Key point: The Mississippi would rather not go through New Orleans anymore, it only does so because the Corp of Engineers forces it to. That apparatus is about to get a severe test.
This and 2 other essays by McPhee were collected into a book, "The Control of Nature". The other essays, also quite long, were about debris flows in the LA basin, and about stopping an Icelandic volcanic flow which threatened a town and a port by spraying it with sea water. It's a fantastic book.
Huh, actually the Old River Control Structure being damaged and creating a massive disaster was the premise of an xkcd post, and the alt-text is about Jeff Masters having read good analysis on disaster scenarios
Anyone know what the long-term decade-scale plan is? Sooner or later we have to let the river move, because if I understand this correctly, over time it simply becomes arbitrarily harder to force through the same channel, without bound.
