Word: flooding
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Reforestation. A frequently brought forward measure of flood-control has been reforestation. One objection to this scheme is that the Mississippi went on one of the greatest floods of its history in 1844 when the valley was thickly forested...
With the great Mississippi flood of 1927 quietly seeping into the Gulf of Mexico, attention turned toward preventing the river from ever again driving valley-dwellers from their homes in hundreds of thousands. It appears certain that the levee system will continue to carry the main burden of flood prevention, but various adjuncts to it have been insistently urged...
Reservoirs. A system of reservoirs in the upper reaches of streams tributary to the Mississippi would, it is claimed, absorb the spring overflow of these streams, thus catching the floods at an early stage and eliminating them. Such a system would, however, be tremendously expensive (Dayton, Ohio, alone spent $30,000,000 on a reservoir project after the 1913 Dayton Flood), and would not affect rain-swollen streams at points below the reservoir sites...
Basins. A sort of dry-reservoir idea is proposed in a system of basins-stretches of lowlands bordering the river and surrounded by levees. These basins would be dry land in normal times, at flood period an opening would be made in the levees and the basin flooded, thus taking up some of the overflow. These basins could be owned by the Government and rented out for private farming with the understanding that they would have to be inundated in flood time...
Spillways. The most promising and most seriously considered flood-control method is the spillway. The Atchafalaya River is a good example of a natural spillway. It flows, roughly speaking, parallel to the Mississippi through Louisiana. By building strong levees all along its length to the Gulf it could be turned into a kind of trough which would draw off water from the Mississippi itself. In the present flood the Atchafalaya did, in a way, perform exactly this function; unfortunately, however, it received altogether too much water so that the later stages of the flood were along the Atchafalaya, not along...