Engineer Memoirs
I remember one area that he was really worked up about. Basically I was in his camp
on this one--the Atchafalaya Basin.
The Corps had had for years a plan for channelizing the Atchafalaya River. We had
planned to dredge the river deeper and wider on the theory that this would make it a
better conduit and would cut down on siltation. The siltation from the overflow of the
Atchafalaya River was choking the swampland. It is a magnificent bayou or swamp. A
very large volume of water flows through the swamp.
Siltation was choking this off. It was killing all the wildlife in the swamp. The silt came
from the Mississippi by way of the Old River control structure.
There was an endless controversy about this silt. The Corps position, going into this,
was that if we enlarged the channel, the silt would go down the channel, and it wouldn't
choke off the swamp.
Well, there was another theory which said that it would just aggravate the problem.
Frank Koisch, by this time, was the division engineer of the Lower Mississippi Valley
Division [LMVD] and chairman of the Mississippi River Commission. He was very
much in the camp of the people that wanted to channelize the Atchafalaya. However,
there wasn't an environmental impact statement that really addressed the issue
adequately.
On the one hand, Koisch wanted to charge ahead, get Congress to vote the money, and
dig this channel. On the other hand, Veysey and a lot of the environmentalists said that
we should never dig this. Their ploy was that we should do a better job on the
environmental impact statement, hold public hearings, and a whole long string of things.
I had the unenviable task of trying to make Koisch do what Veysey wanted.
Gribble and Morris, I think, thought that we should not charge ahead, but they could
not get Frank Koisch to agree. We sent him instructions to do things about the
environmental impact statement, but he didn't do them.
Q:
He had been Director of Civil Works before?
A:
Yes. Then he had gone to Europe as the Deputy Chief of Staff, Engineer, U.S. Army
Europe. When he came home from that job, he become the division engineer of the
Lower Mississippi Valley Division, which was often a senior position.
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