Word: flood-control
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...cool air. In Denver each summer weekend, the highways leading westward into the higher elevations of the Rockies are jammed with Denverites taking to the hills-the higher, the fewer. Midwesterners have no mountains, but their lakes abound, many of them created in the last 20 years as flood-control projects, which have opened up a whole new recreational world. Vacation houses are springing up around Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks, Table Rock, Taneycomo, and the new Pomme de Terre. In Kansas there is Tuttle Creek Reservoir and Fall River. Even in Minnesota (where the license plates proclaim...
Boating is so popular in Texas because it is so improbable. Although Gulf Coast residents have long had access to water, most other Texans until fairly recently have not been able to find enough water to skip a stone. But in the past 20 years, government dams and flood-control projects have created scores of man-made lakes that dot Texas' parched and sweltering flatlands (there are only about half a dozen natural lakes in Texas). Because of Texas' excellent, uncrowded highways, distance is no object. One industrialist trailed his cabin cruiser behind...
...Mississippi. In that vast watershed, comprising 41% of the nation's land area and affecting 31 states, spring has always been a season for apprehension-and often of tragedy. Last week, in some few such places as Waterloo, in the Cedar River region of Iowa, where adequate flood-control installations do not yet exist, more than 6,000 people fled their homes as the river overswelled its banks. But for countless other homeowners in the broad center swath of the U.S., the rising tide of spring floodwaters portended no such disaster: they were protected by a fantastic flood-control...
...almost entirely of unconnected local systems. There were lots of them: Cairo, Ill., for example, at the crucial confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, had dikes that peered down on the city's tallest building. But eventually the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began working out an integrated flood-control system for the whole river network...
...Corps of Engineers divided their labors among several control systems. Dams, reservoirs, floodgates, riprap and levees were built to control the flow rate. Reforestation and soil-conservation practices decreased flood runoff. By enlarging and lining channels, removing snags and other obstructions, and by straightening bends, the engineers reduced flow resistance. Combined with local expenditures, these federal programs will eventually provide for 87 million acre-feet of flood-control storage in 219 reservoirs in the U.S., more than 9,000 miles of levees and floodwalls, and about 7,400 miles of channel improvement...