Most have been riveted by the gushing waters of the recently opened Mississippi Main Stem spillways--including one by dynamite. This effort was largely designed before the era of computers and the USACOE and FEMA no longer have the in house skills to predict what will happen exactly from these efforts. Nor do they have the contractor talent to help them that they once did. The Vicksburg Waterways Experiment Station and the Hydraulic Engineering Center in Davis, CA may be working overtime but they cannot make up for the lack of detail, calibrated actual openings, and other data that just have not been collected to understand fully the impacts of these various man made changes in the river flow. The entirety of the system was really designed largely by guesswork long before computers so now almost anything could happen over the next 6 weeks.
THE 2011 MISSISSPPI RIVER EVENT WILL BE STUDIED FOR YEARS AS TO THE CHOICES MADE AND RESULTS AND COULD HAVE BEEN OR MIGHT HAVE BEENS. Hey give boys toys and they will always choose to play with them even when highly dangerous.
Good luck those subject to these GUESSTIMATES!
