The Alton Levee, Maintained by the Wood River Levee and Drainage District

The levee at Alton is in trouble, not because its construction was faulty, but because the construction of the Melvin Price Dam two miles south of the old dam created a permanent flood behind dam and raised the water table in the wetlands behind the levee. Water is seeping under the levee and forming sand boils in the wetlands on the other side.

Wetland where the sand boils are erupting. Piezometer in the foreground measures the level of the water table behind the levee

The Corps of Engineers built and paid for the levee sixty years ago, from material dredged from the river, and turned its maintenance over to the Wood River Levee and Drainage District. This is standard procedure: the Corps builds the levee; the beneficiary maintains it. Were the levee built today, the beneficiary would pay 35% of the cost and the Corps 65% of the cost. There is a move afoot to flip that ratio.

First, you have to understand the geology of the land that supports the levee: a thin clay blanket overlays a thick sand aquifer, which rests on top of bedrock. It’s the thinness of the clay blanket at Alton that is the problem. Water is seeping under clay blanket, moving through the sand, and carrying it to the land side of the levee. Seepage, water seeping under the levee is a given in all levees, particularly when the river is flooded.

Then you have to understand hydrostatic pressure. My husband, the architect, who deals with hydrostatic pressure every time he builds a retaining wall and said hydrostatic pressure does anything it wants, helped me understand it. In the retaining wall the dirt behind it wants to push it over from the top or shove it out from the bottom. That’s one form of hydrostatic pressure.

When you dive deep into a swimming pool and your ears hurt: That’s hydrostatic pressure. Which brings us to levees.

Build a levee and the water pushes against it when the river floods: hydrostatic pressure. The pressure is stronger at the base of the levee than at the surface of the water. The construction of the Melvin Price dam created a permanent flood next to the levee and raised the water table landward.

Alton Levee north of Melvin Price Lock and Dam

When the pressure meets permeable soil under the levee, say sandy layer at Alton, it pushes water through the sand to the land side of the levee. That’s seepage. That’s what is happening at  Alton . And it’s carrying the sand with it and bubbling up in sand boils in the wetlands landward of the levee.

There are several ways to counter hydrostatic pressure.

Push back: The seepage berm, I have always thought of it as a buttress, but it is designed to balance the press of the water outside the levee with the weight of the berm on the inside. If the water seeps under the levee at a great rate, it will create cavities under the levee, into which the levee can collapse, allowing the river to pour through resulting crevasse.

Alton Levee and Ber

A second way is to built relief wells, an internal drainage system set at the toe of the levee that reaches down into the sandy layer under the clay blanket, removes the seepage,  and spills it  into collector ditches, gutters, that carry pump stations, where it is pumped back into the Mississippi.

Relief Well

A third way is to build cutoff walls: excavate a trench down to the bedrock and fill it with bentonite, stopping seepage altogether.

The levee at Alton has a berm on which Illinois 143 travels and relief wells set in the toe of the berm. The Mississippi Levee Board has  fairly clear illustrations of  seepage berms and relief wells.

Alton Levee Berm and Relief Wells

When the engineers constructed the dam in the 1980s and early 1990s, they modified the relief wells to counter the increase hydrostatic pressure that came with the permanent flood behind the dam.

I am grateful to Chris Wilson of the St. Louis District of the Corps of Engineers for helping me understand what is going on with the Alton levee. Mr. Wilson is also in charge of the upgrade of all the levees from Alton to Columbia, Illinois, all of which have water seeping under them and all of which have been decertified in the wake of the levee failures at New Orleans, during Hurricane Katrina.

There is more on the levee and Chris Wilson in the Alton Telegraph and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Copyright © Quinta Scott, 2009, All Rights Reserved

The following quotation from my upcoming book, The Mississippi, explains the vulnerability of levees:

“As massive as they are, levees are fragile come floodtime. Leave a stick in the levee during construction, when it rots, it creates a cavity, weakening the levee. Let a small animal or crawdad burrow into the levee, it creates a cavity, weakening the levee. Let it rain for days and weeks and months, water will saturate its soil, weakening the levee. Build the levee of light, sandy soil, it is vulnerable to wave wash from wind or barge traffic, weakening the levee. A flooded river roaring downstream might scour its base, weakening the levee.

“The weight of the flood is the greatest danger to the levee. Two, three, four stories of water press against the levee, seek out its vulnerabilities, and saturate it, burrowing underneath it and erupting as sand boils–geysers of river water–on the inside. If the spout is muddy, the river is eroding the core of the levee. The taller the levee, the more massive the crevasse, the greater the damage to the land when it breaks.”

Last night, November 18, 2009, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval, a native of Houma, Louisiana, issued his decision on the culpability of MRGO and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the flooding of St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. It was.

A reminder: MRGO, the Mississippi River and Gulf Outlet, is the 76-mile long, straight navigation channel the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged in 1965 to bypass the meandering Mississippi and cut a few miles off the trip between the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans. Read more here and go to the categories section of this blog and scroll down to the MRGO category for other postings on the channel.

The Corps construction MRGO to 650 feet wide. The slumping of the sides of the channel and wave wash from passing ships  and other factors eroded to about 2500 feet wide. The Corps built the levees of soft alluvial soil and they slumped. In fact, the Corps had not finished construction of the levees that began after Hurricane Betsy in 1965. When Katrina struck forty years later, the engineers were waiting for the soils to compact so they could put the finishing touches on them.

Mississippi River and Gulf Outlet

The judge ruled that the Corps was negligent in the design and maintenance of the channel, that that caused the flooding of St. Bernard and New Orleans, and that the plaintiffs, who could not sue the Federal Government over the collapse of the levees erected between MRGO and their homes, could sue the Corps and the Feds over the design and maintenance of the channel.

This morning the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had an article about the 60-year old levee that runs just north of Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois. It’s leaking. Water has worked its way under the levee and sand spoils are erupting on its landward site. Engineers attribute the weakness in the levee to the construction of the dam in 1990, which raised the level of the river–a permanent flood– and the hydraulic pressure on the levee. The Corps built the levee and turned it over to the Wood River Levee and Drainage District for maintenance.

Pool 26 at Riverlands, Levee in question in the background

The Mississippi in this part of the world has been going up and down like a yo-yo the last two years. Today, it is at flood stage at Lock and Dam 26 and is expected to go higher. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a graph of flooding at the dam and a list of which places flood at what levels in the region behind the dam.

Open Gates at Pool 26

This spring when the river was flooded and the gates on Lock and Dam 26 were open, the water level behind the dam was lower than when the gates are close, allowing for moist soil plants, food for waterfowl to germinate on the exposed mudflats.

Heron fishing in moist soil growth in Ellis Bay at Riverlands

Multiple Lines of Defense Graphic

In January as we were all talking about the inauguration of a new president and his stimulus program, I wrote several times about infrastructure as stimulus. I included this graphic that comes from the Comprehensive Recommendations Supporting the Use of the Multiple Lines of Defense Strategy to Sustain Coastal Louisiana, published in August 2007. The writers’ strategy was a planning tool that set priorities and coordinated restoration methods and coastal habitat and flood protection projects. The report acknowledged the importance of flood protection, both engineered and coastal habitat restoration, but with an emphasis on wetlands as flood protection. For example: most hurricane levees are adjacent to fresh water environments. Therefore, to protect the levees from wind and water, cypress forests should be planted out front of the levees. They also recommended elevating house, both in front of hurricane levees and behind.

Elevated House, St. Charles County, Missouri

People have been building elevated recreational houses in the batture lands between the levees and the Mississippi since the passage of the 1944 Flood Control Act, when Congress allowed the Corps of Engineers to lease locations in Corps-owned land for recreational sites. In the 1950s the Corps offered subdivisions along the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to be developed for recreational cottages. By 1988, when the Corps began to phase out the program, 764 privately-owned cottages dotted the shoreline along the river and its sloughs and on islands on land leased from the Corps of Engineers.

Elevated House along Sandy Slough, St. Charles County, Missouri

Howver, during the Flood of 1993, people found they had not elevated their houses high enough.

At the turn of the century 376 cottages remained in fourteen subdivisions. After the flood owners abandoned 220 destroyed cottages, or their leases were revoked for non-compliance. Once a lease was abandoned, the Corps returned the land to the floodplain and rezoned it for vegetative management. However, owners of well-built and well-maintained structures can expect to maintain their leases on the floodplain indefinitely.

In 1993 The National Wildlife Federation identified 1.382 properties, the most in the country, that had flooded repeatedly in the floods of 1973, 1986, and 1993 at the cost to the taxpayer of $58,017,815 in flood insurance payments. In those days, you could see the flood coming and buy insurance a mere five days before it arrived. After the 1993 flood FEMA changed it to a fifteen day waiting period.

All these lands are a part of the Upper Mississippi Conservation Area, 14,906 acres of lands devoted to wildlife scattered in eighty-seven tracts. Managed by the Missouri Department of Conservation, the refuge is located on lands, owned by the Corps, both on the floodplain and on the islands. The conservation area is devoted to habitat for ducks, giving them rest on their migration south, and giving duck hunters controlled access to public lands between the Des Moines River and Lock and Dam 26 and Alton, Illinois.

Down along Bayou du Large south of Theriot, Louisiana my friend Wendy Wilson Billiot, Bayou Woman, elevated an eighty-year-old cypress house, Camp du Large, she restored in the summer of 2008, only to see Hurricane Ike flood it and the house she lives in further down the bayou. At one point she thought she would have to abandon her plan to rent the Camp du Large to duck hunters and anglers and live in it. But with help she was able to restore her primary residence, which was already elevated, but not enough to keep out flooding from Ike in 2008 and Rita in 2005. Wendy explains the ins and outs of flood insurance and elevating houses in Louisiana in light of recent hurricanes.

Wendy Wilson Billiot's Camp duLarge, Bayou du Large, Louisiana

This week the Thibodaux Daily Comet had an article about elevating houses in the Louisiana wetlands and about building houses that float. Floating houses act like a floating dock and are anchored in place by tall poles that guide the house up and down and keep it from floating away come flood time

Floating House Open Lake, Ashport Bottom, Lauderdale County, Tennessee

Fifteen years ago I found such a house at Open Lake on Ashport Bottom in Lauderdale County, Tennessee. The northern short of Open Lake, a large bottomland lake that may have formed when the land sank during the New Madrid earthquake, is the Chickasaw National Wildlife Refute. The southern shore is private land, unprotected by levees, where people have built their club houses.

Finally, two years ago, I spent a day with Max Latham, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and keeps as eye out on the Delta National Wildlife Refuge. Mr. Latham has lived all his life between the hurricane levees and the Mississippi River levee that protect his hometown of Buras, Louisiana, and has seen his house and his village washed away in Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Camille in 1972, and Katrina, which made land fall at Buras with a 20-foot storm surge in 2005. At the time he was living in a steel shipping container, the type that is loaded onto a container ship. But he had plans for a new house, a concrete house built on concrete piers and elevated above the seventeen-f00t height of the hurricane levee that protects Buras. The next storm surge that washes over that levee, will wash under his house. And if it is higher than his piers, it will wash through his house, leaving it in tact.

Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Area

The Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Area

St. Clair County, Illinois

The Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Area is a twenty minute-drive from my house, a good place to get a handle on how energy extraction changes the landscape.

The Lower Kaskaskia River runs through an eroded till plain laid down by Illinoian glaciation 130,000 years ago and capped by loess, dried silt that lay on the surface of Wisconsinan valley trains that filled the Mississippi. Winds created huge dust storms and lifted the loess out of the river valley and deposited on the adjacent uplands. Underneath lay Pennsylvania rocks, holding seams of coal.

In 1974 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the channelization of the Kaskaskia River from Fayetteville, Illinois to its mouth at the Mississippi River, a distance of 36 miles. In doing so, the Corps created an efficient barge canal to ferry the 1.8 billion tons of coal that lies buried in Pennsylvanian rocks within 15 miles of the river.

Peabody started stripping the coal from Pit #3 of its vast River King Mine in 1965. By 1986 when the mine played out, Peabody had taken 6,728,122 tons of coal from the mine.

In 1977 Congress passed the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act, requiring coal companies to restore the landscapes, from which they stripped coal, to their original conditions.  Hence, I found a corrugated landscape that had not been restored and a prairie landscape, rare in Illinois, that had been restored.

The Corps of Engineers turned 20,000 acres or cutoff oxbows and bottomland forests along the banks of the channel over to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources for management as a wildlife refuge. In 1994 Peabody donated the old strip mine, 2,200 acres, to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources as a wildlife refuge, to be included in the larger refuge.

John Bowman, Manager, Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Area

“When they straightened the channel of the river, they took out a lot of pecan and walnut groves. Then they dammed and drained the old channel and mined it for coal. They removed seven feet of river bottom to find the coal.”

“The road through the refuge is the line between the area that came under the reclamation law and the area that didn’t. I asked a guy who knew this place if the reclaimed area looked like it did before they mined it. He said it did. We have a real good crop of quail this year out there in the reclaimed area.”

“This pond behind me is a box strip. They just dumped the soil and made that hill.”

Aerial Peabody River King SFWA, New Athens, Illinois

Model of the Peabody River Pit #3 in the Office at the Refuge

The process: Think of it as a really, really big Tonka Toy, a huge steam shovel, a stripping shovel actually, 22-stories tall, all levers and pulleys, operating a shovel capable of scooping 200 tons of earth and rock–the overburden–from the landscape, reaching down to the underlying coal seam. Once there it creeps along, scooping out the earth in front of it. It scoops, it swivels, it dumps the overburden to the side, and moves forward, creating a sausage-shaped spoil ridge. When the shovel reaches the end of its first strip, it drills holes in the overburden in the next strip, fills it with explosives, and blasts the soil and rock to loosen it. The shovel scoops up overburden, exposes the coal seam, swivels, and dumps it into the first pit, creating a second sausage-shaped spoil ridge parallel to the first. And so on, back and forth across the landscape it works until coal is gone. Smaller shovels and bulldozers, but still big Tonka Toys, follow in its wake, digging out the coal and dumping it into haulers, more big Tonka Toys, which drive up a long, widroad– running perpendicular to the spoil ridges and sloping to the bottom of the pit–out of the mine.

Cypress Lake

When the mine is played out, rainwater fills the steeply inclined road, creating the deep, narrow lakes you see at the Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Area.

This is how the River King–a huge Bucyrus Erie 3850B stripping-shovel created the corrugated landscape that is western half of the Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Area. Peabody worked the eastern half after Congress passed the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act and required the company to restore the landscape—farmland to farmland, prairie to prairie, forest to forest–once it removed the coal.

“Yeah, that’s what they did up here. They striped the coal in one direction. Then they worked in the other direction. They dumped the soil and rock in the first strip.” –John Bowman

Grassland and Oak Forest between Two Spoil Ridges

“A great part of the territory is miserably poor, especially that near lakes Michigan & Erie & that upon the Mississippi & the Illinois consists of extensive plains which have not had from appearances & will not have a single bush on them, for ages.  The districts therefore within which these fall will perhaps never contain a sufficient number of Inhabitants to entitle them to membership in the confederacy.” –James Monroe, 1786

James Monroe, who visited the old Northwest Territory twice after the Revolution, laid out the conventional wisdom about the fertility of Illinois prairie to his friend and neighbor Thomas Jefferson in a letter dated January 19, 1786:  Conventional wisdom at the end of the eighteenth century stated that land that did not support trees could not support the crops that sustain human life; that treeless grasslands were barren places; that bottomlands and forests along the rivers were fertile places; that the flat prairies of Illinois were too far from the existing modes of transportation to move grain to market.   The Illinois prairie grasses that stretched west from the Wabash River, north from the Kaskaskia River and, and east from the Illinois River, were treeless with few rivers and streams.  James Monroe and conventional wisdom were wrong about the humid prairie lands west of the Wabash River.  The land was productive; it would support human life, but not easily until John Deere invented the steel plow in 1831 and Cyrus McCormick the reaper in 1837. The largest grasslands in Illinois today are reclaimed strip mines.

Peabody mined this area before Congress passed the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, which grandfathered-in this rough, corrugated landscape.

Each hillock in the spoil ridge represents one 200-ton scoop of topsoil (though there is little of that left in agricultural Illinois) and underlying rock–nutrient-rich limestones, sandstones, and shales.

Tall grasses and weeds grow in a trough between two ridges. Here hiking is difficult. Long grass snags the toe and ankle-breakers, rocks–large and small–litter the landscape, hiding in the grass.

Reclamation came in steps. The first reclamation law required mine companies to level out the tops of the spoil ridges. The next law required companies to make the spoil nice and flat and appealing to the eye close to roads. Finally, the 1977 act required complete restoration of the landscape.

After the reclaimers returned the soil and leveled it, coal compaies planted it in Kentucky fescue. It grows tall, it’s hardy, it’s cheap, and it inhibits the growth of woody plants. Reclamation specialists also use big and little  bluestem, smooth brome, orchardgrass, lespedeza, sweetclover, and alfalfa, and some native forbs, like goldenrod. Rabbits and other rodents thrive in the dense cover the grasses offer. Grassland birds, however, like warm season grasses and forbs. Birds, which specialize in grasslands, avoid these places. Others, which are not so picky, don’t.

Refuge managers are beginning to plant native prairie grasses that attract prairie species like Henslow’s Sparrow in the Grasshopper Sparrow in the summer and Short-eared Owls and Northern Harriers in winter. Peabody River King boosts a full complement of the owls and harriers in winter.

Reclaimed Praire, Peabody River King, SFWA

Forest along Unnamed Lake

Forests in Reclaimed Strip Mines: Restoring strip-mined land to forests has not been a high priority in Illinois. Nor was it a high priority for the drafters of the 1977 Reclamation Act. Agriculture was and is. Fish and wildlife were and are. Nor has restoring forests been easy when tried. That means prairie, grassland, and wetlands restoration, all of which happened at Peabody River King.

Many of the grasses grown inhibit the germination of trees grown from seed. But, trees do grow on un-restored land, where the grasses hid those ankle-breaking hunks of nutrient-rich limestone and sandstone. Soils containing coarse fragments of rock are productive and become more productive as the rocks weather and break down. Trees, uninhibited by dense grasses, thrive. Like the grasses they anchor the soil, retard runoff, prevent erosion, and preserve the clarity of the lakes.

At Peabody River King: “The soil has been disturbed so much that we have had trouble planting trees, even on the reclaimed lands. The trees tend to dry out. We had some success with oaks back in the un-reclaimed section. But we found its best to let the trees come in by natural succession: willows, then cottonwoods, then oaks.”—John Bowman, Manager, Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Management Area

Reed Lake

Anglers on Fishing the Lakes at Peabody River King

“Fish the Pits: For the adventurous angler there are numerous lakes to be found by walking and exploring the roadless areas of the park. There are lakes out there tucked in hollows, and surrounded by trees and weeds. These may be a hike, but can produce some great action and big fish due to lack of pressure.”–Bob Rutkowsi, http://www.siloutdoors.com/showthread.php?t=58

“There are over 20 pits at the Peabody site. Some are big and some are tiny. Some have great bass fishing, some are mediocre, and some offer good chances for fish other than bass.”—Bryan Dent, Illinois Game and Fish

“Some of these pits might only be a few acres in surface area, but all strip pits have deep water. Whenever I hear about somebody catching a 6- or 7-pound bass, it is usually from one of the back lakes.”—Fred Cronin, Fishery Biologist, Illinois DNR

Cottonwood Lake

Fred Cronin, Fishery Biologist, Illinois DNR, on Cottonwood Lake

“These pits are difficult to sample because of the steep banks. Most of the information I get on them is from angler reports. But it is not hard to figure that they have a lot of bass.

“One such is 13-acre Cottonwood Lake, a long, narrow pit at the end of the access road in the West Sub Unit. Cottonwood is practically walled-in by the steep banks like a canyon and is hardly ever fished. From the road, a steep, muddy trail leads down to the water’s edge, over which a couple guys can, with some difficulty, haul a johnboat or canoe. There is no other way to access it.

“Cottonwood is a typically clear lake that has hordes of bass – perhaps too many. A lot of them are sublegal 10- to 12-inchers. This pit is also one of the better crappie lakes.”

Copyright © Quinta Scott, 2009, All Rights Reserved

I was first drawn to the Kaskaskia when I noticed that wheat flourishes in its basin, a place where nineteenth century-town proprietors platted towns and built flour mills and churches to provide anchors for their communities.

Brockschmidt Mill, 1859, Razed 1995, Venedy, Illinois

I next noticed the Kaskaskia when I flew over its channelized lower reaches and noticed the cut off oxbows that bracketed its new straight channel.

Channelized Kaskaskia River south of New Athens, Illinois

Again, I noticed the Kaskaskia when I crossed its floodplain daily, sometimes twice a day as I traveled east to North Prairie to photograph a red shed that stood between two wheat fields.

North Prairie, April 23, 1992

I first photographed the Kaskaskia when I came across an a natural cutoff, a wetlands, on Illinois 177, near Venedy, Illinois.

Queen's Lake, Kaskaskia Oxbow, near Veneday, Illinois

Years ago I came upon Highbank, a right angle bend in the unchannelized stretch of the river, one that would have been cutoff if the river had been straightened at that point. Here the river shaved sediment from the outside of the bend and deposited sediment on the inside of the bend, a perfect illustration of how meandering rivers work.

Flooded Kaskaskia at Highbank near Mascoutah, Illinois

Highbank is very different from the channelized portion of the river at New Athens.

Channelized Kaskaskia at New Athens, Illinois

The Corps of Engineers channelized 36 miles of the Kaskaskia between Fayetteville, Illinois and its mouth and built a lock and dam near its confluence with the Mississippi in order to turn it into an efficient barge canal to ferry the 1.8 billion tons of coal that lay under glacial till and Pennsylvanian rocks and within 15 miles of the river

Now, I come to the place where Peabody Coal drained a cutoff channel of the Kaskaskia and stripped the coal from its river bottom and adjacent floodplain. When the mine played out, Peabody donated the site to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources for the Peabody-River King State Fish and Wildlife Management Area.

Levee Lake, Peabody River King State Fish and Wildlife Management Area, Mined Oxbow of the Kaskaskia River

The coal in the Lower Kaskaskia basin lies close to the surface. When Peabody drained the cutoff section of the Kaskaskia to mine it for coal, it found a vain seven feet below the river bottom. They had to go deeper in the adjacent floodplain.

Copyright © Quinta Scott, 2009, All Rights Reserved

Lima Slough meanders through farmfield in Adams County, Illinois

Illinois Congressman Phil Hare (D-Il) presented the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with 7,000 signatures in support of raising the 50-year levees that protect farm land in Adams, Henderson, and Hancock Counties to the 500-year level.

I have had this rant before. A 500-year levee is an urban levee.

The New Orleans District of the Army Corps of Engineers, where Katrina causes an estimated $81.2 billion in damages, is struggling to design and built a levee that will protect that city from a 100-year hurricane. The National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council have termed the new levees inadequate.

If 100-year levees at New Orleans cost $14 billion (the 1998 estimated cost of restoring the wetlands that protect the Louisiana coast and New Orleans), then how can we built 500-year levees from Minneapolis to St. Louis at a cost of $6 billion, which will create higher and higher flood levels. We saw Davenport, Iowa go underwater in 2001, because the city chose not to live behind floodwalls and the levees protecting farm land across the river forced the flood into the city.

I know the farmers of Adams, Henderson, and Hancock Counties lost $80 million dollars in the Flood of 2008, but, to be blunt, it is part of the cost of doing business in the floodplain.

Copyright © Quinta Scott, 2009, All Rights Reserved

Last week a pair of geologists, at the University of Texas, Austin, proposed diverting the Mississippi and its sediment to Breton Sound on the east and Barataria Bay to the west in order to build new deltas in each body of water.

Illustration from Science Daily, (Credit: AGU/EOS)

They would make the diversions about ninety miles south of New Orleans, my guess near Grand Bayou on the west, where the Mississippi levee runs, and Bohemia on the east, where the Mississippi River levee ends.

Mississippi River Ridge at Bohemia

Like other who have proposed Mississippi River diversions to build land in Louisiana, they have looked at the landbuilding that is going on at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River and the Wax Lake Outlet from the Atchafalaya Basin. Since the completion of the Old River Control Structure in 1962, the Atchafalaya has funneled off 1/3 of the Mississippi water and sediment at Old River, about 200 miles north of New Orleans. The Atchafalaya also carries all of the Red River and its sediment to the Gulf of Mexico, where it is building new land. Last summer the New Orleans District of the Corps of Engineers announced it would study changing the ratio of Mississippi to the Atchafalaya with an eye to diverting more water and sediment to the Atchafalaya.

It should be noted that the Corps built the Old River Control Structure to keep the Mississippi from diverting to the Atchafalaya on its own in its effort to find a shorter, steeper route to the Gulf of Mexico.

Old River Control Structure

All of this runs in the face of a paper published four months ago by a pair of geologists from Louisiana State University, stating that there is not enough sediment in the Mississippi to rebuild the Louisiana Coast. It’s all trapped behind dams in the Mississippi River basin, dams designed sometimes to retain floodwater in the uplands until the Mississippi and its tributaries could handle them, and built sometimes because the Corps of Engineers could and Congress approved.

Carl Pope, Executiver Director of the Sierra Club, put all this in perspective in an article at the Huffington Post. He came away from the Ecumenical Patriarch’s Eighth Religion, Science and the Environment Symposium with his own take on the state of the Mississippi River, the Missouri, the Atchafalaya, the Louisiana Coast, and New Orleans: they are all of a piece. The only way we are going to save the Louisiana Coast and New Orleans is to release the sediment, trapped behind dams on the Missouri, which supplied 60% of the mud to the Mississippi in 1900, and allow it to flow down the Mississippi/Atchafalaya and build land along the Louisiana Coast. This sediment is needed to keep up with the rise in sea level, which will come as Arctic ice melts.

To get the sediment to the coastal wetlands, something will have to be done about the levees that keep the Mississippi spilling over into the Louisiana parishes south of New Orleans. And, the river needs more room to flood north of New Orleans, where it is hemmed between levees–that protect cotton, corn, and soybeans–clear to the mouth of the Missouri River and above, where the Flood of 2008 breached agricultural levees in northern Illinois and farmers want a 500-year levee to protect their fields. New Orleans may get a 100-year levee someday.

Copyright © Quinta Scott, 2009, All Rights Reserved

Six months ago U.S. Geological Survey scientists noted that the Chicago region is the greatest contributor of nutrients to the Dead Zone In the Gulf of Mexico. I wrote about how that came to be. When canal builders excavated the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848, they cut through the low divide that separates drainage to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico from drainage to Lake Michigan. The divide is located several miles outside of Chicago.  In 1907 the City of Chicago dredged the Chicago Sanitary Canal through the divide to carry the city’s sewage to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. This is how nutrients get from the Chicago region to the Gulf of Mexico.

The Chicago Portage, the divide between drainages to the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Michigan

Well, it’s a two-way street. What allows nutrients to flow south can allow Silver Carp to swim north to the Great Lakes.

Last spring when the Mississippi was flooded and the gates were open at Lock and Dam 26 at Alton, Illinois, fishing for Silver Carp was excellent.

JoAnn Fastoff has an excellent article in the Chicago Examiner about the need to keep Silver Carp out of the Great Lakes.

The Asian carp or silver carp or bigheaded carp is an invasive species indigenous to India and China. In 1973 fish farmers imported and stocked carp to control phytoplankton, algae, in their ponds. The phytoplanktons are microscpic plants–food for larval fish, native mussels, and zooplankton–that drift in the well-lit surface of a lake. Within a few years six state, federal, and private fish hatcheries were raising carp. By the end of th edecade municipal sewage lagoons were stocking the fish. By 1980 they had escaped into the nation’s rivers and lakes, where they reproduced and increased their range exponentially throughout the Mississippi River Basin.

The carp scoop plankton from the surface of a lake, competing with native fishes that rely on plankton for food: gizzard shad, bigmouth buffalo, and paddlefish.

Ironically, a fish that was introduced to control algae led to the production of more algae. The carp feed on algae, excrete nitrogen and phosphorous nutrients, which produce more algae. The also feed on zooplankton, reducing the number and size of plankton that would feed on algae; hence more algae and less oxygen in the waterways.

Silver carp swim in schools, just below the surface of the water, and when disturbed, jump. Noisy outboard motors upset them. They leap into the boats, often damaging them and knocking the boater silly, leaving behind slime, scales, and feces. They are set to cross the barriers between the Mississippi  and the Great Lake Basins. They have reached the electric fence in the Chicago Sanitary Canal. They are in the Des Plaines River, adjacent to the Canal, and should it flood, the carp could spill over into the Canal.

Lock #8, Illinois and Michigan Canal, Aux Sable Creek, Illinois

Or, during a heavy rain, they could sneak through culverts that connect the Illinois and Michigan Canal to the Chicago Sanitary Canal .

Potential sites for generating turbines in the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, and Red Rivers in Louisiana, a graphic by Free Flow Power, from the Baton Route Advocate.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioon has issued 35 preliminary permits to 4 companies to install electricity generating turbines in the Mississippi, Atachafalaya, and Red Rivers in Louisiana. The FERC permitting process takes about five years, which means the turbines will not start producing electricity for another two or three years. FERC will hold hearings in New Orleans this week to examine the impact of the turbines on fish, navigation, and the environment. Will the blades chew up fish? Will the turbines disrupt navigation? And, maintaining the navigation channel is the Corps primary responsibility on the river.

Free Flow Power, one of the companies, will  complete a series of tests by October 2010 that will send fish “inject fish into a tube and through turbine blades at varying speeds. The tests begin in January.

Free Flow wants to install 180, 000 turbines, six feet in diameter, in the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans. The system of 26 locks and dams on the river north of Alton, Illinois have turned the Upper Mississippi into a series of pools, where there is not enough current to turn the turbines.

South of Alton, the Mississippi is a free flowing river that has been channelized. The Corps of Engineers has set wing dams or dikes in the river perpendicular from the bank to speed the current and direct it to the navigation channel, which is at least nine feet deep. In short the river south of Alton runs fast and deep, a good place for turbines. Click on my April 29 post for more information.

The river bends in a deep horseshoe at Plaquemine, Louisiana, the possible site for turbines.

Mississippi River at Plaquemine, Louisiana

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service may ban commercial fishing of all sturgeon, the endangered pallid sturgeon and the common shovelnose sturgeon. Fish and Wildlife put the pallid Sturgeon on the endangered list in 1990.

Those of us who love caviar have driven the harvest of shovelnose sturgeon from 6,600 pounds in 1995 to 23,000 pounds in 2007, when its roe or eggs were getting $80 a pound.

There is a problem here: the young pallid sturgeon can be mistaken for an adult shovelnose. If its caught and turned into caviar, that’s one less pallid to grow to adulthood and breed more sturgeon.

Biologists release Pallid Sturgeon

Sturgeons spend most of their lives in fast-moving, muddy rivers. But they breed in quiet side channels near sand or gravel bars.

Duck Island Side Channel at the Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers

In its attempt to maintain a viable nine-foot navigation channel and to keep the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers from adopting side channels as the navigation channel, the Corps built closing dams across the head of side channels. The closed channels silted in. The pallid sturgeon lost breeding places.

Confluence, Columbia Bottoms, Long Dike on right

At the Confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi, a long dike directs the Missouri current into the Mississippi to the right of the dike.

Long Dike at the Confluence

The Corps of Engineers on the Missouri and Mississippi have been working to restore side channels to the rivers. The Corps began cutting notches in dikes to allow water to flow through side channels, keeping them open for sturgeon and other fish looking for a quiet place. The anglers follow.

Notched Dike at the Confluence