Engineer Memoirs _____________________________________________________________________
A:
Yes, sure.
Q:
You were also, as division engineer of the Ohio River Division, a member of the Mississippi
River Commission.
A:
Yes.
Q:
What sort of activities were you involved in with the Mississippi River Commission?
A:
I knew very little about the Mississippi River Commission until I became a commissioner
and found that it was a very interesting part of my job. I enjoyed it professionally because it
opened new vistas of understanding of our nation, and an important component of the Corps'
contribution to the nation.
Forty-one percent of the 48 continental states of the United States drains out past New
Orleans into the Gulf of Mexico, and it goes down that waterway. When people talk about
the Lower Mississippi Valley Division being the premiere division in our system, they do it
with some reason. There are other competitors, like the South Atlantic Division with its
multiple responsibilities in South America and now in the Middle East. The South Atlantic
Division has major military installations--Bragg, Stewart, Benning--and during my time
had responsibility for the large TennTom project. The responsibilities that befall the
division engineer in Vicksburg in time of crisis can be as big as anybody's. He has to make
decisions based on what's tumbling down the Mississippi in cascading amounts of water.
So, I always appreciated Major General Bill Read's job. He was the division engineer at the
time and the president of the Mississippi River Commission. Of course, I had worked for him
in the ACE's shop, where I'd been his deputy.
The Mississippi River system is operated by the Mississippi River Commission--the Lower
Mississippi Valley Division less the St. Louis District--that is Memphis, Vicksburg, and
New Orleans Districts. It is an open river--no locks--and they have engineered it and trained
it to keep the flows available for navigation and to be able to fight flood flows. The
Mississippi River tributaries project has all types of systems--levees, floodways, tributary
dams--the Morganza Floodway, Bonnet Carr Spillway, the Old River control structure, and
the Atchafalaya River are the measures by which they do it.
The key reason for my being on the commission or, say, the position of the division engineer
of the Ohio River Division, is the fact that the Ohio River can be the biggest contributor to
floods in the lower Mississippi. The Missouri has a component. The upper Mississippi
certainly has a component. I mean, you can get rains anywhere, but the real design storms for
the catastrophic flood on the lower Mississippi is a major storm centered over the Ohio basin,
and basically centered over the main stem of the Ohio.
Recognize that the flood control apparatus, the 76 dams that I mentioned earlier, are up the
tributaries. So, if you get a storm centered over the main stem below the tributaries, you're
getting water that hits directly into the Ohio. Not well known to the layman is the fact that
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