Mighty Mississippi: Epic flood resulted in $200B 'big dig'

Death and destruction caused by the flood of 1927 spurred a river-control project that today keeps the Mississippi in check from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

"It instigated a new way of thinking about the river and about our relationship to the river," said Denise Reed, a University of New Orleans geology professor.

The result was a $200 billion levee system that starts at Cape Girardeau in Missouri before traveling across the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta to Vicksburg and beyond.

"It's probably the largest engineering effort the United States has had in terms of infrastructure development," said Michael Logue, public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Vicksburg District.

"There are channels, dikes, thousands of flood control structures - aimed at reducing the flood damages we had in 1927. Some have compared it, in scope, to the Great Wall of China. It can be seen from space."

The river had to be controlled, and managed, for public safety purposes. But also because more than 50 cities, and millions of people, rely on the Mississippi for their water supply. When you consider the tributaries, which reach across the central section of the country, the importance is even more staggering.

"People don't realize that the water that comes out of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park flows through Vicksburg," Logue said. "The water that flows into a drain in Pennsylvania flows past Vicksburg. All that water from 41 percent of the United States has to flow down this funnel."

In addition to the levee system, the Army Corps of Engineers maintains a 9-foot channel along the river from St. Paul, Minn., to Baton Rouge, La., to accommodate shipping barges, and a 45-foot channel from Baton Rouge to the Gulf of Mexico to allow ocean-going ships to navigate the river.

A shut down in river barge traffic during a 1988 drought showed how important the river is for commerce, Logue said. Thousands of barges were stopped dead in their tracks on the Vicksburg District portion of the river because of blockages caused by the shallow river. If they had been emptied into semi-trailer trucks, he said, the traffic jam would have stretched from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.

"The commodity flow going through there isn't something you can stop even for a day," he said. "You'd have shippers calling saying they can't meet their contracts. Then, the next thing you know, you're hearing from places like Germany and Japan saying they're not getting their products through. It creates a tremor all around the world when you have a blockage like that."

Dan Nienaber is a CNHI News Service Elite reporter.