even in Egypt are rivers allowed their normal cycles of flood and dryness when people can help it. But it is now recognized that the people of the true Mississippi Delta – i.e. the land south of Baton Rouge, not the area between Vicksburg and the Peabody Hotel – will have to find some way to restore or artificially mimic the ancient floods of the river in order to have a land at all.

Going about this will be exceptionally difficult. We are talking about an area comprising thousands of square miles, which cannot survive as land without being periodically flooded – an area, moreover, which is thickly populated now and is also home to “the American Ruhr” or “Cancer Alley,” several hundred miles of chemical plants, oil refineries, grain elevators, coal transfer facilities, and all the other dirty businesses that can use the Mississippi’s ample water and ocean access. None of these homes or businesses are built to be flooded. The political problems involved in flooding out people’s land – and it is almost all privately owned – are almost infinite. Nor can sediments possibly be trucked in in sufficient supply to make any difference to the coastline. Only the river can possibly provide what the area needs in order to remain land. But the river is hemmed in, and kept there – by act of the U.S. Congress, and its enforcers, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

So I decided to take a trip out to the Atchafalaya Basin with Randy Perrin, an engineer for the Corps, who happens to be one of my friends from my days in New Orleans. The Atchafalaya – a river running to the west of the Mississippi, reaching the sea right in the middle of the Louisiana coast – was a quiet, natural area, a perfect backdrop for conversation, first of all, but also more than that. The Atchafalaya is a comparatively healthy river ecosystem. In fact, it is one of the few areas on the Louisiana coastline which is growing – land is being added, because the Atchafalaya still floods relatively normally.

But it also represents the single greatest engineering problem on the Mississippi river, a problem so brilliantly and thoroughly dissected by John McPhee in his 1987 essay “Atchafalaya” that no one has bothered to talk about the problem much since. When people think about the problems of New Orleans, they think of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures on the Industrial Canal, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. But those are small problems compared with the danger the Atchafalaya poses. Storm surges recede. But the Atchafalaya has the potential to destroy New Orleans entirely by severing its connection to the river.

The Atchafalaya is, by itself, a tiny river, draining part of Louisiana. But several hundred years ago, the Mississippi eroded a bend for itself which touched the Atchafalaya. At the point of contact, the rivers were at the same level, but the Atchafalaya reached the sea in half the distance the Mississippi did. Do the math: that means its slope is twice as steep. In times of flood, when the Mississippi was high, the differential was even greater. Slowly but surely, the Atchafalaya started to capture the Mississippi, each year taking more and more water. By 1950, the Atchafalaya had captured one-third of the water of the Mississippi and the process was accelerating.  It was headed for complete capture: a new river, the Mississifalaya.

This would be a complete disaster for all the river towns south of Baton Rouge, and primarily New Orleans. The riverbed at New Orleans is 180 feet deep, and the only thing keeping the ocean from rushing in and turning the riverbed into a sluggish brackish estuary is the constant pressure of the water coming downstream. Without fresh water in the river, the city would lose its water supply, and without flow, its sewage system. Cancer Alley would suffer the same fate – without access to the garden hose known as the Mississippi none of the old factories and refineries would be able to function. They would be abandoned within years.

The Army Corps of Engineers stepped into the gap, building a series of massive dams between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya, and stabilizing the Atchafalaya’s flow at thirty percent of the Mississippi. The result has become the Corps’ first experiment in distributing Mississippi water into other outlets, and an example of how the coastline could be rebuilt by using the river. In that way it has been a success. But the same basic problem remains: the river wants to abandon New Orleans, and it seems to be merely waiting for its opportunity. “The Mississippi River,” as McPhee observes,

with its sand and silt, has created most of Louisiana, and it could not have done so by remaining in one channel. If it had, southern Louisiana would be a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana exists in its present form because the Mississippi River has jumped here and there within an arc about two hundred miles wide, like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course, surging over the left or the right bank to go off in utterly new directions. Always it is the river’s purpose to get to the Gulf by the shortest and steepest gradient. As the mouth advances southward and the river lengthens, the gradient declines, the current slows, and sediment builds up the bed. Eventually, it builds up so much that the river spills to one side.

A glance at the map shows the extent of the problem. The Mississippi has, in fact, become a long narrow peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico – I had biked and seen precisely that, with open water on both sides – while nearer parts of the Louisiana coastline are nutrient-starved lowlands just waiting to capture the river. The most obvious spot is West Cote Blanch Bay, the northernmost intrusion of open Gulf water on the coast. If you were charged with distributing sediments along the Louisiana coast, this would be the place you’d start – it looks like the hungriest spot. It is also almost precisely the mouth of the Atchafalaya. Nature was working perfectly. But man had changed nature’s workings – or perhaps just postponed them.

Whether or not this project of attempting to make the Mississippi do something it had never done before – stay in one channel – would work is a question which we can leave until I got a look at the dams I found upriver, the Old River Control Structures where the Mississippi and Atchafalaya touch. As Randy Perrin said, “If you’re asking me if we can prevent the Mississippi from going down the Atchafalaya, I’ll say of course we can. Until we can’t. It really is just a question of mathematics. If you have a big enough mountain, the river will take a long time to get through it. If you have people to maintain that mountain, the river will never get through it. Unless there’s something you can’t predict. Something that’s not in anybody’s equation. And generally, something you can’t predict happens eventually.”

But it might be possible that the big dam holding the Mississippi off from the Atchafalaya might be too successful – here was something which did not enter the equation at all. The Mississippi was being held off from the entire Gulf coast, and its sediments were being routed out to sea and shot into deep water. The result was the collapse of the coastline. This made the entire area susceptible to storm surge – a process which would work gradually, but eventually eat the whole coast away if some solution were not found.

And the Corps was now looking into solutions. “Basically the buzzwords now around the Corps are sediments, nutrients, capturing sediments,” Randy told me as we drove away from Johnny Angel’s house. “We’re looking at that as a resource that we’re supposed to conserve. Right now, we’re shooting all those sediments into the Gulf. They can never be recovered there. They’ll be lost. We’re seeing that as a problem now.”

“Why wasn’t that seen as a problem before?”

“Well, you have to understand the way the Corps works. The Corps really was never here to manage the river in some holistic sense. The Corps has very specific mandates from Congress. First it was navigation – the Corps was involved with improving navigation on U.S. waterways. You can see that making sense from a military standpoint, the same way roads are a military concern. Then it was flood control. Really it was the Great Flood of 1927 that got the Corps involved in flood control and the levees. Basically, they saw that state agencies were not reliable during a big flood, because one state would fight against another state trying to get the river to flood somebody else’s land. There had to be someone impartial – or at least less partial – involved. If you want to read about there’s a great book, called, Rising Tide, about how the Corps started really paying attention to the river after that flood. That flood was a disaster, and it was clear that something had to change.”

And the Corps had, in fact, changed things. In 2011, the Mississippi River had the greatest flood it has ever had, and yet you have probably never heard of it. The river was carrying twenty-five percent more water than the 1927 flood, and yet very little damage was done. The Corps had managed the situation brilliantly – including making politically difficult decisions to blow levees. This had been done in Missouri and Arkansas, in sparsely settled farmland. Those farmers, of course, did not like the situation, but the needs of the many had outweighed the needs of the few.

“So anyway, that was what the Corps did, navigation and flood control on rivers. Shipping and the economy. That was our mandate from Congress. We didn’t really do anything else. So people who complain about building up the coastline, that wasn’t part of the mandate. If it was part of the mandate we would have a program. But that has to come from Congress. So the environment has always been something of an afterthought for the Corps. And hey, you can blame Congress for that.  But in recent years the Congress has given us a new mandate to also do projects for environmental restoration.”

And the fundamental environmental restoration work that had to go on was restoring the relationship of the river to the wetlands around it – a relationship where the river nourishes the whole coast. And so we were headed for the Atchafalaya, to take a look at the one part of the Louisiana coastal wetland that was growing.  The Atchafalaya had been seen as a problem: it might just be the solution.