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Posted on 05/03/2011 9:34:24 AM PDT by Western Phil
Corps of Engineers officials have just announced that they have blown the first levee in Birds Point Missouri along the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Reports are coming in from residents in the area who felt the blast. Let's hope this wasn't a horrible idea.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
This land now will be declared wetlands and no building or farming will be allowed!
And here we have Obama --
blowing up levees --
At night --
devastating vast areas of food production --
To save a dying city filled with black Democrats.
Nothing to see here. Move along citizen.
Really and truly trying to NOT put on my tinfoil...but why did they do this at night? Undercover of darkness? Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until daylight to video from helicopters above? Or...were house truly swept away...and having no pictures...well...
As an architect, I always advise, do not build in a flood plain!
I would suspect that the film from Japan had an impact on the decision. We all saw the tsunami race over the land and the destruction that it caused. To see our own government intentionally inflict that kind of flooding on prosperous US farmland would be very bad PR. Doing the deed under cover of darkness makes it much more palatable.
...and if you made a mistake and built in a flood plain, and are flooded out, don’t rebuild THERE.
Some say weight of the water could cause undue pressure on New Madrid Fault. No idea. Time will tell, I suppose...
I have been reading alot about that. The ground is so super saturated...does that absolute weight affect fault lines? I have no clue...just wondering out loud.
PS...like your FR handle, Fallingwater is one my favorite places to take visitors to my little corner of the world :)
As such you should be aware that those farms have been farmed for about 150 to 200 years. Since bottom land is the richest ground anywhere, it makes sense to farm it. The problem is that those levees should have never been built up that high. When that river used to run over its banks it naturally flooded and the flood lasted just a short while. Now, with the Mississippi contained and actually much higher normally than the ground around it, it has brought more problems than actually worth containing it. Now, with all that foreign soil and sand running into that farmland, that land will become unproductive for years to come. So the result is, we have about 15 million bushels of grain taken off the market.
All to try and save a bunch of welfare cases in a ghetto of a little town up the river.
Of course the farmers up the way In IA and NEB are happy, it’ll push the grain prices up. So, what we have, is the old dust bowl is in a drought not unlike the dust bowl days, CA farmers cant get water to irrigate, and they flooded some of the most productive land in the USA. What the HELL do you or anyone with any common sense, think is going to happen? They already know that corn supplies are at an all time low and they DO THIS?! Talk about a bunch of GD DUMB MOTHEREFFERS!
I have wondered the same (see post below) about the weight and the stress that could put on the fault. I even read, on another site last night, that the super saturation of the ground they felt made the ‘blast’ affect be felt further away (that the wet ground conducted the sound/vibrations more). Again...I don’t know...but it makes sense to me (and I am admittedly, untrained in engineering/seismology).
I think (from the ‘looking bad’ and distrusting the gov’t point of view) it just adds to the problem. If they had come out and said (and maybe it was...there has not been alot of media coverage...you have to look and seek to find out what is happening) ‘look, time is of the essence, we have to act NOW’ that would be understandable. But instead...they did the first blast after 10 p.m., right? So eight hours (6 a.m) make that huge a difference?
Again, I don’t know...just asking to be informed.
2000 democrat votes in Cairo have been saved!
I sure hope it stays this way...
I was thinking the same thing. I can’t believe they did this to save the run down half empty town.
Typical government destroy something instead of fixing the problem.
Oh now that's just silly.
There's only like, 2600 people in the whole town!
You know darn well that works out to 3000 Democrat votes
A good part of the delay in implementing the levee destruction was due to the fact that Missouri unsuccessfully took the Corps to the Supreme Court to stop it.
The Corps documentation on this http://www.mvm.usace.army.mil/Readiness/bpnm/bpnminfo.asp is not real clear to me, but my interpretation is that this levee is near the river and a second levee is further back. If that is the case, the flooded farm land may be between two levees. 25 affected farmers are trying to start a class action suit to try to retrieve some of their losses due to this action. http://www.semissourian.com/story/1723877.html Apparently the government does not have a good reputation for settlements with damages to individuals.
I don’t know if the land behind the Bird’s Point levee has been flooded since its construction, but the Mississippi Bottom around Kinderhook, Illinois (east of Hannibal, Missouri) has only been flooded once (1993) since we have lived in Illinois (1969). Before 1993 there were many farm houses on the land. Now there are few.
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