enthalpy

enthalpy

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Friday, December 01, 2006

Posted 12/01/2006 05:22:00 PM by Douglas

More on the future and imminent flooding of southern Louisiana. Try as they might, not even the Army Corps of Engineers can make water flow uphill.

Well there it was, the situation was staring them right in the face, but the folks back then were thinking in human time. They wanted to navigate the Atchafalaya and so in 1863 the State of Louisiana took out the logjam. In the blink of a geologic eye (about one hundred years) the Atchafalaya widened and increased its draw on the Mississippi so that fully thirty percent of the Mississippi was pouring down the Atchafalaya. There is a fifteen foot difference now between the elevation of the two rivers and the Atchafalaya's route to the Gulf is approx. 140 miles shorter than the Mississippi's -- water always finds the shortest route downhill.

"The river to the ocean goes." This is not a question of "if." It's a question of "when" the Corps loses this battle against nature, gravity, and 1.15 million square miles of a drainage basin. It's a hard lesson, and it may take another hundred years, but eventually we're going to learn what the French knew in 1740: no matter how strategically attractive it is, Southern Louisiana is uninhabitable.

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