Showing posts with label levees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label levees. Show all posts

Sunday, December 30, 2018

Wandering around Eagle Lake, Mississippi

Background

Eagle Lake is an oxbow lake northwest of Vicksburg. A short geology explanation: When a river flows through a wide alluvial valley (a geologic depression filled with riverine-deposited sediment), the river usually meanders, meaning it develops into tightly curved S-shaped channels. Often the channel almost curves back on itself. Over time, some of the curves are breached and the river rushes through the new opening to flow through the lower part of the S. The former bend of the river is abandoned, forming an oxbow lake. Eagle Lake, Lake Chicot, and Lake Washington are examples of oxbow lakes. These lakes become valuable habitat for fish and numerous bird species. Gradually (over hundreds of years) the lakes fill with organic debris and silt. The Mississippi valley between Cape Girardeau and the delta in the Gulf of Mexico shows evidence of hundreds of changes in these meanders as well as buried former channels throughout the alluvial valley (Fisk, 1944).
Eagle Lake, Mississippi. Map from ESRI ArcGIS online based on US Geological Survey topographic maps.
The town of Eagle Lake lies along the eastern shore and consists of mostly vacation and retirement homes, although some residents commute daily to Vicksburg for their jobs. I have not photographed in the town itself, but MS 465 has some interesting sights. (Warning, "pretty" pictures below.)

Some Sights near Town

Mt. Zion Church, near Laney Camp Road, Mississippi. Hasselblad, 50mm Distagon lens.
Lightning-struck tree at Mt. Zion Church, near Laney Camp Road, Mississippi.
North of Eagle Lake, MS 465 runs along the top of the levee. This is an unusual opportunity to drive along the levee top on a public road and watch wildlife in the ponds and hardwood bottomlands below. In many areas, levees are not open to the general public (they are restricted to hunters with permits, employees of levee boards, or the US Army Corps of Engineers). The Mount Zion Church is on a dirt road south of the levee, adjacent to where the Laney Camp Road joins 465.
This little church is east of 465 south of where the highway joins the levee. I do not know the name, but the modest little church had been deteriorating for at least 4 or 5 years. A few graves are located on the grounds south of the building.
In late December of 2017, I helped with the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count. The early morning light was misty and soft, perfect for tree pictures. These are on Kodak Panatomic-X film from a Hasselblad 501CM camera (tripod-mounted).
This is a store I photographed in 1997. It faced 465 but I cannot recall the exact location. This was a frame from Agfa Scala 200 black and white positive film (meaning black and white slides), taken with a Leica M3. The Scala scans really well. Of course, now I wish I had used more of it in the past.

Beaches and forest

Beach near Tara Wildlife Center with non-native rock in the foreground.
This is an example of a beach near Eagle Lake with access via a dirt path only during low water. The sand is carried naturally down the river from the central North American continent, but the rocks in the foreground were artificially placed. No rock of this size is carried by the Mississippi’s flow in this region.

Access like this to the river is relatively rare. Many visitors to the region are surprised that normally they can only see the river from high towns, like Vicksburg or Natchez, or from an occasional commercial loading facility. The reason is the placement of the flood-control levees. The main stem levees of the Mississippi River extend from Cape Girardeau in Missouri to the mouth of the river at the Gulf of Mexico. The levees are usually built some distance from the low water river channel, sometimes as much as one or two miles away (see Figure 1). The low terrain between the main channel and the levees is usually forested and subject to inundation whenever there is a high water event. The purpose of the forest is to provide friction to reduce the velocity of the water during high water. In effect, the forest helps protect the levees by preventing high currents from washing directly against the flanks of the earthen structures.
Example of pond and vegetation found in hardwood bottomland.
This is a pond in the hardwood bottomland that naturally forms on the river side of the levees. Note that up through the 1800s, much of the delta was hardwood bottomland, but the land was laboriously cleared and drained in the late 1800s and early 1900s to form the farmland that we see now. These bottomlands are characterized by being periodically inundated or saturated by surface or groundwater during the growing season. Common tree species in the area are adapted to survive, reach maturity, and reproduce in an environment where the soils within the root zone may be saturated or anaerobic (lacking oxygen) during part of the growing season (Clark and Benforado, 1980).

References

Clark, J.R., and Benforado, J. (Eds.), 1980. Wetlands of Bottomland Hardwood Forests: Proceedings of a Workshop on Bottomland Hardwood Forest Wetlands of the Southeastern United States. Developments in Agricultural and Managed-Forest Ecology, 11, Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, 401p.

Fisk, H.N., 1944. Geological investigation of the alluvial valley of the lower Mississippi River. U.S. Department of the Army, Mississippi River Commission, 78p. Online:  http://lmvmapping.erdc.usace.army.mil/index.htm  Accessed Sep. 13, 2018.

Camera notes

The square photographs were taken with a Hasselblad 501CM camera on Kodak Panatomic-X film. I used Zeiss 80mm CB and 50mm Distagon lenses. Praus Productions in Rochester, NY, developed the film in Xtol. The two rectangle frames are from a Fujifilm X-E1 digital camera.

End-of-year salutation

Dear Readers, this is the last article of 2018. Thank you for reading and occasionally commenting. If you have ideas on places to photograph or comments of any type, please feel free to forward them to kodachromeguy - at - gmail - dot - com. A prosperous 2019 to you all. Stay well and explore your world.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Hurricane Katrina 10-Year Anniversary - the Lower Ninth Ward

(Note: click any image to enlarge it.)
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Mississippi Gulf coast on August 29, 2005. It proved to be the costliest natural disaster in United States history as well as one of the 5 most deadly hurricanes in our history. People around the world were transfixed by dramatic television pictures of flooded residents on rooftops and the refugees in the Superdome. They were also amazed at the stupid and inept mayor, who bungled everything. My daughter and I were out of the country when the storm struck and watched the unfolding events on Greek television. As I recall, Greek TV crews were filming and interviewing in New Orleans even before FEMA representatives arrived. Many Greeks have a personal connection with and interest in New Orleans because Greek merchant marine sailors have visited or been stationed there.

I did not have a chance to see New Orleans immediately after the storm but spent some time exploring in 2006, when initial cleanup had begun but little restoration was underway. These photographs will show some of the destruction. We will start with a visit to the Lower Ninth Ward, but first let's discuss the geography of New Orleans and the Mississippi delta.

Many people are still confused about what part of the city flooded and why this happened. Possibly a short explanation will help. Nouvelle-Orléans was founded by the French in 1718. They founded it at a bend of the Mississippi River on natural high ground. I assume they must have learned from experience or from the native Americans which areas were high and, therefore, relatively safe from flooding.
This is a 1720 map from the British Admiralty (click to enlarge). It shows the core of the city with cypress forest and marsh surrounding it.
The figure above shows how the city in 1862 had grown but was still concentrated along the bend in the Mississippi River. The view looking north shows Lake Pontchartrain in the distance (from  Illustration from Campfires and Battlefields by Rossiter, Johnson, et al. (New York, 1894), from Wikipedia commons). New Orleans prospered and early in the 20th century, businessmen wondered how they could provide more living space near the downtown. Idea: build levees along Lake Pontchartrain, cut drainage canals, install pumps, and pump out the water. Once the land was drained, the developers cleared out trees and debris, platted the land, and instant suburbia was formed (Gentilly, New Orleans East, and other neighborhoods). The pumps had to be used whenever there was rainfall, and even during non-hurricane storms, they ran continuously to clear out the runoff.

Decades later, scientists learned that land subsidence had been grossly underestimated. Much of the former swamp terrain has continued to slowly sink as the soil dewaters. This is a natural process in all river deltas. As a result, many of the neighborhoods developed after 1900 have settled below sea level. A coworker told me that a common practice every spring was for homeowners to have sand spread over the their house lots to try to combat the settlement. I will leave it to you readers to decide if building suburbia below sea level in an area that needs pumps and depends on the integrity of the levees and on the electric supply is a wise idea.
In the colonial area, the area now occupied by the Lower Ninth Ward consisted of sugarcane plantations. In the late-1800s, house lots were developed along the Mississippi River waterfront (the higher ground). The interior then was cypress swamp, later to be drained and converted to residential. The Lower Ninth Ward has suffered from devastating flooding several times in the 20th century. When Hurricane Betsy roared through New Orleans on  September 9, 1965, with 110 mph winds, a levee breached and the Ward flooded. Recovery was slow, and many of the homes that flooded during Katrina in 2005 were post-Betsy vintage. The photograph above shows the flooded Ward on September 1965, (from a brochure prepared by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).
Forty years later, it happened again. Look at the figure above. The red "+" marks show where the levees or walls breached in various parts of town. Four of the breaks were in the canals that carry pumped-out rain runoff to Lake Pontchartrain. The blue areas show the extent of flooding on September 15, 2005 (map from Dartmouth Flood Observatory, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH). The French Quarter and the historic Garden District did not flood because they were on natural high ground.
As of late-2006, very little recovery was underway, utilities were still not available, and the area looked like a ghost town. The streets had been cleared, and you could drive around. Grass was growing in the lots. Houses were unoccupied. Some had been cleared out, while others had their furniture and junk strewn about untouched since the water receded.
I did not record the exact location of the photographs. The group of three above are near the industrial Canal. The bridge in the distance spans the canal.
Some houses were untouched in over a year, with rotted furniture and abandoned possessions left unvandalized. Most of these mid-century houses were on ground-level slab foundations, utterly unsuitable for a wet area prone to flooding.
The former resident of this house had a sizable collection of LPs. They were probably playable if removed from their moldering jackets and cleaned. Hmmm, will the data on flooded hard drives be retrievable in the future?
There was a lot of graffiti expressing anger towards various agencies or cities. The reference towards Houston may refer to the fact that the Houston police cracked down hard on criminals who had fled New Orleans. They tried to set up practice in Houston and discovered that the Texas public prosecutors and police were much more strict than they had experienced in New Orleans. Don't mess with Texas was true; they really couldn't get away with murder. It underscores how dysfunctional the criminal justice system was in New Orleans in the years before Katrina.
I was surprised how many crushed cars were left abandoned.

This is just a sampling of the destruction wrought by Katrina. We will explore more parts of the city in later articles.

Much has been written about Katrina and its consequences. The article in Wikipedia provides a good summary. Another Wikipedia article describes the Lower Ninth Ward. The article on Hurricane Betsy is interesting reading. A summary on restoration efforts in the Mississippi River Delta is in this New York Times article. John McPhee's classic article "Atchafalaya" in The New Yorker is an excellent and readable introduction to why we control the flow of water and sediment down the Mississippi and the interplay with the Atchafalaya waterway.

Photographs were taken with a Sony DSC-R1 digital camera. This was a 10 mpixel camera with a superb lens.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Eagle Lake and Chotard Landing, Mississippi: Quiet Living

Eagle Lake is an oxbow lake in northwest Warren County, Mississippi, about 40 minutes drive northwest of Vicksburg. The lake is popular with boaters and fishermen, but also has a year-round population. Some are retirees and some commute to Vicksburg. My friends and I visit annually in late December for the Audubon Christmas bird count.
On a cold gloomy morning, there are some nice landscape photography opportunities.
There are some urban decay subjects, like this shed in the woods off Hwy 465.
This little church stands abandoned off Hwy 465. I do not know the denomination and the signs were gone.
Some folks are really into hunting here.
Eagle Lake Shore Road parallels the south side of the lake, with some mobile homes and landings.
If the level of the Mississippi River is low, you can proceed west into Tara Wildlife (ask for permission) and follow some dirt roads to one of the rare river overlooks. People who do not live here in the South are often surprised that the Mississippi is often inaccessible from land. Road or bridge access may be tens of miles apart. These sand bars are on the river side of the mainline levee, so if the water is high, this beach and the adjacent woods are flooded.

Chotard, or Chotard Landing, is a community of elevated trailers and cabins on the water side of the mainline levee, facing Lake Chotard. It is popular with fishermen, but because it floods whenever the Mississippi River is high, all the properties must replaced way up on piles.
It is impressive to see some of these places - they are way up. Chotard was part of the Mississippi River until 1934, when the Corps of Engineers removed one of the cutoffs, leaving Chotard Lake as a detached oxbow.
If you need a restroom, the community graciously provides one. What happens in spring when the place floods?

Eagle Lake and Chotard Landing are worth a visit on a nice weekend. Take your binoculars for some good birding. The mature hardwoods are excellent habitat for woodpeckers.