Flooding Louisiana and Mississippi

Western States Have Fill Dirt

Many cities in the region are near or below sea level. They are easily flooded every season of slightly more than normal rainfall and runoff.

This problem can be easily solved with fill dirt. In the West we have hundreds of billions of cubic acres of surplus earth. We could build up the entire states of Louisiana and Mississippi to unimagined heights. We could supply rock for barricades that could never ever be breached by hurricane or flood that would make the Great Wall of China look like a weekend backyard project.

The west needs water; they need dirt. It could be the basis for a good trade.

Levees and seawalls 200 feet tall and 5,000 feet wide can easily be constructed.

A square acre is 208.7103 feet on each side, area of 43,560 square feet. A cubic acre is 208.71 feet on all sides equaling 9,091,418.44 cubic feet. A cubic foot is about the size of a basketball in a square box.

Earthworks are usually measured in Cubic Yards, (27 cubic feet); about the size of half of an American refrigerator. So a cubic acre (9.1 million cubic feet) divided by 27 cubic feet (a cubic yard) is 336,719.20 cubic yards, let’s just say 336,720 cubic yards per cubic acre. I don’t know how earthwork is measured in the metric world, probably cubic meters; slightly bigger than a cubic yard, about 3.37 inches bigger in each direction.

Louisiana is about 44,066 square miles (28,202,240 acres). Mississippi is about 47,689 square miles (30,520,960 acres). A square mile is 640 acres.

So how many low lying acres in these two states are vulnerable to river or seawater flooding? Let’s say 7 million acres for Louisiana and 4 million acres for Mississippi, so 11 million acres would need to be raised considerably above sea and river levels; let's also say we would try to raise the land 208.71 feet.  I know it's conveniently just one cubic acre high.

So, we would need 11 million cubic acres of good fill material to raise substantial portions of the easily flooded land in those two states so that it would never flood again. 336,719.2 CY times 11 million acres equals 3,703,911,200,000 cubic yards, (that’s about 3.7 trillion cubic yards). It would raise about 25 % of Louisiana and about 13 % Mississippi a couple hundred feet above sea level.

We have mining and earth moving equipment sitting unused because of the government caused recession. We have idle hauling and trucking assets sitting unused because of union contracts. We have an elaborate railway system with tens of thousands of freight, rock, and ore cars side-tracked to avoid rolling stock taxes, all around the rural west. Open pit mining in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and closer states produce huge volumes of waste rock. Much of it overburden removed to get to the valuable ore. It’s not economic for mining companies to haul it any farther than they must, but it could easily be trucked to the nearest rail-head. From there sent by freight trains to the vicinity where massive fill dirt is badly needed.

The saddest thing is we've had the technology and knowledge to prevent coastal and river flooding for more than 100 years. Not the history of incomplete solutions, ineffective projects, and storm-water mismanagement we have and are seeing.

Massive relocation of businesses, residents, and public infrastructure will be needed; and new storage, handling and shipping methods will be needed. Highways, railways, and port facilities will all need reconstruction; putting millions of people to work for a long period of progress for a very noble goal, unlike what we have had to endure since the 1970’s.

Sadly, no one with the will and imagination to undertake giant scale projects has stepped forward to eliminate the misery, opportunities for corruption, excessive public employment, and government entitlements that have grown up around frequent disaster and damage from flooding events.

No one with reputation and vision has ever proposed projects of this magnitude.

We need to find someone who actually wants to fix this.

Except those who truly suffer, nearly everyone will oppose solving this problem; environmentalists, politicians and political parties, the Corps of Engineers, Insurance companies, many government organizations and bureaucrats, Native Americans, several religious groups, recovery businesses and suppliers, media and philanthropy organizations will all strenuously rail against, misdirect, sabotage and roadblock any massive, permanent, long term solution.

We have the technology, knowledge, and resources to solve this problem forever. We certainly have idle people and equipment.  We have mountain ranges of fill material.

We can move mountains.  Let’s get started filling them in, they have suffered too much and too long unnecessarily.

The question is; do we have the will to solve this problem and actually help people.