River of worry in this divorce

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Each spring and summer, when the Mississippi begins to rise, we start to hear from folks who think it will change course into the Atchafalaya, flooding half of south Louisiana.
In 1980, two LSU professors, economist David Johnson and civil engineer Raphael Kazman, were among the first to seriously study what might happen if the Big Muddy did switch its bed. More recently LSU hydrologist Yi-Jun Xu, has joined the list of folks who warn that a really big Mississippi River flood could cause the change, permanently and with disastrous results.
The Corps of Engineers began seriously studying the problem in the 1950s, when they were designing controls to allow some, but just some, of the Mississippi water into the Atchafalaya. It turns out that they came up with a solution that was recommended at least 50 years earlier by a civil engineer named E. T. King.
He was hired in 1897 by the police juries of St. Martin and Iberia parishes, who were thinking of another diversion. They wanted the federal government to pay for a dam across Bayou Courtableau at Port Barre, sending its water into Bayou Teche.
For most of the year the upper Teche didn’t have enough water to float a good-sized steamboat and Bayou Courtableau was so jammed with logs near Port Barre that boats could not use it. Folks on the Teche reasoned that diverting the water would allow steamboats to use the upper Teche and even get back into the Courtableau, and also provide ample water for irrigation. They hired King to “compile the available data . . . [for] a business-like and intelligent presentation to Congress.”
His report gives an impressive picture of the commerce along the Teche in St. Mary, Iberia, and St. Martin parishes just as the new century was about to begin. There were 66 sugar mills, 19 saw and shingle mills, 38 cotton gins, two cottonseed oil mills, 10 brick factories, five ice factories, and three foundries alongside the bayou. They turned out products valued at $12 million (about $375 million in today’s money), and that didn’t include fish and oyster factories, tanneries, moss gins, and more.
King said improving navigation was well worth the money, that the factories in place would do more business, and new ones would be built.
But he also said in 1898 that there was a “great danger” threatening everything — “the danger of the Mississippi river continuing down the Atchafalaya.”
The distance down the Atchafalaya from the mouth of the Red River to the Gulf was only one-third of the winding Mississippi’s course, he pointed out. The Atchafalaya was also straighter and steeper. The only reason the Mississippi had not changed course was because the Atchafalaya was not yet wide enough or deep enough to handle the water, he said.
“But,” he warned, “it is both widening and deepening rapidly, and it is only a question of time.”
The remedy, he said, “is to entirely divorce the Red and Atchafalaya from the Mississippi” by building a dam at Old River that would “protect from overflow one million acres of the richest land in the world.”
His report was sent to Congress, but nothing was done then — either to cause the diversion of the Courtableau or to stop the diversion of the Mississippi. King’s studies and comments were presumably filed away in some dusty corner of the Library of Congress, probably sitting untouched to this day.
But it is just possible that someone peeked at them in the 1950s when the Corps began to worry that the Atchafalaya was getting even wider and steeper than in King’s day. Or it may simply have been that they applied the same engineering principles and arrived at the same solution independently. At any rate, their answer was to build the Old River Control Structure, designed to “divorce” the Mississippi from the Atchafalaya, exactly where King said it should be.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.