As the Army Fights the Mississippi River, Who Is Winning?

The ongoing flooding along the Mississippi River is the worst the region has seen in recent memory--all three of the river's three major spillways are open at the same time for the first time ever, diverting flood waters from New Orleans and one of America's major fuel refining corridors. Other areas aren't so lucky; water flowing from Louisiana's Morganza spillway (one of the big three) is flooding the Atchafalaya River basin, displacing some 4,000 people. Scenes of inundated towns, rooftops peeking above the water line, are playing out from the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico.

But while the 2011 floods are the worst in years, for many places they're not the worst in that many years. The Big Muddy is topping its banks and barriers more frequently and with greater consequences than flood models tend to predict. There are several reasons for that depending on who you ask, but regardless of whether it’s global warming, bad flood modeling, or simple statistical anomaly, one thing is abundantly clear: the mighty Mississippi wants out of the path that humans have determined for it, and it is increasingly finding ways to escape.

The Army Corps of Engineers often speaks in terms of 100-year or 25-year floods (a somewhat confusing nomenclature that means a flood of a given magnitude has a 1-in-100 or a 1-in-25 chance of occurring in a certain year, respectively), but since 1993’s devastating Midwestern floods, some places in the region are seeing 10- and 25-year events several times in a single decade.

From an engineering and infrastructure standpoint, this is becoming a serious problem. Fighting back the waters is an ongoing fight--and if one were to judge from the Corps’ decision to blow some levees in Missouri earlier this month to relieve pressure upstream, it’s a fight that we aren’t necessarily winning.