Louisiana's threatened wetlands provide a critical barrier to hurricanes and flooding.With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to promptly honor President Obama's pledge "to restore nature's barriers -- the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast."

The MRGO Must Go Coalition held a press conference and media tour in New Orleans yesterday to highlight the slow progress in restoring wetlands east of the city along the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a navigation channel the Army Corps of Engineers constructed in the 1960s as a shortcut between the Port of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.

When Hurricane Katrina blew ashore four years ago, MRGO directed wind-driven floodwaters into New Orleans and adjacent St. Bernard Parish, contributing to the catastrophic failure of levees and flood walls. Levees along the channel were breached in approximately 20 places during Katrina.

The channel's construction, use and maintenance also caused the loss of more than 27,000 acres of surrounding wetlands, another factor that exacerbated Katrina's impact on the New Orleans area. During the storm, levees protected by wetlands remained intact while those exposed to open water -- like the ones along the MRGO's banks -- failed.

Congress ordered MRGO's closure last year, and construction of a rock dam was completed last month. But the coalition points out that the dam is only the first step to protecting communities from storm surge.

Congress directed the Corps to develop a comprehensive closure plan that includes restoring adjacent wetlands with a deadline of last May -- but the agency doesn't expect to finish its MRGO Ecosystem Restoration Plan until next year. The coalition is urging faster action.

"There are good people at the Corps and at other relevant federal agencies who are trying to get their job done and quickly move these projects forward, but we need an unequivocal commitment from the Corps, Congress and other responsible agencies that they won't let outdated bureaucratic procedures stand in the way of necessary action," said Col. David Dysart, chief administrative officer for St. Bernard Parish. "It's going to take creativity and breaking away from some long-standing ways of doing business, but the stakes call for nothing less."

(This story originally appeared at Facing South)

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Children who moved into FEMA trailers after losing their homes in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita have alarming rates of sickness and mental health problems, according to an in-depth review of medical records. Forty-two percent of the children studied suffer from respiratory troubles that may be linked to formaldehyde in the trailers.

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The U.S. EPA has vetoed a giant, expensive plan to build the world's largest water pump in the Mississippi River delta. The so-called Yazoo Pump flood-control project would have sucked 6 million gallons of water a minute from 67,000 acres of wetlands along the Yazoo River. The scheme, proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and first authorized by Congress in 1941, would have cost $220 million. The EPA concluded that maybe, just maybe, sucking all that wet out of the wetlands would have been damaging to fish, wildlife, and migratory birds. "The EPA truly deserves our thanks for killing this unnecessary and economically wasteful Corps of Engineers project," says the Sierra Club's Ed Hopkins. "The natural, and free, flood protections offered by these wetlands are far more effective than an expensive pumping project." Today's veto was only the 12th time since 1972 that the EPA has put the kibosh on a Corps project; the last was in 1990.

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Louisiana wildlife have so far largely escaped harm from the oil spill that shut down 100 miles of the Mississippi River last week. But biologists remain nervous as the oil slick heads downstream toward the Delta National Wildlife Refuge and neighboring marshy areas, where nearly 100,000 migratory birds will alight in the fall. Barriers are being erected to keep oil away from marshes, and folks are keeping fingers crossed that currents will push the grease to the banks of the river before it reaches the wetlands. Meanwhile, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has set up propane cannons designed to scare animals away from oily areas. The agency has so far found nearly 60 oil-coated ducks and other birds, as well as a beaver and a muskrat; nearly all of the animals were weakened but still quick enough to elude capture by biologists trying to get 'em cleaned up.

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Some 420,000 gallons of fuel oil spilled into the Mississippi River early Wednesday, after a 600-foot chemical tanker collided with a fuel barge. The collision split the barge in half; thick, slow-to-evaporate fuel has traveled at least 12 miles downriver. The Coast Guard closed a 29-mile stretch of the river around New Orleans, and residents have been asked to conserve water as drinking-water intakes are closed or diverted. Cleanup is expected to take days. Full environmental impact is yet unclear, but, notes a spokesperson for the Louisiana environmental agency: "We have a lot of wildlife in the southern delta." To look on the bright side, the spill pales in comparison to the millions of gallons of oil that the Coast Guard estimates were dumped in the river following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Yes, folks, millions -- not zero.

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The phrase "Mississippi River" conjures a swirl of images in our collective imagination: wide, turbulent, muddy waters; chugging steamships and heavily laden barges; violent, life-altering floods; maybe even Mark Twain chomping on a pipe. Everything outsized, legendary. But at the headwaters of the river, in a quiet corner of northern Minnesota, the scene is a world away from all of that.

Press the next arrow to browse photos of the Mississippi headwaters. Photos: Mark Hirsch

Lake Itasca -- whose name is a Latin neologism meant to translate as "true head" -- was first identified as the source of the 2,300-mile Mississippi in 1832. Six decades later, by a margin about as narrow as the creeks that feed the lake, the Minnesota Legislature declared the area -- which is home to more than 100 lakes in all -- a state park. Today it's a popular attraction, with nearly 500,000 annual visits and a year-round naturalist program.

But when photographer Mark Hirsch visited Itasca for Grist in mid-March, he had it all to himself, save for the park's staffers. Spending a few days at the remote location was an eye-opener, he says: "Having lived near the Mississippi River my entire life, I have always viewed it as a wonderful but dirty, polluted river. At the headwaters, it is a crystal-clear stream ... It was a fantastic time of year to visit the park and experience its solitude."

Want to see more of the Mississippi? Check out Grist's road trip to riverfront cities, our special series on the Army Corps of Engineers and agriculture in the heartland, and Wayne Curtis's dispatches from New Orleans.

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There are 8 million stories in the Mississippi Basin, and this week we've told only a few. As lead editor of this Army Corps series, I've been immersed for the last few months in all things Mississippi River. Coming out the other side, I have a few answers, yes, but even more questions to explore. Below is my personal working list of issues that -- while perhaps less acknowledged nationally than the spectacular disaster that is New Orleans and the Louisiana coast -- rank high in determining a bright or dim future for the Mississippi Basin's communities, both human and wild.

It makes one hell of a neighbor.

Photo: nasa.gov

1. Living with Risk
In New York City, most of us have installed bars across our windows and double locks on our doors. New Yorkers tend not to forget that living here, there's a relatively high risk someone will try to break into our homes and steal our stuff -- and no one tells us otherwise. We're not special, of course: many Californians live with the ever-present risk of earthquakes, and design buildings to increase the chances they'll survive the next one. In other parts of the West, officials urge homeowners to build, landscape, and maintain properties in ways that will help protect them from wildland fires.

But it's different for people living and working behind the levees of greater St. Louis, of New Orleans, and of other flood-prone spots on the Mississippi. They have been assured for generations that they are safe -- and much of the time, that's true. In many locations, they are not expected to build differently to account for the (arguably) rare one-in-a-hundred flood. However, it's the exceptions -- violent, life-altering exceptions -- that prove the inherent risks of setting up life behind a levee.

Isn't it time for residents and their representatives to change their ways to account for these periodic, and largely predictable, weather events? In some places, that's happening. When residents of Biloxi, Miss., climb the stairs of rebuilt homes set on nine-foot pilings above the ground, they likely won't forget that they're living in the path of future Hurricane Katrinas.

2. Who's Mitigating Whom?
Should the same federal agency -- the Army Corps of Engineers -- be responsible for not only planning and building Mississippi Basin flood protections, but assessing how much environmental damage those projects will cause, fixing up that damage, and reporting back to Congress on how well all that went? And all from the same budget? "The Corps' goal is to actually build projects," says Melissa Samet of American Rivers. "If you highlight the fact that there are big environmental impacts, that usually hurts that effort. The cost of mitigation is a project cost, so it adds to the cost of the project. And then there's this whole other layer of getting it implemented, getting it monitored, getting it done, that the Corps has historically had problems with." Conflict of interest-o-rama!

3. Zebra Musseling In
Invasive species -- a known and serious problem in the Great Lakes -- have also worked their way into the Mississippi Basin, where they are posing dangerous threats to native species and ecologies. Asian carp are pushing native buffalo carp out of the Illinois River. Retiring Higgins' Eye mussels on the Upper Mississippi -- already hurt by ecological changes brought on by the lock-and-dam system -- are being ousted by resource-hogging non-native zebra mussels, which alter the quality of the water and the riverbed for the worse in the process.

The Mississippi River has been so thoroughly engineered over the past two centuries -- and those changes so vociferously defended in the name of perpetuating the nation's economic growth -- that without deeper reflection, it would be tempting to call it a loss as far as "wild nature" is concerned. But the native ecological qualities and processes of the Mississippi and its wildlife -- its "ecosystem services" -- likely have at least as much value as the goods on the barges traversing the locks and dams. Who's quantifying that value, and what's the cost to us if it becomes impossible to recover? And hey -- what responsibilities do we have to the well being of other species, even if they don't rate directly on our profit and loss statements? The Mississippi's going to be a proving ground for that debate in coming decades.

4. It's Not Easy Being Amphibian
The likelihood that climate change will bring more moisture to the mid-Mississippi River region might sound like a boon for amphibians and fish. But the way that rain is likely to fall -- in less frequent but heavier bursts -- could mean disaster for aquatic species dependent upon more even water flows. "If you're getting very intense episodes of precipitation, it means in other parts of the year you're getting intense drying episodes," says St. Louis University biologist Jason Knouft. "And the majority of aquatic diversity occurs in smaller streams, say across the entire Mississippi Basin," that are more susceptible to drying out. "You're altering these flow regimes," Knouft says, "which then has cascading effects on the habitat quality for aquatic taxa, and it sort of cascades down." Who speaks for the climate-challenged fishes?

5. Ruler of All the River
In a 2007 report on Mississippi River water quality, the National Academy of Sciences opined that, "Too little coordination among the 10 states along the river has left the Mississippi River an 'orphan' from a water quality monitoring and assessment perspective. Stronger leadership from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with better interstate coordination, is needed to address these problems."

And why stop at water quality? There are plenty of cross-border crises to choose from: Higher flood levels, threats to local and national economies if New Orleans washes away, climate change impacts, native species protection, disintegrating stormwater systems, sewer overflows, etc. And then there's the hypoxic "dead zone" radiating from the mouth of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico -- created in large part by runoff from agricultural operations throughout the basin.

Kudos are due to the growing collaborations along the Mississippi corridor that are working to protect the river, such as those that Grist's Sarah van Schagen noted in her account from Dubuque, Iowa, last fall; the organizers of and participants in February's Levee Safety Summit in St. Louis; and the environmental groups behind the Corps Reform Network. They're pointing the way to the future. More is needed.

6. Everything's Rhine
The Army Corps dredges, diverts, locks, dams, dikes, and channelizes the Mississippi and its tributaries largely in the name of facilitating navigation -- remember, it was the federal government's right to regulate commerce that led Congress to set the Corps loose on the river back in the 1820s.

But commerce can coexist with a Mississippi River that's also being managed for higher ecological values, flood safety, and the onset of climate change. Southern Illinois University geologist Nicholas Pinter, who has studied rising flood levels on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, points to cross-border initiatives in Europe that are aiming to decrease damage from river flooding by maintaining low usage of the floodplains, and removing navigational structures that impede flowing water and raise flood levels. "It's not even a question for them of increasing development in the floodplain," says Pinter.

In low-lying Holland, this "Room for the River" policy has included lowering dozens of dikes along the Rhine and Meuse rivers; they'll be overtopped in floods and thus relieve pressure on dikes further downriver. "It's very clear in the literature over there that this was driven by late 20th century climate change," says Pinter. "The Dutch government saw increasing amounts of water coming down the river. The consequences of doing nothing would have been horrific."

Barge traffic on the Rhine is managed with significantly less intrusive engineering, he says, using single-hulled barges with a maximum draft of four to five feet -- whereas the double-hulled barges on the Mississippi draft twice as much, and sometimes move in huge rafts of 40 or more. "Navigation could continue completely but perhaps differently" on the Mississippi, says Pinter, "with a new strategy for engineering the river."

----

There are many, many smart, creative minds set on solving the problems of the Mississippi and its communities -- but also a legacy stretching back two centuries of powerful but shortsighted, self-interested river management to overcome. In the case of the Army Corps of Engineers, I wonder if this transformation will have to arise from changes within -- as much as pressure from without -- to really ensure a bright future for the Mississippi River.

I don't have a prescription in my pocket for how that will happen -- but I am looking forward to covering it.

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Here's the good news: The Army Corps of Engineers is "racing" to complete a comprehensive levee system for metropolitan New Orleans by 2011 that actually takes into account global warming, at least in terms of sea-level rise.

Here's the bad news: the levee system under development is wildly insufficient to the growing climate problem, according to many informed critics.

That's because the vast and flat Louisiana coastal area -- sometimes called the "Bangladesh of America" because it could disappear due to sea-level rise alone -- cannot be saved just by building levees. It's the one area of America which, to survive the rising water and bigger hurricanes of a warming world, must develop human-made barrier islands and coastal marshes as an additional emergency defense. These landforms, which can be crafted using the voluminous sediments of the Mississippi River itself, would create a vital buffer that complements the levees, according to a wide range of engineers.

"It all comes down to this: You simply can't build the levees high enough under any scenario in Louisiana," said Clifford Smith, a member of the prestigious Mississippi River Commission, a seven-member panel created by Congress to advise the corps on works projects. "That the corps still doesn't act on this fact, doesn't commit to building wetlands and barrier islands immediately, leaves me so depressed you can't imagine it. I'm in depression over this."

Ironically, many Americans still point to Hurricane Katrina as the event that finally got their attention on global warming. It's impossible to definitively prove or disprove the connection of any single weather event to global warming. But it was Katrina and the record hurricane season of 2005 that left many folks wondering what was up with the weather. Nearly three years later, global warming practically dominates the daily news in dozens of different ways. Author Bill McKibben describes the change in our national awareness this way: "Katrina opened the door and Al Gore walked through it."

Oliver Houck.

Photo: tulane.edu

But even after a Nobel Prize last fall for Gore, who shared it with the world's leading climate scientists, and even after new studies showing hurricanes are getting bigger and more frequent due to warming oceans, the Army Corps can't seem to commit to a protection plan that matches the global climate reality as it pertains to New Orleans.

"The number one thing protecting New Orleans right now is not the corps, it's chance," says Tulane University law professor and coastal protection activist Oliver Houck. "The historical odds show Katrina doesn't come every day. That's all that's really protecting us right now. The odds."

To the corps' credit, its massive "Task Force Hope" levee construction project, costing nearly $15 billion and slated for completion by 2011, will anticipate sea-level rise from global warming roughly equal to what has already been observed in recent decades. The plan also anticipates the natural sinking of the fragile Louisiana coast. Both factors affect how high a hurricane surge tide will be as it moves onto land. The levees, in theory, will also be built wide enough to allow engineers to add at least marginally to their height later on, creating so-called "lifts," according to several spokespeople at the corps.

Dr. Lewis "Ed" Link.

Photo: usace.army.mil

"We know we have warming, and the corps is taking that in as a factor," says Dr. Lewis "Ed" Link, former director of Research and Development at the corps and a chief contributor to the risk assessment modeling underlying the planned levee improvements. "Different [levee] segments will have different improvements based on land contours, but the range is 12 to 15 percent higher levees being planned for."

The problem, according to a growing number of concerned observers, is that past warming rates and impacts are almost certainly no indication of the future now that NASA satellite imagery shows a rapidly deteriorating Greenland ice sheet.

How high will sea level go? Two feet by 2100? Ten feet? How big will hurricanes get? How frequently will they come? It's uncertain, of course, but the observed trends and scientific forecasts keep getting worse. And if there's one region of America that should plan for something akin to "the worst," it's the flat alluvial region of south Louisiana, home to one-third of America's domestic seafood catch, lots and lots of oil and gas infrastructure, and the critically important port of New Orleans.

Both the deepening risks of climate change as well as the range of possible impacts argue for the abandonment of a de facto "levees only" approach, say Houck and others. What's needed with an urgency and commitment equal to the levee plan is a program to build "nature's levees," also known as barrier islands and coastal marshes. These landforms have historically served to greatly lessen the impacts of past hurricanes on New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana coast. But it's the Army Corps' efforts to control Mississippi River flooding over the past century and a half that have caused these very land forms to erode and vanish.

Corps employees scope out damage caused by Hurricane Rita, a month after Katrina.

Photo: usace.army.mil

More than a million acres of land has turned to water in coastal Louisiana just since World War II. And if the coast has any hope of surviving the next Katrina (whose astonishing surge tide was up to 30 feet as she hit land in Louisiana), then much of this protective coastal terrain must be rebuilt -- literally turning water back to land -- and at a rate that outpaces sea-level rise and the expected growth in storm intensity.

Here's where the planning truly breaks down within the Army Corps process, according to Smith and others. Ambitious initiatives to build new barrier islands and wetlands were expected to emerge from the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration bill passed by Congress in 2006. It called on the corps to present a comprehensive protection plan for coastal Louisiana -- i.e., more than just levees -- by December 2007. The corps missed the deadline, but now expects to deliver the plan this fall.

Unfortunately, no one privy to deliberations within the corps believes an adequate commitment to rapid land building will be forthcoming, no matter how clear the need.

"The problem is it's not in the corps' nature to ask Congress for new problems to solve," said Mark Davis, recent past director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. "This is an organization that historically has been a levee-building organization. That's what it knows how to do. Using levees alone now is like asking a Revolutionary War soldier to fight in Iraq. You don't have the right weapons."

The missing weapon, according to Davis and others, is the Mississippi River itself. Carefully diverting part of the river's muddy water away from the main stem and toward rapidly eroding coastal areas would allow sediments to build up and create land in the ancient delta-forming fashion. Special pipelines and canals could be used to surgically deliver the sediment-rich water to exactly the spots where land is needed most to protect against hurricane surges made worse by sea-level rise. With sufficient planning and funding -- at least $28 billion -- and a willingness to relocate at least some of the coastal population, there's little doubt among engineers and coastal geologists that the process will succeed in making land.

"We could build entire barrier islands in 12 months or less," says Davis, who now directs Tulane's Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy.

There's just no sign so far that the corps is ready to commit to the process. Without it, however, most serious observers view New Orleans as flat-out doomed.

The ultimate problem, according to Davis, is that the corps takes its orders directly from Congress, a body that has only recently begun to discuss climate change seriously, much less act on it. Congress has told the corps to build bigger and better levees as a result of Katrina, and it's obeying. But there have been no direct orders pertaining to global warming. Indeed, just last May, a Senate bill that would require the corps to consider the impact of climate change in designing all its water resources projects nationwide fell nine votes short of the 60 needed to beat a filibuster. In that context, the corps' decision to plan for even modest future sea-level rise in New Orleans might seem a minor miracle.

Will a new U.S. president and larger Democratic majorities in Congress change the nation's approach to saving coastal Louisiana? Maybe. But what's really needed is a realization among a majority of American voters that life without New Orleans will be one of the biggest and most painful -- and perhaps earliest -- casualties of global warming.

And if we can't save New Orleans, is there really any hope for Miami, Charleston, New York, Annapolis, and all the other low-lying coastal cities in the queue?

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Once it was a cornfield; now it's a Wal-Mart, a Taco Bell, a Target. Here along a stretch of Missouri's Highway 40, in the Chesterfield Valley area just west of downtown St. Louis, what's said to be the largest strip mall in the country sits on about 46 acres of Mississippi River bottomlands. Less than 20 years ago, the land was open space.

It's been fifteen years since the Great Flood of 1993 put this land under 10 feet of water. Since then, thousands of acres of floodplain in the St. Louis area have been built up with strip malls, office and industrial parks, and 28,000 new homes. And all this infrastructure depends on miles and miles of levees to hold back the Mississippi and Missouri rivers the next time they try to retake the land.

If you ignore the historical tendency of the Mississippi and Missouri to periodically drown it, this vast, flat landscape does present an appealing canvas for building. "When you have such an expansive floodplain, people don't have a problem with building on the fringes," says Dan Burkemper, director of the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance. "And then the fringe moves closer to the river every day."

The Flood of 1993 was one of the most destructive in the recorded history of the Mississippi Basin: nearly 50 people were killed, over 70,000 evacuated, and 50,000 homes damaged on over 17 million acres (close to 27,000 square miles) across nine states. Over 16,000 square miles of working cropland was flooded, at a loss of more than $5 billion. All told, the flood caused around $16 billion in damage.

In the first blush of post-flood shock, some local and federal officials decided that trying to hold back the Mississippi River was likely to be a costly and never-ending enterprise. Instead of depending on levees and other structures for protection, some thought, it was time to move people's homes and workplaces off the floodplain and cede ground to the river.

"We must and can work to design and build our communities better and, to the extent possible, out of harm's way," then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency James Lee Witt told Congress later that year. "Mitigation must become a priority throughout all levels of our government. We must be proactive on mitigation and not reactive."

Flood me once, shame on you ... flood me
twice, shame on me.

Photo: mo.water.usgs.gov

And FEMA acted on this notion: In the nine states flooded in 1993, the agency ultimately moved more than 300 homes, and bought and razed nearly 12,000, at a cost of over $150 million; the lands were turned to flood-friendlier uses like parks and wildlife habitat. The village of Valmeyer, Ill., just downriver of St. Louis, became the buyout poster child: devastated when floodwaters overtopped its levee (an event that likely helped save St. Louis itself from a major flood), the entire town packed it in, selling out its bottomland location for a new site two miles away -- and 400 feet above the Mississippi floodplain.

It may have been the greatest exodus of Americans from floodplain homes and businesses in the nation's history.

But official resolve to depopulate the floodplain has given way to development fever in Missouri: over $2.2 billion worth so far on land that was underwater in 1993. And unlike some of the other states deluged in the Flood of 1993, such as Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois, Missouri has been much slower to enact stronger regulations for floodplain development -- perhaps because the state has hundreds of miles of floodplain fronting the Mississippi and Missouri rivers (read: lots of tax income lost and jobs unrealized if new businesses and homes don't get built).

In the St. Louis metro area, there's been more built upon the floodplain since 1993 than in its entire prior history, says Tim Kusky, a professor of natural sciences at St. Louis University. This development brings new pressures that haven't been assessed for how they might intensify flooding elsewhere, or cumulatively damage floodplain ecosystems.

"Since 1993, projects now complete, underway, and in planning have put or will put [28.1 square miles] of the Mississippi and Missouri floodplains near St. Louis behind new levees, enlarged levees, or floodplain land raised above the 100-year to 500-year protection level," wrote Southern Illinois University at Carbondale geologist Nicholas Pinter in the journal Science in 2005. Those projects included over $190 million spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to work on nine levees in its St. Louis District.

The corps argues that flood-control structures prevented $19 billion of damage in 1993 across the nine states affected. But is the confidence that these protections inspire part of the problem? "Most infrastructure on the floodplain would not be there were it not for the historic reliance on levees," Pinter noted in Science.

"[The Army Corps] thinks that the levees are going to protect the people behind them, and the businesses behind them," says Kusky, "because there are calculations based on the assumed risk of floods on the hundred-year floodplain and the five-hundred-year floodplain." But, Kusky says, "there's a problem with that calculation." The problem -- shocker! -- is global warming.

"We've calculated things like the hundred-year flood, five-hundred-year flood, based on current amounts of water in the river, not with any global change factored into that," Kusky says. But according to well-accepted models of how human-caused climate disruption will affect the St. Louis area, average yearly rainfall will rise by 21 percent within the next 30 years -- increasing the amount of water in the Mississippi River by just over 50 percent.

Even with current amounts of water in the river, there have been around seven 100-year floods along the Mississippi over the past century, he says. So "how are we going to handle an extra 50 percent of water flowing in the rivers every year, and what effect is that going to have on the predicted flood stages, and the frequency at which we get the hundred-year and five-hundred-year flood, and all the other floods in between?"

Dan Burkemper.

Photo: Mark Hirsch

With all those houses and malls and more going up on the floodplain, his questions are more than academic.

Back to Dan Burkemper and the Great Rivers Habitat Alliance, which has brought together Missouri conservationists, farmers, and hunters who want to keep the floodplain near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers largely undeveloped. GRHA advocates traditional uses like farming, hunting, wildlife conservation, and boating on the floodplain. In 2007, in a joint effort with the National Rifle Association, GRHA scored a victory with the enactment of the state "Hunting Heritage Protection Areas Act," which will prohibit certain kinds of development on the 100-year floodplain in Missouri.

But the group's work is far from done. It is currently involved in a lawsuit against the city of St. Peters over a development called Premier 370, begun before the Hunting Heritage law was passed, which aims to create a huge industrial park on hundreds of acres of former farmland on the 100-year floodplain. St. Peters financed the construction of a levee to protect the development.

For its part, the developer of Premier 370 says that of the total acreage devoted to the project, roughly half -- the half that's on the river side of the levee -- will be devoted to wetlands, a lake with camping and fishing, and other recreational uses. And St. Peters will still get the economic engine it was hoping for, says Mike Hejna, president of Gundaker Commercial Group: "When this complex is completely built out, it could be up to 10,000 employment, and close to 10 million square feet of industrial space."

If you like this, we've got some swampland
in Florida we'd love to sell you.

Photo: Mark Hirsch

Burkemper rails against this sort of rationale. "You had farmers, with their family farms, that have been operating for generations. You've got hunters that value the land and put a lot of money toward conservation," he says. "Those two groups have lived happily for a long time. It's only recently, when you have a developer come along and offer an exorbitant amount of money for the land, that that's disrupted."

Burkemper would like to see the Army Corps take a stronger position on advocating sustainable development on the floodplain. "When you have the Corps of Engineers that says ... it's fine if you build a levee there, we've got the river under control, nothing to worry about, [then] there's no reason why [developers] wouldn't, that's the bottom line."

But ask the Army Corps, and it will tell you that kind of advocacy is not the job that Congress -- and by extension the taxpayer -- has hired it to do. "When we're looking at floodplain development, or wetland impacts, we have to really look at things as they are, not how we'd like them to be," says Alan Dooley, chief of Public Affairs for the St. Louis district of the Army Corps. The agency is limited by law to responding to the wishes of Congress and regional officials in creating flood protections like levees, he says, and to reviewing floodplain development proposals for compliance with Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, which regulates the discharge of dredged or other fill materials into U.S. waters -- including many wetlands.

"We're not looking for loopholes to get rid of wetlands; we're looking for ways to save wetlands," says Dooley. "But if the American public comes in with a request to do something on their own property, and they follow the permit process and fulfill it, we have to give the permit."

Asked how receptive the Army Corps has been to his research on the river's present and likely future conditions, Tim Kusky answers circumspectly. "They're doing their job, and so far their job is to calculate the effects of any levee they've built, at that particular levee, on the river dynamics," he says. "They don't need to calculate ... the cumulative effect of all the levees."

It's become generally understood that ever higher, stronger levees lead to higher water levels during floods, with faster moving water building up tremendous force. Even if a levee holds in one location, the water it sends downstream is more powerful and potentially dangerous than before. Kusky likens the destructive power of a levee breach under these conditions to the force generated by Niagara Falls.

Kathy Andria.

Photo: Mark Hirsch

To Kathy Andria, an eco-activist in southwestern Illinois, the levees that have been newly built or improved to protect development on the Missouri side of the greater St. Louis metro area are intensifying the dangers along her stretch of the Mississippi -- where FEMA recently declared that the five 70-year-old levees protecting East St. Louis, Ill., don't meet current standards for flood protection. While these levees held in 1993, there were extensive "sand boils" -- eruptions of water and dirt on the land side of the levees -- that had to be sandbagged to withstand the Great Flood.

"The Army Corps of Engineers has identified some design deficiencies that allow under-seepage that can lead to levee failure," says Terry Fell, chief of Floodplain Management and Insurance for FEMA's Region Five, based in Chicago.

Ultimately, FEMA intends to remove these levees from its flood vulnerability maps, essentially denoting the area as an unprotected floodplain --which could have big economic consequences for the area. "I don't believe that the communities in this area had a general awareness of flood risk, or are in general pleased to find out about it," says Fell. "But they're now eager to find out what steps they can take to get levees repaired."

Andria -- who is president of the American Bottom Conservancy and conservation chair of the local Sierra Club group -- charges that so far, the Army Corps is taking a less-than-aggressive approach to repairing the levees. "I've been to several meetings where the corps said that they were going to do what they could do," she says, "but that it was up to the local people to get the money to match it [federal funding], and to get the money appropriated from Congress." According to both Fell of FEMA and Dooley of the Army Corps, local officials are lobbying the area's federal legislators to get that funding.

Meanwhile, growth continues. Industrial facilities dotting the Metro East area (as the Illinois counties due east of St. Louis are known) include the ConocoPhillips Wood River Refinery about 15 miles northeast of St. Louis, which puts out around 322,000 barrels a day of crude oil and wants to expand capacity. And on the western edge of Horseshoe Lake, an old meander of the Mississippi River (which it tried to reclaim in the Great Flood of 1993), U.S. Steel's Granite City Works has an annual steelmaking capacity of 2.6 million tons and a new coke plant on the way. There's a new soccer stadium proposed for an area on the floodplain just north of East St. Louis, where acres of warehouses have also popped up in recent years -- increasing runoff problems, says Andria.

While the area's congressional representatives and local officials want to get the levees upgraded, "I just think that some of it might be for the wrong reasons," Andria says. "Rather than to protect people, it's to protect future development [and] worrying that Missouri is going to get one up on us."

And because the floodplain north-northwest of St. Louis proper -- which flooded in 1993, joining the overtopped Valmeyer levee in likely preserving St. Louis from a dunking -- is now largely bounded by newer, stronger levees, there's going to be even more fast-moving river water pressing against the East St. Louis levees in the next big flood. The levee built by the developers to protect that enormous strip mall in the Chesterfield Valley is designed to withstand a one-in-500 flood. And the one-in-500 levee financed by the city of St. Peters to protect Premier 370 was recently qualified for acceptance into the federal levee program -- which means that the Army Corps will pay for nearly all future repair costs due to flood damage.

Fell doesn't agree that there's a one-to-one correlation here: "The Mississippi River watershed is so huge that there is less likelihood of anything on the Missouri side having a real significant impact on the Illinois side." But geologist Pinter disagrees. "Our research has shown that every single percent of floodplain land that is leveed shows a measurable increase in flood levels on the floodplain on the opposite bank upstream and downstream," he says. "Individual levee projects are permitted on the basis of local hydraulic models, which are running on 1940s technology. You can make those models give you any answer you want. The permitting process is based on an analytical technique that is insensitive to the truth."

Inadequate levees, overdevelopment, oil refineries, and a history of catastrophic floods. Does this situation sound familiar?

"We're very much in a position to be another New Orleans" in East St. Louis, says Kathy Andria. "We're in a really precarious spot here."

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Imagine the Pentagon had been caught red-handed concocting its justification before launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Imagine that after the scandal died down, the Pentagon admitted Saddam didn't really have WMDs -- but proposed an even larger invasion, because there was a remote possibility things might change someday. Then imagine Congress had rewarded this logic with overwhelming bipartisan support.

It's a silly thought experiment, because Congress -- for all its flaws -- takes war at least somewhat seriously. But there's still one part of the Pentagon that can count on overwhelming bipartisan support no matter what it proposes.

In 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers was caught red-handed concocting its justification before launching a $1 billion project on the upper Mississippi River system. After the scandal died down, the corps admitted there wasn't really enough barge traffic to justify construction -- but proposed a $4 billion project, because there was a remote possibility things might change someday. And yes, the project recently sailed through a united Congress, where water projects are a time-honored form of political currency that steer jobs and money to the constituents and contributors of powerful members.

By corps standards, pouring thousands of tons of concrete into the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers to relieve nonexistent barge congestion with seven new locks is no environmental disaster; those rivers are already highly engineered and degraded. But it is a stark example of the dysfunction of the corps -- its dishonest analyses, anachronistic priorities, predilection for makework, and desperation to please its congressional patrons and special-interest clients. And that dysfunction is itself an environmental disaster -- not only because some of the porky boondoggles it produces destroy pristine rivers and enormous swaths of wetlands, but because an honest corps with better priorities could help revive America's ravaged ecosystems.

The upper Mississippi scandal was the start of my morbid fascination with the corps and its enablers in Congress. I was a Washington Post reporter then, and I had stumbled into America's bumbling water resources agency after hearing that it was spending billions of dollars damming and dredging rivers with little barge traffic. Soon leakers were sending me a stream of hilarious internal corps memos about "getting creative" with economic analyses in order to "grow the program" with ginned-up projects. I remember my editor saying the corps bureaucracy reminded him of covering communist Czechoslovakia. And I remember thinking -- after independent investigations by the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and even the Pentagon inspector general confirmed that the corps was an unholy mess -- that since the mess had become public, it would have to be cleaned up.

I thought wrong. Since 2000, corps leaders have repeatedly promised more environmental sensitivity and better economic analyses. But they keep rubber-stamping the same wasteful and destructive pork that soured their reputations in the first place. As I have written in Grist, the dysfunction of the corps and America's water resources system drowned the city of New Orleans and killed more than 1,000 people in 2005. And not even that catastrophe has prompted change. So I was pretty naïve to expect the debacle on the upper Mississippi to lead to reform.

My first corps story was about the Red River, where the agency had spent $2 billion building dams (named after Louisiana congressmen) to create a liquid highway (named after a Louisiana senator) for barges that never came. My second was about the Missouri River, where the corps was flouting the Endangered Species Act to maintain a reliable waterway for barges that rarely came. And with that I figured I had given more than enough attention to an obscure public works agency with an addiction to concrete.

Don Sweeney.

Photo: Mark Hirsch

Then I got a pile of documents from a corps economist named Don Sweeney.

In 1993, the corps had begun a $60 million study of navigation improvements on the upper Mississippi, its largest study ever. Sweeney was tapped to lead the study team. His task was to calculate whether the economic benefits that private shipping interests would receive from larger locks would exceed the costs to the public. If so, the corps would recommend the project, and Congress would approve it.

Sweeney knew the corps tended to overestimate the need for giant navigation projects with powerful congressional sponsors. The agency had predicted 27 million tons of barge traffic for the first year of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, 25 million tons too high. He realized the corps was using a hopelessly primitive economics model that assumed shippers would use barges at any cost. So he developed a more sophisticated model that was hailed inside and outside the corps as a supermodel. And in 1998, he concluded there was no need to spend a billion dollars on larger locks; the river's occasional barge delays could be eased with decent scheduling.

But this was not the answer his bosses wanted. The barge industry -- dominated by influential conglomerates like CSX, ConAgra, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland -- wanted bigger locks. So their friends in Congress, led by Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), were pushing as well. Corps generals disbanded Sweeney's team and ordered a new team to come up with a "reasonably plausible" rationale for the project.

The No. 2 corps general ordered the team "to develop evidence or data to support a defensible set of capacity enhancement projects." In an email summarizing the orders, one corps economist wrote: "If the demand curves, traffic growth projections and associated variables ... do not capture the need for navigation improvements, then we have to figure out some other way to do it."

Eventually, the team managed to inflate enough benefits, ignore enough costs, and skew enough data to produce a positive benefit-cost ratio. It made just one mistake: It kept copying Sweeney on its emails. And Sweeney's lawyers relayed them to me. I also got a copy of a secret "Program Growth Initiative" that corps military leaders had developed to try to boost their agency's budget, as if they were dot-com executives trying to expand market share. "We have been encouraged to have our study managers not take no for an answer," one corps official wrote. "The push to grow the program is coming from the top down." When I read excerpts to Joseph Westphal, the assistant Army secretary who was supposed to be overseeing the corps for the Clinton administration, this was his response: "Oh my God. My God. I have no idea what you're talking about."

Good times! Army Secretary Louis Caldera, who once told me he wished it could be the Navy Corps of Engineers, promptly announced some gentle "management reforms" reminding the corps brass to obey its civilian overseers. He might as well have sent the 101st Airborne to storm Capitol Hill. Congress considers itself the only true overseer of the corps, and Caldera was promptly forced to retract his reforms. It was clear that I had stumbled into the journalistic equivalent of a full-employment program.

I spent six more months investigating how the corps had twisted its analyses to justify billions of dollars worth of white elephants, from a flood-control pump in the Mississippi Delta that would have drained 200,000 acres of wetlands to a dredging scheme for the Port of Baltimore that was so preposterous it became a subplot on HBO's The Wire. My final article was supposed to be about the corps redeeming itself by restoring the damage it had done to the Florida Everglades, but the story turned out to be a lot more complex and interesting than that -- so complex and interesting that I ended up writing a book. Let's just say that the corps is a lot better at draining wetlands than it is at fixing them.

In December 2000, the Pentagon wrapped up its internal investigation of the corps, concluding not only that the Mississippi study was rigged, but also that the agency had a systemic bias in favor of large-scale construction. It was a shocking admission, but by then no one was paying much attention. A few corps officers were reprimanded, a new commander renounced the Program Growth Initiative, and the Mississippi study went back to the drawing board. Otherwise, it was business as usual. In fact, after a National Academies report that trashed the corps for cooking its books also included a few caveats acknowledging that even Sweeney's model couldn't always predict the future -- the economic equivalent of acknowledging that evolution is a theory -- corps officials tried to blame the whole controversy on Sweeney and resurrect their discredited model.

"It was surreal," says Sweeney, who filed a successful whistleblower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, and is now a professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. "But facts don't count for much at the corps."

These days, the Bush administration's environmental reputation is about as good as Eliot Spitzer's marital reputation, but credit where it's due: The Bushies have tried to rein in the corps. All administrations talk about reining in the corps, but Bush's has consistently proposed zero funding for the worst corps oinkers, although it's been just as consistently overruled by Congress. Corps projects hate to die, but the Bushies somehow managed to kill a ridiculous $108 million jetty scheme in North Carolina in 2003, and they're about to kill that $220 million pump nonsense in the Mississippi Delta. And Bush's budget office delved deep into the details of the upper Mississippi study, publicly trashing that discredited corps model, forcing the agency back to the drawing board yet again.

The prospects for larger locks were starting to look bleak. In 2000, the project's rationale had depended on an agribusiness consultant's study predicting huge increases in grain shipments, even though shipments had been declining slightly for over a decade. Since 2000, grain shipments have continued to slow, and the rise of the corn ethanol industry should mean fewer grain exports in the future. "You'd need significant growth to justify a project," the new corps study leader, Denny Lundberg, admitted to me in 2003. Right now, the seven locks are in use less than half the time, and barge traffic is so light that Sweeney says there's not even a need for a schedule, much less a megaproject. But the corps wasn't about to let 20 years of no-growth experience trump its big-growth dreams. "You've got to think about the potential for growth," Lundberg explained. "If you only made these judgments based on past history, you'd never do anything."

Sounds like a plan!

Unfortunately, the corps can't stand to do nothing -- its motto is essayons, French for "let us try" -- so it decided instead to adopt a new approach, basing its recommendations on "scenarios" instead of forecasts. For example, under a mildly optimistic flat-growth scenario, it calculated that the costs of new locks would be five times the economic benefits. And under a highly optimistic modest-growth scenario, the costs would be 2.5 times the benefits. But under an outlandishly optimistic high-growth scenario, the benefits would slightly exceed the costs. That was good enough for the corps, which liked the high-growth scenario so much it recommended expanding the original $1 billion plan to expand seven locks into a $2.2 billion plan to build seven new locks. A triumphant Sen. Bond called it "a plan that gets the corps back in the business of building for the future rather than haggling about predicting it."

Corps boondoggles thrive because they provide benefits to a few -- in this case, barge interests, farm interests, and unions -- at the expense of the many. You pay for this foolishness, but you probably won't come to Washington to fight it. There are a few corps reformers on the Hill, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and especially Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), but most members of Congress consider it bad form to oppose another member's water project. Usually, the strongest voices in opposition are environmentalists. And the corps devised a brilliant strategy for dealing with them on the upper Mississippi: It bought them off.

In addition to the $2.2 billion in navigation improvements, the corps proposed $1.7 billion in environmental improvements. Groups like the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy were delighted with the green pork, especially after Congress included toothless language pledging "comparable" spending on restoration and navigation. (My house is "comparable" to the Sears Tower; it's smaller.) And the project's supporters got to brag about saving the earth as well as bringing home jobs. "The funding for ecosystem restoration will keep the land around these mighty rivers clean and beautiful," crowed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

The entire $4 billion bonanza was stashed into the Water Resources Development Act of 2007. Most environmental groups ended up supporting the bill, because it also included $5 billion for the Everglades and the devastated Louisiana coast, along with $14 billion worth of more traditional pork. But as I have already whined at length on this website, there was nothing in the bill to reform the troubled corps for the 21st century. Obama supported some proposed reforms, such as independent reviews of corps projects, but he didn't fight for them because he "didn't want to slow the process down." That's an understandable sentiment for an Illinois senator. But the water resources bill had pork for every state; that's why it was so popular. And that's why, once again, nothing is going to change.

Some corps projects are true ecological nightmares, like the pump in the Delta, or this flood-control fiasco on the Mississippi. But the real ecological nightmare of the corps is the opportunity cost. If it didn't have to spend another $2.2 billion pouring concrete into the Mississippi, maybe it really would spend $1.7 billion restoring the Mississippi. And if it wasn't the kind of agency that spent its time finagling ways to pour concrete, maybe it would be the kind of agency we could actually trust to restore the Mississippi properly -- along with the Everglades, Louisiana's coastal marshes, and so many other ecosystems the corps has helped to destroy in the first place.

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Today, it's almost impossible to say "Army Corps of Engineers" without also saying "Hurricane Katrina" and "levee failure," or "Yazoo Pump" and "boondoggle." But the corps' original mandate made no mention of hurricane and flood protection, or even of the Mississippi River.

An Army Corps survey crew in 1916.

Photo: history.nasa.gov

In 1802, Congress established the Army Corps of Engineers as the nation's design and construction crew. The country was barely a quarter-century past the Revolutionary War -- where the first iteration of the corps had been assembled on the battlefield -- and it needed a steady supply of engineers to map its assets and to build basic infrastructure such as forts, lighthouses, and roads.

At its inception, the corps consisted of a captain, two lieutenants, a math instructor, and 10 cadets. It was a far cry from today's 35,000-member military and civilian organization, which has an annual operating budget nearing $38 billion.

Among the corps' many early works are a series of forts maintained today as state and national landmarks, from Fort Adams in Rhode Island to Fort Jefferson off the coast of Florida, and even the fort at the base of the Statue of Liberty. The Cape Hatteras lighthouse, postcard-picture symbol of the Outer Banks, is an Army Corps project. Army engineers also designed and built many of the landmarks in the nation's capital, including the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Memorial, and Rock Creek Park.

As the nation grew, the Army Corps saw its mission expand. Today, its duties encompass everything from maintaining aquatic resources across the country to cleaning up Superfund sites to building facilities for the Army and Air Force. And for more than a century, it has been building levees along the Mississippi River, the project for which it is perhaps best known -- and most reviled -- today.

With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 -- 828,000 square miles of French territory stretching from New Orleans, La., to what is today North Dakota -- the size of the United States doubled, and the way to the West was opened. The acquisition ushered in a new era of national expansion, both geographically and commercially.

People were drawn to the "water highway" of the Mississippi, says Charles Camillo, historian for the Mississippi Valley Commission of the Army Corps in Vicksburg, Miss. And planters sought to farm the fertile land alongside the river, he says, but were wiped out with floods every spring. To stave off this seasonal onslaught, cities along the flood-prone river established local levee districts. Often funded through the sale of floodplain land to planters, these districts built their own levees according to their own requirements -- and often with little concern for the levee's effects downstream.

Craig Colten.

Photo: American University

This "solution" only worsened the flooding problem, says Craig Colten, professor of geography at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature. "Before levees, the flood would come and be a few inches to a few feet deep," he says. "But after levees went up, floods would come through in a raging torrent."

And so a debate sprang up in Congress: Should the federal government get involved in managing the Mississippi River? Were levees the best protection from flooding? And if they were, who should build and maintain them?

"Many in Congress had reservations about the Constitutional appropriateness of the federal government getting involved in flood control," says Martin Reuss, retired senior historian of the Corps of Engineers and author of Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995. "But they had no such problem with navigation."

The Supreme Court ruled in 1824 that river navigation was directly tied to commerce and therefore should be maintained by the federal government, and not the states. While the case itself focused on competing steamboat operators' access to a canal in upstate New York, the ruling set the stage for the feds to finance river improvements nationwide, including the Mississippi River, which was quickly becoming an important conduit for steamboats carrying agricultural goods. Soon, Congress charged the corps with the role of maintaining navigable waterways, emphasizing commerce on the entire Mississippi. Tree snags, sand bars, and other impediments to boat traffic had to be removed, and it became the corps' responsibility to remove them.

Dam-building on the Mississippi in the late 1800s.

Photo: New York State Museum

As a result of this court case, the federal government appropriated $75,000 to the corps to improve navigation on both the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, making the agency a fundamental force in controlling the Mississippi. Its power grew in 1879, when Congress established the Mississippi River Commission, a seven-member board whose members were chosen by the president. Although the MRC was supposed to balance civilian and Army engineering perspectives, Army officers outnumbered civilians on the board; an Army officer served as its president; and all these officers reported to the head of the corps. Ultimately the Army Corps controlled the civilian appointments as well.

The commission's role was to both improve navigation and prevent floods. To meet these goals, it built a series of levees on the lower portions of the Mississippi. "Louisiana state engineers in the 1850s said the levees were making the floods worse," Colten says. "There was a debate, but the proponents of a confined river won out." That vital win would shape the future of the Mississippi region, and of the generations of residents who call the area home.

In the Great Flood of 1927, the Mississippi surged over its levee system in 145 locations, flooding 27,000 square miles at depths of up to 30 feet. The flood reached from Illinois to Louisiana, displacing 700,000 people and causing over $100 million (more than $1 billion in today's dollars) in damage to crops and livestock. "The tremendous flood of 1927 showed the inadequacy of relying entirely on levees for flood control," Reuss says.

The "Corps Castle" has been in use since 1839.

In response, Congress quickly passed the Mississippi River and Tributaries Act, changing the MRC into a strictly advisory body and giving the Army Corps of Engineers fundamental responsibility for maintaining flood control and navigation on the entire Mississippi. Congress authorized $325 million to the corps over 10 years -- about one-tenth the entire federal budget at the time -- to expand control of the river beyond levees. New measures would include dredging, channelization, and reservoirs, says Reuss.

"In terms of the future of the Mississippi, this was a very big deal," says Reuss. "The plan that was passed in 1928 remains to this very day the template for developing the lower Mississippi in terms of navigation and flood control."

While much of the flood-control legislation addressed the lower Mississippi, the corps' influence reached all the way to the river's headwaters, and had since the late 1800s. In fact, the corps built its first dam on the upper Mississippi in the 1880s -- ostensibly to improve river navigation, but also to provide a reliable supply of water to run a Pillsbury flour mill in Minneapolis-St. Paul, according to Reuss.

The 1930s saw the construction of the locks and dams that today create a "staircase" allowing a smooth flow for barge traffic as the river descends over 350 feet in elevation between St. Paul and Granite City, Ill. While commercial interests along the river such as barge operators and grain processors lobbied for this lock and dam construction, Reuss said the Army Corps initially resisted the pressure. "It was quite contentious ... The district engineer in St. Paul didn't think there was enough benefit to justify the cost of a whole sequence of locks and dams. But at the beginning of the Depression, Herbert Hoover overrode the corps objections, authorizing the lock and dam system not only for navigation but to contribute to public works."

While the conservation community raised some concerns regarding impacts to fish and wildlife, the project moved ahead, further entrenching the corps' presence along the entire length of the river.

In 1965, the Army Corps received yet another directive, one that would inspire the type of local controversy it often faces today. In the wake of Hurricane Betsy, which killed 75 people, flooded much of New Orleans, and left behind $1 billion (over $8.4 billion in today's dollars) in damage, Congress approved money for the corps to build a massive hurricane protection system for the whole southeast of Louisiana. "And this," says Colten, "is where you begin to see a lot of local controversy."

With this shift from relatively straightforward mandates to ensure safer navigation and limit flooding to the murkier goal of hurricane protection, the corps found itself playing the heavy, instead of the hero. Worried that a storm surge diverted from New Orleans would flood other communities and jeopardize the commercial fish and shrimp industry, several local municipalities resisted Army Corps recommendations to build barriers and other projects meant to deflect a hurricane surge from hitting the city. These conflicts delayed new construction in many parts of the city, in some cases for decades. "This whole plan for hurricane protection advanced in 1965 was supposed to be completed in 1978," Colten says. "It still wasn't complete when Katrina came."

"I know the corps would very much like the locals to acknowledge their role," says Colten, reflecting on the Army Corps' response to the flooding that wiped out much of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. "But the corps also has a habit of saying, 'We only do what Congress tells us to do.' They constantly shift the blame when there's a problem: 'Well, Congress told us to build a levee this height.' But it's the Corps of Engineers who designs the levees."

As the Army Corps moves into the 21st century, it faces new challenges at the local and federal levels alike; its works are under intense scrutiny for their high price tags and environmental toll. Even the eco-hostile Bush administration recently moved to deauthorize the Yazoo pump, a hotly contested $220 million Mississippi Delta project that would have, by the corps' own estimation, damaged at least 67,000 acres of wetlands.

The Katrina experience and the controversy over the Yazoo pump both speak to a lingering mistrust of the Army Corps of Engineers, even in places where corps projects may have benefited local communities. Overcoming that mistrust and moving ahead with other projects, says Colten, will take much better coordination between local leaders, the corps, and the administration. Meanwhile, the river flows on -- as does the work of America's biggest and oldest engineering firm.

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It's spring, and for most of us that means tackling a few home improvement projects: cleaning the gutters, say, or replacing storm windows with screens.

The Mississippi Valley Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is responsible for maintaining the Mississippi as a useful and navigable waterway. But some of the Corps' projects have critics crying "pork." Click the map below to find out more.

But what if you took that to-do list and magnified it by millions of acres, billions of dollars, and reliable bursts of outrage from the neighbors? Why, then you'd be the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

This spring, we take a look at what the nation's legendarily industrious, controversial, and misunderstood agency is up to along the Mississippi River -- and what its presence there has meant for both residents and natural resources over the last 200 years.

How well is the Army Corps spending your tax dollars? Do the locks and levees the corps builds help or harm the river? Do the agency's plans for flood- and hurricane-prone areas leave low-income residents with nowhere to go? And why was the Corps created in the first place? (Hint: It had more to do with the Statue of Liberty than with steamboats.)

Over the next few days, we'll explore these and other questions. From a look back at the Army Corps' creation to a look ahead at how it's planning to confront climate change, we'll bring you up close and personal with the busiest beaver in America's waterways.

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The U.S. EPA has moved to block an Army Corps of Engineers flood-control project in the Mississippi Delta, the first time the agency has aimed to veto a Corps project since 1990. The $220 million project would have built the world's largest hydraulic pump, sucking dry enough wetland area to cover New York City in order to protect a sparsely populated area of soybean fields from Yazoo River flooding. The so-called Yazoo Pump (which would almost solely benefit subsidy-laden soybean farmers) was once described as an "economic [dud] with huge environmental consequences" -- by a top Corps lobbyist. Informing the Corps of its disapproval, the EPA wrote that the plan "could result in unacceptable adverse effects on the aquatic ecosystem, particularly to fish and wildlife resources." Says a delighted Rebecca Wodder of green group American Rivers, "One of the most environmentally disastrous ideas of the last half century is now one step closer to being thrown into the trash where it belongs."

sources:

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The Mississippi River has been dramatically changed by agricultural practices, says new research in the journal Nature. In the past 50 years or so, carbon levels in the river have jumped 40 percent, while the actual amount of water flowing through the riverbed has increased 9 percent -- the equivalent of five Connecticut Rivers. "Agricultural practices are causing a greater percentage of rainfall to make it to river water instead of being evaporated back into the atmosphere," explains researcher Peter Raymond. The extra-mighty Mississippi then transports ever more nutrients and pollution into the Gulf of Mexico, where they contribute to an oxygen-starved dead zone. But hey, at least we've got lots of corn!

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10 -- states that border the Mississippi River
31 -- states drained by the Mississippi River watershed 1
2 -- Canadian provinces drained by the Mississippi River watershed 1
50 -- cities that rely on the river for their water supply 1
40 -- percentage of U.S. that's part of the Mississippi River basin 1

2,300 -- length of the river, in miles 1

326 -- species of birds that migrate along the Mississippi corridor 1
260 -- species of fish that call the Mississippi home 1

12 million -- people who recreate annually along the Upper Mississippi 2
$1.2 billion -- amount they spend in riverfront communities 2

60 -- percentage of grain exported from the U.S. that's shipped on the Mississippi 1
90 million -- tons of cargo moved on the Mississippi River between St. Paul, Minn., and St. Louis each year 3

58 -- semi-truck trailers of load capacity on one barge 4
2.25 million -- loaves of bread you could bake from the wheat in one barge load 4

68 -- days it took a Slovenian long-distance swimmer to cover the length of the river in 2002 5
90 -- days it would take a raindrop to travel the length of the river 1

29 -- lock-and-dam structures on the Upper Mississippi 6
9 -- depth of the shipping channel from Minneapolis to Baton Rouge, La., in feet 4

24 -- length of Lake Pontchartrain over-water highway bridge, the world's longest, in miles 6

6 -- average flow rate at the headwaters, in cubic feet per second 1
600,000 -- average flow rate at New Orleans, in cubic feet per second 1

3 -- depth of the river at its headwaters, in feet 1
200 -- depth of the river at its deepest point, near Algiers Point, New Orleans, in feet 1

436,000 -- tons of sediment the river carries each day 1

85 -- years ago that waterskiing was invented on the Mississippi 6

Sources:

1: National Park Service, Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, General Information About the Mississippi River
2: American Rivers, Army Corps Reform: The Mississippi River, About the River
3: American Rivers, Army Corps Reform: The Mississippi River, A Brief History
4: Mississippi River Resource Page
5: Wikipedia, Martin Strel
6: Mississippi River Parkway Commission, River Facts & Fun

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May God bless Memphis, the noblest city on the face of the earth.
-- Mark Twain

To visit Memphis, Tenn., is to visit a place that is slowly waking from a decades-long stupor. The things that define this city in the popular imagination -- the glamorous life of Elvis Presley, the shocking assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. -- happened decades ago. Some of the young professionals the city would like to attract weren't even born when Dr. King and The King ended their respective reigns. But in many ways, the city still lives through that past, both economically and culturally. And the tumult attached to those events -- economic, racial, religious -- still simmers at the surface.

As a result, Memphis is a city struggling to feel at home with itself, and to define its role in the 21st century. There are some who are working to reinvent the birthplace of the blues, to breathe new life into its streets and reinflate its self-esteem. Much has been accomplished in the last decade. I first visited Memphis in 1998, and the Memphis I saw in 2007 is not the same place. Major investments in the downtown include a new arena, a professional NBA team, a retail center, and a revitalized arts district.

Much of this progress has occurred under the leadership of Willie Herenton, who took office in 1991 as the city's first African-American mayor. Herenton is a controversial figure whose claims to notoriety include fathering an illegitimate child with a woman 30 years his junior; being cited, but not tried, in a far-reaching corruption scandal; and, according to some, fanning the flames of racial tension during this fall's mayoral campaign, which saw him win an unprecedented fifth term.

Eight years ago, Herenton made another move that proved controversial: He assembled the Riverfront Development Corporation, a private nonprofit that would work with the city government to make the riverfront an inviting, active place to live, work, and play.

Seems a sensible enough idea: turn the mighty Mississippi -- once the economic backbone of this city when it was the cotton capital of the world -- into a backbone again, a draw for tourists and residents alike.

But that's where the trouble starts. Or rather, continues. The RDC's plans -- for a boat landing and retail/residential development -- have met with fierce resistance from some prominent community members who would prefer to see open space along the river. An endless series of meetings, proposed lawsuits, master plans, newspaper articles, and blog attacks has unfolded, keeping these bitter rivals distracted from a simple truth: They all want to improve the area; they just can't agree on how to do it.

And while the battle rages, a downtown riverfront largely defined by interstate ramps and parking garages falls far short of what it could be.

Like everything in Memphis, the current controversy has deep roots in the city's history. To understand the furor, it's necessary to understand two local features: the cobblestones and the promenade. Both have the ring of genteel Southern living, conjuring images of leisurely strolls by parasol-wielding women and handlebar-mustached men. But in fact, a grittier history and reality belie the pretty names.

Unlike many cities along the Mississippi, the waterfront is not consumed by industrial behemoths or recovering brownfields. From its inception in the early 1800s, Memphis was a port first and foremost -- a place for moving goods, not making them. The riverbank was lined with cobblestones that served as ballast for ships and a landing place for cargo. "The cobblestones were the center of commerce for Memphis," explains John Conroy, a former city engineer who is vice president of project development for the RDC. "Everything that came into the city pretty much came by river and came up the cobblestones." Today the cobblestones are a treasured historical landmark -- so treasured, in fact, that their preservation must be considered in any plan for changing the riverfront.

Just uphill from the cobblestones lies the promenade, an area set aside by the city founders -- a trio that included future President Andrew Jackson -- for residents to enjoy. Nearly 200 years later, the promenade is still regarded as public space, although it has been treated roughly over the decades. Parking garages occupy some of it, and a concrete fire station squats at one end. A library and a former customs house and post office -- soon to become the University of Memphis law school -- are also on the site. The city doesn't own the land, but has set its sights on leasing it to developers, a move the courts would have to approve.

Memphis has something else that most Mississippi towns don't: public parkland on the riverfront. One hundred and fifty acres of it, to be exact. "We are lucky because we own park space, where other cities have had to buy riverfront park space," says June West of Memphis Heritage, the area's preservation association.

Yet another feature distinguishes this city from its counterparts: It sits on a slack-water harbor, nothing like the raging channels that pass by St. Louis or the lock-and-dammed recreational depths farther north. It is, wrote Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, "a beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river."

But the beautiful city, says historian West, "turned its back on the river. It was not seen as an attraction; it was seen as something that was there that was muddy and dirty, and it was used for barges. Not until 15 to 17 years ago did people start really realizing that it's a beautiful view."

With that realization came a renewed sense of protectiveness for the features that had so long gone unloved. In a sense, of course, these features -- the parks, the cobblestones, the promenade -- are strengths. But they are also obstacles to progress. "It's like we're stuck in a 1920s movie and we can't change anything," says Tom Jones, an urban-planning consultant who lives and works downtown and is involved in the riverfront fight. "This is the stage set we were given and we're not supposed to do anything."

For Memphis to become the vibrant city it imagines, something might have to give. But at the moment, no one's giving an inch.

Here's a boiled-down version of what the RDC wants to do: build Beale Street Landing, a floating dock that would give visiting ships a place to tie up and tourists and residents a place to eat, drink, and enjoy the river; develop the promenade into a combination of retail and residential development; and restore the cobblestones.

"Many river cities have a problem with public access to their riverfront -- it's almost all privately owned," says Conroy. "We have exactly the opposite problem: We have virtually total public ownership of the riverfront, but we have nothing going on down there. We tell people we've got a 5-mile riverfront, you can't buy a Coke, can't buy a bottle of water, can't buy a snack."

Here's what the other side, led by a group called Friends for Our Riverfront, wants to see: conversion of the promenade almost entirely to greenway, with space for food vendors, outdoor movies, and art exhibits; and refurbishment of abandoned downtown buildings to meet any demand for other services.

"Most Memphians would agree that the Mississippi River is our city's greatest natural resource and the riverbluff, with its magnificent vistas, our most unique feature," says the Friends website. (Friends did not return calls seeking comment for this story.) "So you would think we would capitalize on those strengths when we plan for our riverfront ... But the current RDC plan fails the test and instead proposes allowing private developers to build high-rise apartments, hotels, offices, shops, and restaurants on the most strategically located section of our public riverfront. It proposes exchanging our right to a green river-bluff for a paved walkway and shops in private buildings."

And what do the citizens of Memphis, a bustling metropolis of 670,000, think of all this? For the most part, says Jones, not much: "Most people aren't even plugged in."

A weary Conroy echoes that assessment: "I could easily tell you everybody else loves us, but I think a more honest answer is most of the public doesn't know what's going on." He adds that RDC has presented its plan to nearly 200 organizations, and still hopes for the best. "We think that if we can do some of the things that we've talked about, we can walk away and say this is a far better place to live and play and have fun than it was before we started."

The riverfront battle is not just about space -- it's also about race. The population of Memphis is 60 percent African-American, and the city "is built on African-American culture and the river culture," says urban-planning consultant Jones. "Strip everything else away, those are the two things that mattered then and matter now."

But that truth is too often overlooked by the white community, he says, and that's no less true in this current battle: "By and large, the African-American community sees this as some big discussion the white community is having, and [wonders] how does it affect me."

Still, some of the key players say a restored riverfront could be one way to help heal the wounds in this racially divisive city.

"The river is an asset that is equally appreciated by both the white and black community," says Conroy. "If you go down to Tom Lee Park on a Sunday afternoon, there'll be bunches of people there, and a really good racial mix. There's a lot of places around here where you won't see that, but the river seems to serve as something that appeals across that boundary, and because it does, it's a tremendous opportunity ... if you can get more activity down there and draw more people down there and draw the racial mix that it seems to draw up 'til now, that goes a long way toward getting those two groups together, and getting past or helping get past the racial issues that have abounded in Memphis."

His opponents might roll their eyes at such a sentiment -- since when does a retired city bureaucrat give a hoot about racial relations -- but Conroy seems sincere. And that's the saddest thing about the Memphis situation: There are no clearly defined good guys and bad guys. There are just two sides with their heels stuck firmly in the Mississippi mud.

Tourists still come to see the mighty Mississippi, to take a tour on a riverboat or visit the river museum at Mud Island, a fading waterfront attraction that opened in the early 1980s. And occasionally residents come down to the water too, usually when they have guests in town. This river is a draw, there's no doubt; the question is, who will make it more of a draw -- and how. There's one thing everyone agrees on: it's got to happen soon. The future of this history-soaked city depends on it.

"The reason we're here is because of the river, the reason the economy grew in the beginning was all about the river, we have a very river culture," says Jones. "And there's a lot written about how if you really want to get down into Memphis music, it's in tune with the current of the river. That pulse of the river is felt all about us."

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"The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up."
-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

As the sun rises over the city of St. Louis, an arch-shaped shadow moves eastward over the city's bustling downtown and toward the Mississippi River, where it will leave its invisible mark until early evening. The 630-foot steel structure casting this iconic shadow over the city's riverfront serves as a visual reminder of St. Louis' role as a gateway for early American explorers, and of the river's past (and no doubt future) as an invaluable means of commerce and travel.

From atop that arch, a visceral understanding of the river's purpose is inescapable: The aerial view makes clear that St. Louis' muddy Mississippi does not meander at a pedestrian pace; there are no kayaks, canoes, or pleasure craft floating blithely by. This is a powerful, fast-moving, working river ... and has been since the city's founding in the 1760s by French explorers hoping to take advantage of trade coming downstream from the Missouri River.

For it is here that two of the country's mightiest (and muddiest) rivers flow together in a 200-square-mile area known as the confluence. Along the Mississippi's shores, farmland and forests once flourished, providing habitat for wildlife and a home for Native peoples. But after the rivers were harnessed as liquid highway, they bore a commerce-focused boomtown that by the 1850s had become the second-largest port in the country. In 1904, St. Louis hosted both a World's Fair and the Olympic Games, and had grown to be the fourth-largest city in the nation.

At that time, development in St. Louis -- whether industrial, commercial, or residential -- was clustered near the riverfront. But with the rise of the automobile, the growth of the highway system, and increasing suburbanization in the mid-20th century, downtown St. Louis began to lose population. And as economic development in the area moved away from the industrial corridor, the river became a backyard of sorts.

Although the city took a first step toward rejuvenating the riverfront in the 1980s by developing a Riverfront Trail, the project moved forward slowly, its piecemeal construction left disconnected in many areas. The devastating floods in 1993 did nothing to strengthen the image of the river in St. Louis' collective heart.

Then in 2000, the tide turned. Work by a number of grassroots groups was slowly swaying public sentiment about the value of green space and neighborhood parks, and in November of that year, that value became quantifiable in the form of a one-tenth-of-one-cent sales tax. That tax, which was put to a vote and passed in both Missouri and Illinois, now generates some $10 million a year on the Missouri side alone and is earmarked to fund riverfront projects that restore greenways and create trail systems.

Once the levy was approved, the Great Rivers Greenway District was established to create an overall plan and then manage and dole out the funds on the Missouri side of the river (a mirror organization called Metro East Park and Recreation District manages the money on the Illinois side). The original plan for the funds identified some 45 greenways throughout three counties and two states, creating a 600-mile web of trail systems -- an amount comparable to other green cities, like Seattle or Minneapolis. The resulting River Ring project involves collaboration among a number of groups, but overall, their aim is to connect people in the St. Louis metropolitan area to the Mississippi.

"Going through [the planning process], it became very apparent that the average St. Louisan is very disconnected from the rivers," said Todd Antoine, GRG's deputy director for planning. "They pass over them on a highway bridge, or maybe they see it from glimpses here and there -- the Missouri or Mississippi -- but they really don't look at the natural features here as something to really, truly appreciate."

GRG evaluates the programs under its funding umbrella on three tenets: social equity, environmental stewardship, and economic development (or SEED). And in some cases, emphasizing that third tenet is key, GRG organizers say.

"In this region, we have a lot of different types of constituencies, a lot of different economic levels of the communities that we work in," said Janet Wilding, GRG's deputy director for administration. "For us the challenge is in each community really understanding what the greenway is going to mean to that community and helping them understand that."

Perhaps it's the "Show Me State" mentality, Antoine said, but as the efforts have progressed -- with creative projects like running a trailway over an abandoned railroad trestle crossing the river -- people are beginning to see the larger vision and to demonstrate a growing awareness of the river itself.

One of the organizations benefiting from the sales tax's boon is the Confluence Greenway, an effort focused on preserving the green-space and wildlife-rich land where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers come together. Funded in part by private grants from organizations like the McKnight Foundation, which also helped fund this Grist series, the Confluence Greenway formed in 1997 as a collaboration between regional and national organizations with specialties ranging from natural resources to land acquisition to trail-based efforts.

This collaborative effort to protect the greenway by pooling multiple talents and resources has been "one of the big success stories," said Confluence Director Laura Cohen. "It's been the process of really bringing people together, getting them to know and talk to each other, sharing expertise, and making sure you're not duplicating efforts."

One of the Confluence Greenway's recent endeavors has been the creation of the Columbia Bottom Conservation Area, a 4,300-acre park situated along both the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers that allows visitors to see the confluence firsthand -- on good days, even seeing the change in color and composition of the two rivers (the Missouri being the darker and muddier of the two). Across the river, in Hartford, Ill., a Confluence Tower slated to open next fall will offer a similar view, but from an aerial perspective.

"The rivers are political boundaries, but they've really become social and cultural boundaries in a lot of ways as well," Cohen said. "So getting people to see the rivers as almost a common ground -- as opposed to the boundaries -- is a whole kind of mind shift that we're trying to engage people in."

Through annual programs like Eagle Days and Wings of Spring -- both of which take advantage of the aviary bounty of the area -- as well as Lewis and Clark themed events, which highlight the area's historical significance, the Confluence project aims to bring an audience to the river.

"There's this incredible potential," Cohen said, "to really use the rivers in a way to connect people with that history, provide recreational opportunities, and really do our part in this massive river system of helping to protect and improve the quality of the river here."

One group working very closely on environmental stewardship and watershed quality is the five-person AmeriCorps team headed by Danielle Lee and stationed at Columbia Bottom. The five volunteers, ranging in age from 19 to 41, are all from north St. Louis, an area of town known more for its high crime rate than its conservation efforts. They're handpicked by Grace Hill, a social service agency that works in the area on a number of issues, including the Confluence Greenway -- and is a perfect example of the breadth of that group's membership.

"We are on one of the largest watersheds in the world, and it's part of our responsibility to help keep our water sources clean," said Kneely Williams Jr., a member of Danielle's troop. "We go along the confluence and the river sites where we offer more access -- with more access, we have more litter -- and we try to manage [the litter] and remove it to protect our resources."

Their work also involves educational efforts at local schools and events. Games like "Trash or Recycle" and "Take a Guess," which asks how long trash takes to biodegrade, help get their messages across to children of all ages (and even entertained us adults).

And they've already seen the benefits of their work and the work of others before them. Williams says that although he lives in the Baden community right on the river, he never used to be able to get near the water. "But now, with the Riverfront Trail and the trail that's coming along here at the confluence," he said, "it's really great access to get closer to nature."

It's like that old adage, explained GRG Executive Director David Fisher, "What you don't understand, you don't value; what you don't value, you don't protect." But the ongoing efforts in St. Louis to highlight and protect the river's greenways are helping "bring the environmental stewardship premise to the forefront, on a river that had been neglected, actually thrown away, if you will, by the city."

Trashed as it was, the river is quickly becoming St. Louis' treasure.

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