PM report on opening the flood gates

"

The Corps is pulling out the stops of its Mississippi River & Tributaries Project, a sprawling set of levees, revetments, spillways and floodways devised to control a restless river fed by the third-largest watershed in the world. Robert A. Thomas, director of the Center for Environmental Communications at Loyola University in New Orleans, says this federal flood-control plan was enacted after the 1927 catastrophe to protect the river and its communities. "It's all pretty monumental," he says. "It was foresight on their part, to look that far down the road. All it took was the 1927 flood."

Read more: Mississippi River Floodwaters - U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

- Popular Mechanics

more info HERE, complete with maps and diagrams of how they plan to divert the water.

more in PDF HERE and HERE

history of the changing pathway of the Mississippi river.

the problem is is that eventually the Mississippi will change it's course as it has in the past, and the most likely way to change it would be via the Atchafalaya river and swampland.

New Yorker article from `1987

(headsup LINK)

That would change the ecology of the entire delta, not to mention that New Orleans and Baton Rouge might no longer be on the river.

So it's man vs nature (or the USArmy Corp of Engineers vs nature)...

Salon article on that problem

so there may be a major economic and ecological disaster in the Southern US this summer.