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Old 05-05-2017, 08:30 AM
mmartin798 mmartin798 is offline
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Location: Michigan
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The problem with New Orleans is that the Mississippi River likely would have changed course and no longer empties near it. The Army Corp of Engineers fights a continuous battle to maintain the course of the Mississippi at no small cost. It would not take long for the Old River Control Structure (ORCS) to fail.

This was a major concern in the late 70's, since the flood of 1973 almost did undermine the ORCS. There was a paper written about the physical and economic consequences of such a failure in 1980 by two professors at Louisiana State University. An excerpt from the abstract reads:

"Were a major flood to destroy the ability of the ORCS to control the distribuion of flow between the Lower Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya River, then major flooding would occur in the Atchafalaya Basin, highway and railroad bridges would be destroyed, gas pipelines severed, and industrial production along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge (BR) and New Orleans (NO) would be reduced. The dry weather period following the flood would result in reduced discharges in the river between BR and NO. This would permit salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to fill what is now the main stem of the river. The present channel would become a salt water estuary of the Gulf of Mexico."

It goes on to discuss the saltwater making existing potable water supplies unusable requiring a plan to replace them. It is a good read if you want a realistic idea of what likely happens in the lower Mississippi River after the war. The paper is the "Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute, Bulletin 12, September 1980". Using that as a search term in Google will take you to a PDF of the entire paper.
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