Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 14, 1993 TAG: 9307140074
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But exactly how much has been the subject of a lot of attention lately. Dan Rather has been talking about it. The president signed some proclamation and made a big speech from Japan about it.
In some places, the National Guard has even been called out to stop it.
It seems like the only people who shouldn't really be surprised and horrified by the flooding of the Mississippi River are the people who actually live around it. They should know how powerful and unpredictable it can be.
I do. The river long ago ceased amazing me.
To put another number to it, by the time the river reaches Vicksburg it's pushing about 7 million gallons of water second.
By contrast, the Mighty Roanoke River trickles along at less than 5,000 gallons per second. Quick math reveals the Mississippi to be 1,400 times larger.
By the time it reaches Vicksburg, still 200 miles from the ocean, the river is about a mile wide.
You would stand a better chance of bowling a 300 game with a pingpong ball than you would of swimming across the Mississippi River to Louisiana. Allow me to illustrate.
I was standing on the riverbank one day when something that I could not at first believe caught the corner of my eye. A old tree trunk - about 15 feet long and larger than I could have gotten my arms around - erupted from the surface of the river in a cascade of water. I watched in stunned silence as it landed, floated along for a few yards, stopped, twirled around several times like a matchstick in a toilet bowl, and disappeared into a whirlpool.
A few minutes later, it repeated the performance about 100 yards of where it happened the first time.
The most ingenious, expensive and well-intentioned efforts of man have been sunk into trying to control the third-largest river in the world. I've watched them pour concrete into it, erect steel beams, scoop dirt, dump rocks and build levees.
And the river just laughed and laughed.
For the uninitiated in river lingo, levees are huge earthen barricades that stretch along the banks of the river from Illinois to New Orleans, presumably, to control flooding.
In the 200-mile stretch between Memphis and Vicksburg, the levees are a of 30 feet tall and 100 feet thick. People drive on top of them. Herds of cows graze on their slopes.
They're monuments to our efforts at controlling nature.
But the river, confronted with these awesome levees, simply backs water up along hundreds of its tributaries and floods everyone anyway.
My cousin represents the fourth generation of our family to make his living from the delta that flanks the Mississippi River.
Three years ago, the river stayed up so high in the spring that he was a month late planting his fields. Last year, it came up so quickly in the fall that he couldn't harvest the crops he grew all summer. A thousand acres of soybeans, cotton and corn became fish food overnight.
I called him last week to see whether the river would get him again this year. He said he didn't know. It was too early to tell.
"It's gonna be real close," he said. "But I've got plenty to worry about without staying up all night thinking about something I can't control."
I'm not trying to take anything away from the tragedy that hit the people in the Midwest. I know the sick feeling of watching something you've worked for standing under 6 feet of muddy water.
But the truth is that they knew the risks when they moved there. The river's flooding is what made that land the most fertile cropland in the world. River deltas are great places to farm until they flood. And the beach is a great place to live until a hurricane blows.
You cannot ignore Mother Nature.
She is like a spoiled child with a creative imagination. If you try to play games with her, she'll humiliate you in ways you didn't know existed.
The Mississippi River might not flood again next year. But it will sometime soon. And it could be worse next time. Rivers are like that.
Leigh Allen is interning with this newspaper before beginning his senior year at Washington and Lee University.
by CNB