Shreve was involved with many river 'engineering' projects with unintended consequences. Probably the biggest was him clearing out a massive ancient log dam on the Atchafalaya River known as the Great Raft. With the dam cleared, the river started to flow again and cut much deeper which probably was a major contributing factor to the issues described in this video.
There were hundreds of weird river projects back then. There’s an old canal system where I live that affects irrigation but no one knows why it was built since the records were destroyed during the civil war.
Yah it sounds like removing the great raft was a much larger factor than the shortcut though. So really disappointed in this video, come on Sam, really should have brought that up. Because yah, it doesn't make any sense for that shortcut to cause the Atchafalaya to get bigger, it already went there, if anything this should have slightly impeded it's path west...
It all started because some people with a lot of money wanted to make a lot more money, so they decided build two massive cities on swamp lands that weren’t meant to be lived on. Louisiana shouldn’t be habitable more than 30 minutes (by highway) south of Arkansas. I’ve been across Louisiana on I-10 - so many bridges supporting that highway across there. No wonder DOT is always pissed in that state. They taking them bridge laws serious. Because every bit of their infrastructure is a bridge.
So if you zoom out to time scales of 5,000 years or so, the Mississippi river is / always was going to find a way to move into the Atchafalaya basin anyhow. Regardless of what Shreve may have done at some point. The Old River control structure alone will not be able to keep it in channel forever. Some other leak somewhere else is going to inevitably spurt out, because the Atchafalaya basin is a shorter and steeper path to the Gulf right now. If Uncle Sam wants to keep the river in channel long term, it's gonna have to keep plugging holes. This is also why Louisiana has a really bad "coastal erosion" problem. By keeping the river in channel, the river has built the current Mississippi delta way out into the Gulf of Mexico, and it's dumping all that sediment into deep water where it's not doing anything. Meanwhile, erosion just continues eroding the rest of the coast. If the river went into the Atchafalaya channel where it wants to go, the sediment would end up rebuilding the eroded wetlands in that area, and the current delta would retreat back to a more defensible position. Geologists have mapped out a whole series of river channel migrations over the last several thousand years, where it tends to kind of sweep back and forth across most of Louisiana, keeping the general extent of the coast line even up until when the Old River control structure was built.
I came to the comments to see if anyone pointed this out. This seems like a key fact about the Atchafalaya basin, but oddly glossed over by the video. Yes Shreve cut the channel but then the video skips ahead to the upper old river drying up and lower old river being established. Cutting the channel simply reset the clock on the process until they built the old river control structure to "stop" it...at that location...for now.
To be fair, the coastal erosion problem wouldn't even be as bad as it is if there hadn't been a bunch of mini Shreve's Cuts done by the oil and gas industry trying to find oil and gas in the wetlands.
Nevertheless, not creating that shortcut in the first place woild have saved a shit ton of money and hassle because it would have been many decades where nobody would have needed to waste money on those flood gates
It’s hardly doing “nothing”. It’s depositing sediment that will become an oil resource when the kangaroo civilization 15 million years from now rediscovers the industrial revolution. :-)
It wasn’t actually the digging of Shreve’s Cut that started the avulsion of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya, but the clearing of the Great Raft from the Atchafalaya. This increased water flow into it, and eventually allowed it to start capturing the Mississippi, leading to the current clusterfuck.
It would have been worth mentioning that the Atchafalaya bay / delta was actually the ancient delta of the Mississippi and the Mississippi only formed its current delta around 500 years ago.
But that takes away from the clickbait title and thumbnail. You know that key details never make it into RUclips videos today, like how bayou lafourche actually used to be the river before it was on its modern course
@@TPotatoo That's the way of this guy. Spit out a few facts about an interesting topic, just as a segue into sponsorship. About 25% of this video is him promoting his sponsor.
I just went back to the part about cutting the channel because I was curious how that would do anything different than what would happen anyway once it met up with the red river.... makes sense now.
"...a decision that some guy made 200 years ago before they had invented the concept of consequences." Well if that isn't just the root of all the world's problems right there 😂
I have worked both sides of the business. For the Corp and as a contractor, they have done some of the most impactful things you would never know. Few people know how great of a roll the have played in infrastructure projects around the world
@Rewild The World fair, What makes them good is controlling the ability to use the rivers as transportation, our river system is a huge source of US power. I’m not saying they are perfect or haven’t made the best decisions. I’m not proud of the wetland destruction, but all we can do is correct the mistakes of the past. Im currently working restoration projects and there is more healthy wildlife of all sorts regaining there natural areas. I try my best to be a good steward. Dredging is not a science, rivers will do wild things to the bottom that is not predictable, I’m not familiar with the works on the Missouri but will check it out. I guess my point is sometimes you just have to try and failure is always an option.
I think this was intentional lol. All américains think it's the greatest country in the world. Why not just say that the world = US. If the US is the world. The US is the best country in the US lol
@@TheThomaTube As person from small nation in small country in the Europe... I think that from what I learned so far, this is common big nations mentality (people from the biggest and powerful countries), which in different form is at least also present in China or Russia. Probably it is consequence of long time official and unofficial propaganda.
I've never heard of Jet Lag the Game before this comment. But then one of the related videos is for Jet Lag The Game... Is RUclips using comments to recommend videos or is JLtG connected to this channel already?
If a channel was dredged it would control the path and minimize the losses. Then Morgan City could join the list sea ports. And the cities on the Mississippi would still have their current water source.
No, the cut was not the problem. Removing the log jams in Atchafalaya river aka Great Raft was the problem. The log jam blocked majority of Mississippi water from flowing down Atchafalaya for centuries. And in fact, if there was no Shreve's cut after removing the great raft, lower Mississippi would dry up much quicker.
It's not Shreve making the cut that caused the problem, it's the Mississippi bending in the first place, because it bent into the Red, sending the Mississippi's water down the Red/Atchafalaya. That's where the problem came from. If anything, Shreve lessened the problem.
Yeah, removing the log jams in Atchafalaya river aka Great Raft was the problem. The log jam blocked Mississipi water from flowing down Atchafalaya, if there was no Shreve's cut after removing the great raft, lower Mississippi would dry up much quicker.
For those that have never seen them, the levees along the lower Mississippi River are almost too large to describe. At least it amazed me, who grew up in Minneapolis, where the River is a rather modest stream flowing in an ordinary-looking channel. There are a couple floodwalls, etc., here and there, but nothing really massive like down in Louisiana.
I visited NOLA several years ago. Happened to stumble myself into the Eastern wards and a levee some 100 feet tall like a mountain of concrete while the homes sit below it
@@MarloSoBalJr your mention of the height of the levee is seriously extreme. if you're referring to the great wall across the MRGO, that was a idea after Katrina.
Thanks for your replies. When I visited New Orleans, I've been seeing it from the perspective of a civil engineer. I haven't been there since two years BEFORE Katrina.
@@pacificostudios To contrast I suppose, the first time I saw a picture of Montreal, Canada's waterfront I was shocked to see their levees stood only about 3 feet high, even though the city itself wasn't further elevated above the river's waterline. Large floods and large levees are just a given to me I guess since I grew up with them always being a thing
This is an example of WHY regulations came into existence. People who do not know or care to know the consequences of their decisions being able to cause untold future capital expenditure OR death & destruction. The reason you need an environmental study whenever you want to build a big project? to stop stuff like this from happening again, or at least giving people a heads-up on what they'll need to fork out in the future to deal with the downstream consequences. Those regulations SEEM overhanded because for every one ecological disaster in waiting they avert, most reports just come back essentially "all good". The number of times an entity's "simple project" turned out to have huge unintended consequences that lead to excessive struggle, costs, and death would turn your stomach.
A lot of YT creators ask people to like & comment (as that helps the algorithm). That probably gets a few extra comments. But the clever ones just pronounce a place name differently (from the locals) and sit back for the hundreds of comments that gets. Sam is a genius IMHO.
I don’t know what Morgan City did, but I’m here for this plan and also vote we let the Mississippi do what the Mississippi does and get Morgan City a “little” wet.
Plus these youtubers are getting cleverer and cleverer with their tie in.. if they had this much skill when they had tv earlier imagine how much power advertisers would have
What I’ve been hearing is that the bayou is flooding and needs the Mississippi to flow naturally through to deposit sediments, this is to maintain the environmental balance of the delta.
Louisianian here: Atchafalaya is pronounced: uh-CHAF-fu-LY-uh, where the upper case means it's stressed. You pronounced the sounds right but your stressed it very oddly (I think you stressed the first syllable or something). It's a hard word, but I thought I'd let you know.
@@jbrou123 No, I think Felicia Alexiz is summarizing the video's reference to 3 different gates up around the control structure near Turnbull's Bend. The ones you mentioned are much further south, but they're all part of the same overall project -- i.e., trying to maintain some kind of control over a s#it-ton of water rolling downhill toward south Louisiana from a third of the North American continent... all day long, every day, forever and ever.
Rivers naturally move their courses. The atchafalaya River is 150 miles or so shorter than the Mississippi's course to the gulf, making it faster. Keeping the current river course has devastating effects on the Louisiana coastline.
I always love it when people cover this topic as everyone mispronounces Atchafalaya in various interesting ways. The pronunciation I've heard being a Baton Rouge native is Uh-chaff-uh-lye-uh.
You also have the dredging of the Mississippi to allow easier navigation that ends up meaning sediment doesn't reach the delta. If you don't replenish the sediment in the delta, the ocean's going to eventually erode it. N'Orleans is kind of doomed no matter what.
Isn't the delta currently still growing? that implies a sufficient sediment transport rate to make up for losses. In fact, a deeper channel has a higher sediment capacity assuming that the flow rate remains high enough to maintain suspension of the sediment load, or at least movement of bedload.
@@xiphosura413 The sediment is being pushed further and further into the Gulf. NO used to be near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Now the mouth of the river is 110 miles from NO. All that fast-moving water going down the Mississippi River has also created the Mississippi River Canyon where the Gulf can be 7,000 ft deep less than 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Deep Water Horizon was 41 miles offshore, but in 5,000 feet of water.
504 ya heard me! during the last few major hurricanes they seemed pretty worried around here about the river control structure getting washed away. and I think it was last year or the year before during the high river season it was getting almost too high around that area and they were worried about it then too. theres a youtube channel by a local teacher named loren klien and he made some cool videos about it back then.
Once it's filtered, as every waterworks in the nation has to do, it is very good. New Orleans and surrounding suburbs have the best water in the state. Since I'm from the suburbs and have lived in various cities and towns all over Louisiana, I can tell you that from personal experience.
New Orleans doesn’t get its drinking water from the river. It gets it from an aquifer below the river. If the river changes course, scientists believe there will be saltwater intrusion into the aquifer which makes that water unfit to drink.
@@tcrebelguy Wow, that's a fun fact I never knew! I just knew that the water pipes ran into the river. Do you work for the waterworks or know someone who does?
The Mississippi has changed course in its delta about every 1000-1500 years which has essentially created most of southeast Louisiana .The delta switch is overdue and this course change likely would still have happened but Shreve cut and the clearing of the great raft log jam simply sped up this process.
Nice vid, but you forgot to mention another unintended consequence from the new dam complex: the last stretch of the Mississippi now loses almost its entire sediment load, so now the Louisiana coastline is rapidly eroding away
All river deltas are flood zones where sediment slowly builds new land and the river changes course over hundreds of years. However, it is very annoying for people to live on land that is constantly flooding, so people build levees to prevent flooding. The levees also prevent river sediment from spreading out over the delta, so the river silts up as the soil in the surrounding land naturally sinks as it becomes compressed. Eventually we get to what we have now, which is cities built on land now below sea level surrounded by levees that need constant maintenance and a silted river so much higher than surrounding land that any break in the levees will cause massive flooding.
living in south louisiana i know way too much about this. The controlling of the mississippi is causing massive coastal erosion and is one of the reasons hurricanes hit us so bad.
doesnt removing such a bend also speed up the river downstream, which over time would alter its entire path (i.e bends on a faster river would get washed out until they are straighter)?
All that fast-moving water going down the Mississippi River has also created the Mississippi River Canyon where the Gulf can be 7,000 ft deep less than 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Deep Water Horizon was 41 miles offshore, but in 5,000 feet of water.
Hey! I am the person who suggested this video about the Old River Control Structure. I am overjoyed y'all chose to cover this very interesting topic. I am personally from Lafayette, and the Mississippi River is a core staple of our state's cultural and economic heritage. I was doing a research project for an Research writing course at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette just on the history of the River, how the Native Americans interacted with the River, and how we have shackled the Old Man River. I was especially focused on the effects caused by the Mississippi completing an avulsion to the Atchafalaya. Again, thank you so much for covering this topic.
Can I ask you to provide some context? I feel like they never explained how the cut was the source of the problem? If they hadn't changed the direction of the river wouldn't it have been the same problem? I don't know anything about hydrodynamics so I have more questions than answers
@@VitaeLibra The cut was part of the problem. See, Shreve was doing a lot along the Mississippi River distributaries and tributaries. Back before the 1830s there was this natural blockage along the Atchafalaya that massively restricted the flow of the River, called the Great Raft. It was sort of like a cork for the Atchafalaya. Shreve was hired in the 1830s to remove this Great Raft. The removal of the Great Raft had the effect of allowing more and more water to go down the Atchafalaya. A big reason why the cut is important is that it marked the start of massive geoengineering along the Mississippi River. The USACE still cuts meanders. Cutting meanders causes the river to flow faster, since its straighter. Now that the Great Raft is removed, that increased flow rate has been naturally dredging the Atchafalaya, increasing the capacity of the River to take more and more of the Mississippi.
This video made 0 sense so I had to research it - and yea, *the video is wrong* . The channel did not divert the flow of the Mississippi to the side river, that doesn’t make sense, in fact a more direct channel through the bend should lead to less water flowing westward. Apparently, the river flowed fine until a log jam was removed which then caused more water to flow westward. Ironically, Shreve did actually lead this project, so he did cause the damage, but not fully because of the channel.
Because it's a long way to the Gulf from there. NO used to be near the mouth of the river, but due to sentiment, it's now 110 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. Ports north of the structure would be more than 250 from the mouth of the river in the Gulf.
This video ends when it feels like it is just starting. I was waiting for something like: "but here's the problem with that solution". But no. It just ended. I'm unsatisfied.
In a college geology course the professor described how "straightening" the river dramatically increases the amount of top soil washed into the Gulf of Mexico. The delta where the Mississippi flows into the gulf continues to increase in size. In the original "oxbow" river rich soil was desposited on the riverbanks, not ending up as part of the delta at the mouth of the river. Want to be surprised ? Do a little research and see how much soil is deposited on the delta.
I feel like this one stops after the intro and then never talks about what happens next. We have a big weird river control structure, please continue...
Many of you are getting up on your high horses because you live in some uppity high-altitude gated community, this is a repost from and i see they still have the same flaw at the start saying the river dumps into the ocean instead of the Gulf
50 years ago my geography prof said that if the Corps stopped dredging that the delta would reestablish itself and the Mississippi Sound would clear up.
There is a movie/documentary I watched about this that was made by a man that had spent his entire life living in the Atchafalaya Basin Louisiana coast. He had photos that were made when he was a kid that showed 20 years or so previously where there were trees and marsh and now it was nothing but water for 20 miles from the current Louisiana coast. Why is this happening? Very simple. The Mississippi levee system on this current channel is not allowing the silt that would normally travel to the Louisiana coast to get there to maintain the marsh. He told how much coast they were loosing every year and it was a pretty substantial amount; a few miles a year the best I can remember. The decline started as soon as the levee system was built in the early 1900’s. I believe he even brought up the fact that the Mississippi would naturally move its route to the Atchafalaya basin if it were left alone and this would stop. He also talked about how this effects the New Orleans metro area; for every mile of marsh they loose; they loose a certain amount of protection from the gulf over taking the town. The next Katrina level hurricane that hits New Orleans will wipe it out permanently according to what he was saying.
He didn't mention the fact that this hasn't fully reversed the change in waterflow, just that it's helped the large cities grow bigger. The water use in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, & those in-between are still weakening the river's output to the Gulf of Mexico. Communities like Pilottown & La Balize on the very mouth of the delta died due to the lack of water & erosion in those channels, so that now Venice is the closest permanently populated place to the mouth. Alternatively, the Acthafalaya River being strengthened has allowed for deposits to develop at it's mouth, adding more land to the Louisiana coast as the other part shrinks.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
Shreve was involved with many river 'engineering' projects with unintended consequences. Probably the biggest was him clearing out a massive ancient log dam on the Atchafalaya River known as the Great Raft. With the dam cleared, the river started to flow again and cut much deeper which probably was a major contributing factor to the issues described in this video.
There were hundreds of weird river projects back then. There’s an old canal system where I live that affects irrigation but no one knows why it was built since the records were destroyed during the civil war.
wait is’t his name pronounced like “shree-ve”
@@anabellevandenburgh1749 Yes, and is why there's a city named Shreveport.
@@lagautmd And is that city pronounced "shree-ve-port"?
Yah it sounds like removing the great raft was a much larger factor than the shortcut though. So really disappointed in this video, come on Sam, really should have brought that up.
Because yah, it doesn't make any sense for that shortcut to cause the Atchafalaya to get bigger, it already went there, if anything this should have slightly impeded it's path west...
i love when my home state of Louisiana only ever gets media coverage for how much of an ecological nightmare it is
That's only because Florida does the same things as you but bigger and drunker.
Edit: while on drugs
Hey, we also get to hear how corrupt the politicians are there!
Yeah y'all need to get your s*** together.
-this message brought to you by the Iowa department of agriculture
It all started because some people with a lot of money wanted to make a lot more money, so they decided build two massive cities on swamp lands that weren’t meant to be lived on.
Louisiana shouldn’t be habitable more than 30 minutes (by highway) south of Arkansas. I’ve been across Louisiana on I-10 - so many bridges supporting that highway across there. No wonder DOT is always pissed in that state. They taking them bridge laws serious. Because every bit of their infrastructure is a bridge.
@@MrJstorm4 does your state have any other departments?
So if you zoom out to time scales of 5,000 years or so, the Mississippi river is / always was going to find a way to move into the Atchafalaya basin anyhow. Regardless of what Shreve may have done at some point. The Old River control structure alone will not be able to keep it in channel forever. Some other leak somewhere else is going to inevitably spurt out, because the Atchafalaya basin is a shorter and steeper path to the Gulf right now. If Uncle Sam wants to keep the river in channel long term, it's gonna have to keep plugging holes.
This is also why Louisiana has a really bad "coastal erosion" problem. By keeping the river in channel, the river has built the current Mississippi delta way out into the Gulf of Mexico, and it's dumping all that sediment into deep water where it's not doing anything. Meanwhile, erosion just continues eroding the rest of the coast. If the river went into the Atchafalaya channel where it wants to go, the sediment would end up rebuilding the eroded wetlands in that area, and the current delta would retreat back to a more defensible position. Geologists have mapped out a whole series of river channel migrations over the last several thousand years, where it tends to kind of sweep back and forth across most of Louisiana, keeping the general extent of the coast line even up until when the Old River control structure was built.
I came to the comments to see if anyone pointed this out. This seems like a key fact about the Atchafalaya basin, but oddly glossed over by the video. Yes Shreve cut the channel but then the video skips ahead to the upper old river drying up and lower old river being established. Cutting the channel simply reset the clock on the process until they built the old river control structure to "stop" it...at that location...for now.
To be fair, the coastal erosion problem wouldn't even be as bad as it is if there hadn't been a bunch of mini Shreve's Cuts done by the oil and gas industry trying to find oil and gas in the wetlands.
Nevertheless, not creating that shortcut in the first place woild have saved a shit ton of money and hassle because it would have been many decades where nobody would have needed to waste money on those flood gates
It’s hardly doing “nothing”. It’s depositing sediment that will become an oil resource when the kangaroo civilization 15 million years from now rediscovers the industrial revolution. :-)
God to be as braindead as you people...
It wasn’t actually the digging of Shreve’s Cut that started the avulsion of the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya, but the clearing of the Great Raft from the Atchafalaya. This increased water flow into it, and eventually allowed it to start capturing the Mississippi, leading to the current clusterfuck.
Which was also shreve
It would have been worth mentioning that the Atchafalaya bay / delta was actually the ancient delta of the Mississippi and the Mississippi only formed its current delta around 500 years ago.
But that takes away from the clickbait title and thumbnail. You know that key details never make it into RUclips videos today, like how bayou lafourche actually used to be the river before it was on its modern course
@@TPotatoo That's the way of this guy. Spit out a few facts about an interesting topic, just as a segue into sponsorship. About 25% of this video is him promoting his sponsor.
Yeah this video seemed rushed and missing a lot of information.
I just went back to the part about cutting the channel because I was curious how that would do anything different than what would happen anyway once it met up with the red river.... makes sense now.
Interesting 🤔🧐
"...a decision that some guy made 200 years ago before they had invented the concept of consequences."
Well if that isn't just the root of all the world's problems right there 😂
Pretty much every project was done like that back then. There was very little scientific understanding in that area back then
that's called longterm job security for engineers
The River: ruclips.net/video/FSt1ptsOjL0/видео.html (:11)
God help them 200 years from now.
I have worked both sides of the business. For the Corp and as a contractor, they have done some of the most impactful things you would never know. Few people know how great of a roll the have played in infrastructure projects around the world
i can tell you were really rah rah go army as you cant spell good n stuff
@@byloyuripka9624 no he is just an engineer.
Also a large portion of the Corp is a civilian organization that has not served at all.
@@silensuna meh the interface for YT sucks and i just don’t care anymore . But thanks for the insults, im sure your wonderful people to be around
@@Noone-jn3jp who are his people?
@Rewild The World fair, What makes them good is controlling the ability to use the rivers as transportation, our river system is a huge source of US power. I’m not saying they are perfect or haven’t made the best decisions. I’m not proud of the wetland destruction, but all we can do is correct the mistakes of the past. Im currently working restoration projects and there is more healthy wildlife of all sorts regaining there natural areas. I try my best to be a good steward.
Dredging is not a science, rivers will do wild things to the bottom that is not predictable, I’m not familiar with the works on the Missouri but will check it out. I guess my point is sometimes you just have to try and failure is always an option.
"... the greatest country in the United States"... These guys not only do well on Jet Lag The Game, they also write pretty well. 😇
Hershel Walker said the same thing XD
I think this was intentional lol.
All américains think it's the greatest country in the world. Why not just say that the world = US.
If the US is the world. The US is the best country in the US lol
@@TheThomaTube As person from small nation in small country in the Europe... I think that from what I learned so far, this is common big nations mentality (people from the biggest and powerful countries), which in different form is at least also present in China or Russia. Probably it is consequence of long time official and unofficial propaganda.
Ok, so it wasn't just me LOL
I've never heard of Jet Lag the Game before this comment. But then one of the related videos is for Jet Lag The Game... Is RUclips using comments to recommend videos or is JLtG connected to this channel already?
From the makers of "How Many Japanese Words will Sam Mispronounce?", comes the long-awaited sequel "How Many Louisianian Words will Sam Mispronounce?"
As someone who's lived in Morgan City, nothing of value would be lost WHEN it's wiped off the map.
I like the wendy’s there.
I like listening to y'all talk
If a channel was dredged it would control the path and minimize the losses. Then Morgan City could join the list sea ports. And the cities on the Mississippi would still have their current water source.
Coming from a person with modest means, Hello Fresh is NOT as affordable as you and other creators say it is, with all due respect
Yes. It's an ad. They get paid to say it. Hello fresh has editorial control over the ad.
No, the cut was not the problem.
Removing the log jams in Atchafalaya river aka Great Raft was the problem.
The log jam blocked majority of Mississippi water from flowing down Atchafalaya for centuries. And in fact, if there was no Shreve's cut after removing the great raft, lower Mississippi would dry up much quicker.
Is that so? Lately I've been noticing that HAI's videos are more rushed and thus gloss over some important facts.
Today's fact: When watermelons are grilled or baked, they lose their granular texture and can even be used as meat substitute, a 'watermelon steak'.
How do they taste?
@@JovaJovenile-m4j Like a grilled or baked watermelon.
@@JovaJovenile-m4j like cooked watermelon
@@JovaJovenile-m4j like hot watermelon
What?
It's not Shreve making the cut that caused the problem, it's the Mississippi bending in the first place, because it bent into the Red, sending the Mississippi's water down the Red/Atchafalaya. That's where the problem came from. If anything, Shreve lessened the problem.
Yeah, removing the log jams in Atchafalaya river aka Great Raft was the problem.
The log jam blocked Mississipi water from flowing down Atchafalaya, if there was no Shreve's cut after removing the great raft, lower Mississippi would dry up much quicker.
@@ShibalotonSeattle Shreve removed the raft
So you basically destroyed the whole premise of this video. 😄
@@soundscape26 The premise was supposed to be about how much we engineer the Mississippi.
@@thermostance1815 But the root causes were wrong apparently.
For those that have never seen them, the levees along the lower Mississippi River are almost too large to describe. At least it amazed me, who grew up in Minneapolis, where the River is a rather modest stream flowing in an ordinary-looking channel. There are a couple floodwalls, etc., here and there, but nothing really massive like down in Louisiana.
I visited NOLA several years ago. Happened to stumble myself into the Eastern wards and a levee some 100 feet tall like a mountain of concrete while the homes sit below it
@@MarloSoBalJr your mention of the height of the levee is seriously extreme. if you're referring to the great wall across the MRGO, that was a idea after Katrina.
My parent's house is hoisted up on 12-foot stilts for flood protection and you can still only see the roof of it from the other side of the levee.
Thanks for your replies. When I visited New Orleans, I've been seeing it from the perspective of a civil engineer. I haven't been there since two years BEFORE Katrina.
@@pacificostudios To contrast I suppose, the first time I saw a picture of Montreal, Canada's waterfront I was shocked to see their levees stood only about 3 feet high, even though the city itself wasn't further elevated above the river's waterline. Large floods and large levees are just a given to me I guess since I grew up with them always being a thing
Finally had my first gripe about his pronunciation with “ATCHAFALAYA”. 😂
Same, bro.
Yep totally not Cajun or from Louisiana 😂
Yeah, that was frustrating.
Damn Yankee!!😆😆😆
Sam, great video, but I promise you if I hear the phrase "dumps it's Mississippi juice" ever again I will activate like CIA sleeper agent
This is an example of WHY regulations came into existence. People who do not know or care to know the consequences of their decisions being able to cause untold future capital expenditure OR death & destruction. The reason you need an environmental study whenever you want to build a big project? to stop stuff like this from happening again, or at least giving people a heads-up on what they'll need to fork out in the future to deal with the downstream consequences. Those regulations SEEM overhanded because for every one ecological disaster in waiting they avert, most reports just come back essentially "all good". The number of times an entity's "simple project" turned out to have huge unintended consequences that lead to excessive struggle, costs, and death would turn your stomach.
Great reminder, thanks for sharing
A lot of YT creators ask people to like & comment (as that helps the algorithm). That probably gets a few extra comments.
But the clever ones just pronounce a place name differently (from the locals) and sit back for the hundreds of comments that gets. Sam is a genius IMHO.
The t is basically silent in "Atchafalaya." Say the first syllable like "Uhh" -- "Uhh chaf a lya"
Louisiana native here. It’s pronounced “uh-chaff-uh-lie-uh”.
The sounds were almost right, but he stressed it all wrong. “uh-CHAFF-uh-LIE-uh”.
@@2012Zyle Thank you. I’ve never been good at showing the correct stress on the syllables in words.
Pretty disappointed you didn't mention the Great Raft. Which uh... Is the real reason the river started changing direction, or our removal of it.
That would invalidate the whole premise of the video. Maybe Jet Lag is making them cut on the research for the HAI videos.
What if you wanted to change your course, but humanity said:
“Old River Control Structure”
They spend millions dredging a straightaway on the Missouri River near me so a single barge can go through it yearly near harvest season
what if I am pro drinking water and anti Morgan City and would therefore have no problem if it got a little wet?
I don’t know what Morgan City did, but I’m here for this plan and also vote we let the Mississippi do what the Mississippi does and get Morgan City a “little” wet.
On 30 November 1982, PBS aired a NOVA episode, Goodbye Louisiana, about this subject, and also about loss of coastline in the state.
Most of Louisiana isn't gonna be around by the next century. Baton Rouge may be the inevitable replacement for NOLA
....and, NY.
Never thought id hear "Studies show people need water to live." as a real educational sentence.
"But hey you know what else has catastrophic consequences, not eating right"
Me: *finishing eating my smore poptart*
Mmm. Cookie pop tarts are my fav breakfast. But S'mores are amazing too.
I've been to the old river structure. It's amazing what we do to keep the river from going where it wants.
Your Louisiana pronunciations are quite shocking, but as a Cajun I appreciate you trying
I’m from NOLA so I didn’t really learn how to do it. I can pronounce Tchoupitoulas though
Sam says "but hey...." near the end & we all pause the video before the ad 👀. Love you Sam
Its a bingo!
Plus these youtubers are getting cleverer and cleverer with their tie in.. if they had this much skill when they had tv earlier imagine how much power advertisers would have
Fun fact: Tom Scott also made a video about this...not that it matters, just that I remembered the video's existance.
What I’ve been hearing is that the bayou is flooding and needs the Mississippi to flow naturally through to deposit sediments, this is to maintain the environmental balance of the delta.
Louisianian here: Atchafalaya is pronounced: uh-CHAF-fu-LY-uh, where the upper case means it's stressed. You pronounced the sounds right but your stressed it very oddly (I think you stressed the first syllable or something). It's a hard word, but I thought I'd let you know.
Is it a other French name?
@@TheAmericanCatholic French adaptation of Native American name.
He also mangled 'Shreve'/Shreveport'
@@Phordless_Cone Yep LOL
Would love for him to say Bossier or Natchitoches. Those are always fun too.
He came hot out the gates with "Mississippi Juice" and I immediately lost it 😂😂
TLDR: They made 3 floodgates
Someone please reply to this
@@talkalexis i refuse
Are the other two Morganza and Bonne Carre?
@@jbrou123 No, I think Felicia Alexiz is summarizing the video's reference to 3 different gates up around the control structure near Turnbull's Bend. The ones you mentioned are much further south, but they're all part of the same overall project -- i.e., trying to maintain some kind of control over a s#it-ton of water rolling downhill toward south Louisiana from a third of the North American continent... all day long, every day, forever and ever.
Rivers naturally move their courses. The atchafalaya River is 150 miles or so shorter than the Mississippi's course to the gulf, making it faster. Keeping the current river course has devastating effects on the Louisiana coastline.
0:08 The first time an HAI video includes stock footage of someone shaking their head or wagging their finger or something it always cracks me up
I always love it when people cover this topic as everyone mispronounces Atchafalaya in various interesting ways. The pronunciation I've heard being a Baton Rouge native is Uh-chaff-uh-lye-uh.
You also have the dredging of the Mississippi to allow easier navigation that ends up meaning sediment doesn't reach the delta. If you don't replenish the sediment in the delta, the ocean's going to eventually erode it. N'Orleans is kind of doomed no matter what.
Isn't the delta currently still growing? that implies a sufficient sediment transport rate to make up for losses. In fact, a deeper channel has a higher sediment capacity assuming that the flow rate remains high enough to maintain suspension of the sediment load, or at least movement of bedload.
@@xiphosura413 The sediment is being pushed further and further into the Gulf. NO used to be near the mouth of the Mississippi River. Now the mouth of the river is 110 miles from NO.
All that fast-moving water going down the Mississippi River has also created the Mississippi River Canyon where the Gulf can be 7,000 ft deep less than 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Deep Water Horizon was 41 miles offshore, but in 5,000 feet of water.
504 ya heard me! during the last few major hurricanes they seemed pretty worried around here about the river control structure getting washed away. and I think it was last year or the year before during the high river season it was getting almost too high around that area and they were worried about it then too. theres a youtube channel by a local teacher named loren klien and he made some cool videos about it back then.
I hate to be "that guy" but his name is pronounced "shrEEv." Shreveport is named after him. Love your videos, keep up the great work.
glad to know I'm not the only one to mistakenly cause an ecological catastrophe
We're no strangers to ecological devastation
@@imveryangryitsnotbutter You know the rules, mass habitat loss
"Dumps it's Mississippi juice" right off the bat. Go on...😉
Imagine thinking the water in the mississippi is safe for human consumption
Once it's filtered, as every waterworks in the nation has to do, it is very good. New Orleans and surrounding suburbs have the best water in the state. Since I'm from the suburbs and have lived in various cities and towns all over Louisiana, I can tell you that from personal experience.
New Orleans doesn’t get its drinking water from the river. It gets it from an aquifer below the river. If the river changes course, scientists believe there will be saltwater intrusion into the aquifer which makes that water unfit to drink.
@@tcrebelguy Wow, that's a fun fact I never knew! I just knew that the water pipes ran into the river. Do you work for the waterworks or know someone who does?
can you give the studies cited at 3:05 please?
The Mississippi has changed course in its delta about every 1000-1500 years which has essentially created most of southeast Louisiana .The delta switch is overdue and this course change likely would still have happened but Shreve cut and the clearing of the great raft log jam simply sped up this process.
Nice vid, but you forgot to mention another unintended consequence from the new dam complex: the last stretch of the Mississippi now loses almost its entire sediment load, so now the Louisiana coastline is rapidly eroding away
Tbh at 1:23, pre Shreve cut, it already looks like it flows into the Atchafalaya
1:31 pretty sure it's Shreve pronounced with a long e, y'know, like Shreveport?
The way he says Atchafalaya is just adorable. Bless it.
2 seconds in and we're already talking about Mississippi juice. Brilliant.
Another video suggestion: why building a space station in backyard is not a good idea
grew up in louisiana, and i've been to the old river control structure. it's pretty cool
as someone who spent 3 years living in morgan city, i am actually pro-morgan city being destroyed in a gigantic flood
Hey! From Shreveport. You said Shive as in chive but it is shreve as in Steve
All river deltas are flood zones where sediment slowly builds new land and the river changes course over hundreds of years. However, it is very annoying for people to live on land that is constantly flooding, so people build levees to prevent flooding. The levees also prevent river sediment from spreading out over the delta, so the river silts up as the soil in the surrounding land naturally sinks as it becomes compressed. Eventually we get to what we have now, which is cities built on land now below sea level surrounded by levees that need constant maintenance and a silted river so much higher than surrounding land that any break in the levees will cause massive flooding.
Yknow, I think it's high time we get another brick video. Just because the other one is titled "The Brick Video" doesn't mean it's the *only* one.
America: we are a free country
also america: noooo you can't change course, thats illegal!
i hate living in a fascist state
Another video suggestion: the insane logistics of hiding from Sam's bad jokes
*Mississippi juice* caught me offguard at the start of the video... 🤣🤣🤣
Laughed my ass off when you opened with “The Mississippi River dumps it’s Mississippi juice”. 😂
living in south louisiana i know way too much about this. The controlling of the mississippi is causing massive coastal erosion and is one of the reasons hurricanes hit us so bad.
Bro literally created sarcasm
I love it when we get more information about the Mississippi River and New Orleans in general.
"...in and out of the greatest country in the United States."
Love the subtle humor on this channel 😊
doesnt removing such a bend also speed up the river downstream, which over time would alter its entire path (i.e bends on a faster river would get washed out until they are straighter)?
All that fast-moving water going down the Mississippi River has also created the Mississippi River Canyon where the Gulf can be 7,000 ft deep less than 100 miles off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Deep Water Horizon was 41 miles offshore, but in 5,000 feet of water.
Hey! I am the person who suggested this video about the Old River Control Structure.
I am overjoyed y'all chose to cover this very interesting topic. I am personally from Lafayette, and the Mississippi River is a core staple of our state's cultural and economic heritage. I was doing a research project for an Research writing course at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette just on the history of the River, how the Native Americans interacted with the River, and how we have shackled the Old Man River. I was especially focused on the effects caused by the Mississippi completing an avulsion to the Atchafalaya.
Again, thank you so much for covering this topic.
Can I ask you to provide some context? I feel like they never explained how the cut was the source of the problem? If they hadn't changed the direction of the river wouldn't it have been the same problem? I don't know anything about hydrodynamics so I have more questions than answers
@@VitaeLibra The cut was part of the problem. See, Shreve was doing a lot along the Mississippi River distributaries and tributaries. Back before the 1830s there was this natural blockage along the Atchafalaya that massively restricted the flow of the River, called the Great Raft. It was sort of like a cork for the Atchafalaya. Shreve was hired in the 1830s to remove this Great Raft. The removal of the Great Raft had the effect of allowing more and more water to go down the Atchafalaya. A big reason why the cut is important is that it marked the start of massive geoengineering along the Mississippi River. The USACE still cuts meanders. Cutting meanders causes the river to flow faster, since its straighter. Now that the Great Raft is removed, that increased flow rate has been naturally dredging the Atchafalaya, increasing the capacity of the River to take more and more of the Mississippi.
Baton Rouge does not get it's drinking water from the Mississippi River. Our drinking water comes from deep aquafers.
Great video as always, one note though, I think atchafalaya is pronounced with an silent t, that's how my family from Louisiana says it anyway.
My brain ignored everything else after I heard him pronounce Atchafalaya like that.
Just FYI, Shreve in Cpt. Henry Miller Shreve is pronounce Shr-ee-vee, like Sleeve
This video made 0 sense so I had to research it - and yea, *the video is wrong* . The channel did not divert the flow of the Mississippi to the side river, that doesn’t make sense, in fact a more direct channel through the bend should lead to less water flowing westward. Apparently, the river flowed fine until a log jam was removed which then caused more water to flow westward. Ironically, Shreve did actually lead this project, so he did cause the damage, but not fully because of the channel.
Why can't the America gov build a port a bit further up the river? Somewhere a bit upstream of the river control structure?
Too expensive, historic, and strategic
Br and Nola are the best deep water ports
Because it's a long way to the Gulf from there. NO used to be near the mouth of the river, but due to sentiment, it's now 110 miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. Ports north of the structure would be more than 250 from the mouth of the river in the Gulf.
There are lots of tributaries also.
This video ends when it feels like it is just starting. I was waiting for something like: "but here's the problem with that solution". But no. It just ended. I'm unsatisfied.
You didn’t even mention the Great Raft. That’s the genesis of the whole problem!
Mississippi river water is a vital part of many traditional chinese recipes
What?
@@nolesy34 go down the rabbit hole, just make sure you can turn back
@@Grove332 i will
In a college geology course the professor described how "straightening" the river dramatically increases the amount of top soil washed into the Gulf of Mexico. The delta where the Mississippi flows into the gulf continues to increase in size. In the original "oxbow" river rich soil was desposited on the riverbanks, not ending up as part of the delta at the mouth of the river. Want to be surprised ? Do a little research and see how much soil is deposited on the delta.
I feel like this one stops after the intro and then never talks about what happens next. We have a big weird river control structure, please continue...
Your pronunciation of Atchafalaya is super close! Not bad.
never did i ever think i would be introduced to the term "mississippi juice"
Thats not the ocean!!! Thats the Gulf!!! Sincerely, a Floridian who hates when people call it the ocean lol
I learned this from a Clive Cussler book! Blew my mind.
They shortcutted an oxbow lake and regretted it
Destruction of New Orleans and Baton Rouge would make Shreveport the largest city in Louisana.
Maybe it was an intended consequence after all.
better representation of how awful the rest of the state is
You can read more about this in John McPhee's amazing book, Control of Nature! 300 riveting pages of action packed stories!
It’s going to be dumping toxic Ohio River juice into the Gulf pretty soon.
New Orleans already has issues with it’s draining system and regularly has water boil advisories
With all the Petro-Chemical refineries doing their thing all along the river, that spill won't be noticed by the time it reaches NO.
But how many bears are in the Mississippi River right now? (On average)
Many of you are getting up on your high horses because you live in some uppity high-altitude gated community, this is a repost from and i see they still have the same flaw at the start saying the river dumps into the ocean instead of the Gulf
I'm going to start a petition to change the USA's national motto to "Saxum magnum multum ursi"; "A large rock with a lot of bears on it".
the stock footage is so silly, it's golden
50 years ago my geography prof said that if the Corps stopped dredging that the delta would reestablish itself and the Mississippi Sound would clear up.
I've never met anyone who can pronounce Atchafalaya, but not Shreve. 🤦🏼♂️
There is a movie/documentary I watched about this that was made by a man that had spent his entire life living in the Atchafalaya Basin Louisiana coast. He had photos that were made when he was a kid that showed 20 years or so previously where there were trees and marsh and now it was nothing but water for 20 miles from the current Louisiana coast. Why is this happening? Very simple. The Mississippi levee system on this current channel is not allowing the silt that would normally travel to the Louisiana coast to get there to maintain the marsh. He told how much coast they were loosing every year and it was a pretty substantial amount; a few miles a year the best I can remember. The decline started as soon as the levee system was built in the early 1900’s. I believe he even brought up the fact that the Mississippi would naturally move its route to the Atchafalaya basin if it were left alone and this would stop. He also talked about how this effects the New Orleans metro area; for every mile of marsh they loose; they loose a certain amount of protection from the gulf over taking the town. The next Katrina level hurricane that hits New Orleans will wipe it out permanently according to what he was saying.
He didn't mention the fact that this hasn't fully reversed the change in waterflow, just that it's helped the large cities grow bigger. The water use in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, & those in-between are still weakening the river's output to the Gulf of Mexico. Communities like Pilottown & La Balize on the very mouth of the delta died due to the lack of water & erosion in those channels, so that now Venice is the closest permanently populated place to the mouth. Alternatively, the Acthafalaya River being strengthened has allowed for deposits to develop at it's mouth, adding more land to the Louisiana coast as the other part shrinks.
"Henry Shrev"
As a Shreveport resident, I am simply dumbfounded.
Another video suggestion: the insane logistics of clicking a subscribe button
Huh an HAI video topic that I already knew about... Weird day
Highway maps still had the Red River entering the Mississippi north of Fort Adams, Miss . in the 1960s
So Mississippi use to be longest river but now Missouri River??