Carl Pope: The River's Going to Do...

By Carl Pope, Huffington Post

The intriguing thing about a conference chock full of present and former officers from the Army Corps of Engineers is that you get all the data you need, but you have to connect the dots yourself. At sessions focused on Hurricane Katrina during the Ecumenical Patriarch's Eighth Religion, Science and the Environment Symposium, Army Corps scientists and engineers, including Chief of Engineers Lt. General Robert Van Antwerp, gave the audience in New Orleans some sobering facts:

1. During the spring peak, the Mississippi River at New Orleans can handle only 1 million of the 3 million cubic feet/second of the water that comes down the river. At peak, two-thirds of the river finds another outlet to the Gulf.

2. 50 percent of the wetland-creating silt that once flowed down the river is today clogging up federal dams like Ft. Peck on the Upper Missouri. Not only is it eliminating more than half of the value of those dams as hydroelectric projects it is also making it virtually impossible for wetlands restoration to compensate for the gradual rise of sea level in south Louisiana.

3. During spring floods two years ago, if levees on the Upper Mississippi had not broken, the river would have crested at St. Louis -- more than 10 feet above the levee at the Gateway Arch -- and a second major American city would have been lost to flooding.

4. To protect the entire...

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