Water Resources: Hydraulics and Hydrology
So what you're having here is the equivalent of erosion. You're not having any depositing.
It's bed erosion. As the bed of the Mississippi degrades at the mouth of the White,
degradation works back up the White River.
Solve one problem and you find another one.
Yes, but it took thirty years for it to get that bad.
A:
Your vane dikes are certainly an example of a successful idea.
A:
Yes, as far as I know.
How about other ones that might not have succeeded? What solutions did you try that did
not work or maybe did not model test properly and were not adopted? Or you did adopt and
it didn't succeed in solving the problem you faced?
We didn't anticipate the problem of degradation of the White River; our foresight just wasn't
good enough. If, in fact, lowering of the Mississippi is due to the reduced sediment load
coming in primarily from the Missouri, then it's something that we perhaps should have
expected. However, it is not something that could have been physically modeled, and it was
probably beyond our ability to compute at that time.
Our computations of channel width were not always precise, and some reaches have required
extension of spur dikes to narrow the river to provide a stable channel of sufficient depth for
navigation.
This brings up a question. Do you know Brien Winkley?
A:
Yes.
Well, I was just going to ask you. He makes a contention the Corps really doesn't understand
rivers.
A:
I don't know what his problem is with the Corps. He is highly critical.
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