A long history of constraining the river through levees has led to massive land loss in its delta. Can people engineer a way out?
These camps tend to be clustered in marinas, often just beyond the point where the ridge drops away into marsh. Most modern settlement has occurred atop the ridges themselves, which feature the only viable tracts of farmland in the delta. New Orleans was founded in 1718 atop the ridge that runs alongside the current channel of the Mississippi, 150 kilometers upstream of the river’s mouth. The city’s earliest residents found that even this land was precarious.
Other levees were built along the river through the decades until they merged into a single entity that stretches thousands of kilometers north—well beyond the top of the delta all the way into southern Missouri, where the Mississippi’s big tributaries join together. By the 20th century, engineers were closing the gaps in the levee that had allowed water to pour out into the delta’s forking streams. They presumed this would reduce flooding by helping the water speed toward the sea.
In the 1950s, engineers confronted another problem: The river was beginning to avulse once more. More and more of its water was pouring into the Atchafalaya River, the last unclosed outlet, aside from the river’s mouth. Scientists realized the Atchafalaya could soon steal the Mississippi’s might; the final 500 kilometers of the river would shrivel into a brackish creek—a big problem, given that New Orleans relies on the river for drinking water. A set of gates was installed to halt that jump.
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