Provides a transparent depiction of the 2011 flood within the Mississippi River and Tributaries footprint. It also provides necessary historical context for greater understanding of key features of the project. It is the story of prudent foresight, heroic actions, agonizing decisions, and extreme personal sacrifice. On cover and on dust jacket: Listening. Inspecting, Partnering, Engineering. This print product is also available in print paperback format with ISBN: 9780160933431 that can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-022-00364-9 Related products: Federal Reinsurance for Disasters can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/052-070-07346-2 Toward a Unified Military Response: Hurricane Sandy and the Dual Status Commander can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-000-01147-8 Home Builder's Guide to Coastal Construction can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/064-000-00055-1 Floods resources collection can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/environment-nature/natural-environment... Hurricanes, Typhoons & Tsunamis product collection can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/environment-nature/natural-environment..."

Provides a transparent depiction of the 2011 flood within the Mississippi River and Tributaries footprint. It also provides necessary historical context for greater understanding of key features of the project. It is the story of prudent foresight, heroic actions, agonizing decisions, and extreme personal sacrifice. On cover and on dust jacket: Listening. Inspecting, Partnering, Engineering. Related products: Flood Control and Navigation Maps: Mississippi River: Cairo, Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico Mile 953 A.h.p. to Mile 22 B.h.p. (2015)is available here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/products/sku/008-022-00369-0?ctid=1782 Resources about Floods can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/environment-nature/natural-environmental-disasters/floods U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Navgation Charts can be found here: https: //bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/transportation-navigation/almanacs-navigation-guides/usace-navigational-charts "

Beyond Control reveals the Mississippi as a waterway of change, unnaturally confined by ever-larger levees and control structures. During the great flood of 1973, the current scoured a hole beneath the main structure near Baton Rouge and enlarged a pre-existing football-field-size crater. That night the Mississippi River nearly changed its course for a shorter and steeper path to the sea. Such a map-changing reconfiguration of the country’s largest river would bear national significance as well as disastrous consequences for New Orleans and towns like Morgan City, at the mouth of the Atchafalaya River. Since 1973, the US Army Corps of Engineers Control Complex at Old River has kept the Mississippi from jumping out of its historic channel and plunging through the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond Control traces the history of this phenomenon, beginning with a major channel shift around 3,000 years ago. By the time European colonists began to explore the Lower Mississippi Valley, a unique confluence of waterways had formed where the Red River joined the Mississippi, and the Atchafalaya River flowed out into the Atchafalaya Basin. A series of human alterations to this potentially volatile web of rivers, starting with a bend cutoff in 1831 by Captain Henry Miller Shreve, set the forces in motion for the Mississippi’s move into the Atchafalaya Basin. Told against the backdrop of the Lower Mississippi River’s impending diversion, the book’s chapters chronicle historic floods, rising flood crests, a changing strategy for flood protection, and competing interests in the management of the Old River outlet. Beyond Control is both a history and a close look at an inexorable, living process happening now in the twenty-first century.

Examines interrelations between flood management, flooding, and environmental change, for advanced students, researchers, and practitioners.

A revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America’s most vital natural resource: our rivers. The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America’s rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. We need them for nourishing crops, for cheap bulk transportation, for hydroelectric power, for fresh drinking water. Rivers are also part of our mythology, our collective soul; they are Mark Twain, Led Zeppelin, and the Delta Blues. But as infrastructure across the nation fails and climate change pushes rivers and seas to new heights, we’ve arrived at a critical moment in our battle to tame these often-destructive forces of nature. Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling the heartland, getting to know the men and women whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. On the Illinois-Kentucky border, we encounter Luther Helland, master of the most important—and most decrepit—lock and dam in America. This old dam at the end of the Ohio River was scheduled to be replaced in 1998, but twenty years and $3 billion later, its replacement still isn’t finished. As the old dam crumbles and commerce grinds to a halt, Helland and his team must risk their lives, using steam-powered equipment and sheer brawn, to raise and lower the dam as often as ten times a year. In Southeast Missouri, we meet Twan Robinson, who lives in the historically Black village of Pinhook. As a super-flood rises on the Mississippi, she learns from her sister that the US Army Corps of Engineers is going to blow up the levee that stands between her home and the river. With barely enough notice to evacuate her elderly mother and pack up a few of her own belongings, Robinson escapes to safety only to begin a nightmarish years-long battle to rebuild her lost community. Atop a floodgate in central Louisiana, we’re beside Major General Richard Kaiser, the man responsible for keeping North America’s greatest river under control. Kaiser stands above the spot where the Mississippi River wants to change course, abandoning Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and following the Atchafalaya River to the sea. The daily flow of water from one river to the other is carefully regulated, but something else is happening that may be out of Kaiser and the Corps’ control. America’s infrastructure is old and underfunded. While our economy, society, and climate have changed, our levees, locks, and dams have not. Yet to fix what’s wrong will require more than money. It will require an act of imagination. “With meticulous research and insightful analysis” (Publishers Weekly), Holding Back the River brings us into the lives of the Americans who grapple with our mighty rivers and, through their stories, suggests solutions to some of the century’s greatest challenges.

“An original and thought-provoking exploration of the sinuous course that water has carved through our economic and political landscape.” —Gerard Helferich, Wall Street Journal In a powerful work of environmental history, Martin Doyle tells the epic story of America and its rivers, from the U.S. Constitution’s roots in interstate river navigation, to the failure of the levees in Hurricane Katrina and the water wars in the west. Through his own travels and his encounters with experts all over the country—a Mississippi River tugboat captain, an Erie Canal lock operator, a project manager buying water rights for farms along the Colorado River—Doyle reveals the central role rivers have played in American history and how vital they are to its future.