This 2014 navigational book has been designed to promote safe navigation on the Lower Mississippi River System from Cairo, Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico 953 to Mile 0 A.H.P. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers encourages users to submit corrections, additions or comments for improving this book to the US Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District. http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/geospatial

Cairo, Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico Mile 953 A.H.P. to Mile 22 B.H.P.

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.

Primarily written as course material on flood control and drainage engineering for advanced students of civil engineering, this third edition is thoroughly revised. It accommodates recent developments in remote sensing, information technology and GIS technology. New additional material deals with problems of flood forecasting, flood plain prioritization and flood hazard zoning, and engineering measures for flood control. Drainage improvement is tackled, with particular regard to salinity and coastal aquifer management from the ingress of sea water. The book includes design problem-solving and case studies, making it practical and applications-oriented. The subject matter will be of considerable interest to civil engineers, agricultural engineers, architects and town planners, as well as other government and non-government organizations