PROGRESS AND PRESENT STATUS OF FLOOD CONTROL ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER AND ITS TRIBUTARIES THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 1933 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, Washington, D.C. The committee met at 10 a.m., Hon. Riley J. Wilson (chairman) presiding. The CHAIRMAN. The Clerk will call the roll of the committee, and at the conclusion of the roll call I will ask the new Members to stand. (The clerk called the roll, disclosing the presence of a quorum.) The CHAIRMAN. I will say to the new members of the committee that we are glad to welcome you. I think we will be able to do some very valuable work in the future in which we shall be glad to have you cooperate. I will now ask the Clerk to read the committee call. (The Clerk read the committee call, as follows:) A meeting of the Committee on Flood Control is called for Thursday, March 30, at 10 a.m. The subjects to be considered are: 1. Progress made and present status of work in the execution of the project "For the control of floods on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, adopted by the act approved on May 15, 1928." 2. Progress made and present status of the reexamination and review of the engineering features of said project authorized by resolution adopted by this committee on January 28, 1932. Those appearing before the committee will be: Gen. Lytle Brown, Chief of Army Engineers; Brig. Gen. Harley B. Ferguson, president of the Mississippi River Commission; and the district engineers from the affected areas. You are hereby requested to be present at this meeting. The CHAIRMAN. Gentlemen of the committee, for the benefit of the new members and for the committee as a whole, I will say that this meeting was called to learn the present progress made and the present status of the flood-control work under the project adopted May 15, 1928, to control the flood waters of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. This is an alluvial valley. It is the greatest engineering project the Government has ever undertaken, and that work is being prosecuted under the supervision of the Chief of Engineers. Gen. Lytle Brown, the Chief of Army Engineers, is present, and we will be glad to hear from him at this time. 1 STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. LYTLE BROWN, CHIEF OF ENGINEERS, UNITED STATES ARMY General BROWN. Mr. Chairman and members of the Flood Control Committee, I will give you a very sketchy outline of the project, showing what has been done, what is being done at the present time, and what is contemplated. There are present here engineers from down on the river who have been working under command of General Ferguson, who is the division engineer and president of the Mississippi River Commission, in charge of the work there. He has three district engineers, one at Memphis, Major Somervell; one at Vicksburg, Major Larkin; and one at New Orleans, Colonel Hodges. There is also present an officer from my office, Colonel Graves, who has been connected with this work ever since the beginning, and who had a very large hand in planning it. Major McCoach, the secretary of the Mississippi River Commission, is also present. These officers are here to give you any facts you desire, and if you want any of their opinions, they will be glad to give them. They are absolutely unhampered, and they can give you any of their personal opinions without fear of any consequences to themselves. This piece of work began with a study on the part of the Federal Government of the Mississippi River. In 1850, an engineer of the War Department, Charles Elliott, went down and studied the matter for a while. He was not able to go into it thoroughly, and following him, were sent two officers of the Corps of Engineers to continue the work. They were two of the best officers that have ever been in the corps. They remained down there from 1850 to 1860, making a thorough study of the flood control possibilities on the Mississippi River. The Civil War came on, and not much was done for a good while as the result of their studies. A large part of the knowledge that we have at present of the Mississippi River is due to Humphreys and Abbott, the two officers who made that study, and the knowledge that they had of river hydraulics is known all over the world. It is in practically every textbook on hydraulics that you find. They arrived at a plan, as the result of those studies, which was the construction of levees along the banks of the river to contain the floods all the way down except for provision for some escape of water near Lake Providence. In making those studies, they had one great flood, in 1858, during the time that they were there, and they estimated the amount of water that was to be taken care of in flood times as about 1,500,000 cubic feet per second at about the latitude of Red River Landing. They did not have the data that we have now. nor anything like the means of getting at the truth as to the size of the floods that come down the Mississippi. The levees were not continuous on the river at that time, and a great deal of water escaped in floods and backed into the lowlands. It was an extremely difficult matter for them to estimate the amount of water that came down the river in flood time. They estimated it at about 1,500,000 cubic feet per second, and they missed it by about 100 percent. In the 1927 flood, with all the facilities we had at that time, the maximum flood of the Mississippi River was estimated at about 3,000,000 cubic feet per second at about the latitude of Red River Landing. That is the figure the present plans are based upon. Confining that water by levees over the long reach of river between Cairo to below New Orleans has caused the flood planes to be raised very much over what it was when the water could escape out into the lowlands on each side of the river and find its way through various routes to the sea. There is also a storage of water that occurs on these lowlands. The problem has been aggravated a great deal by the building of levees continuously all along the river. The basis of the present plan is to build good levees from Cape Giradeau down to near the mouth. They are to be strong levees, but not to be of extreme heights, to contain all the ordinary floods that come down the river. In case of an extraordinary flood, such as we had in 1927, the plan would allow the water to escape at such points as will enable it to find its way by separate routes to the sea. The Ohio River brings down the greatest aggravation of flood waters in the Mississippi Valley below its mouth. It is greater than that in the upper Mississippi and the Missouri. Now, it is practicable to contain the water above the mouth of the Arkansas under a levee system, but not so when you add the flood waters of the Arkansas to that which comes from above. The plan that is now adopted, which is based on the idea that it was impracticable to contain all the waters under a levee system below the mouth of the Arkansas, provides that some escape must be provided for those waters, and that was done. As you will see, beginning up at the mouth of the Ohio River here [indicating] you have a continuous levee line on the west side, or on this side [indicating] coming on down to the mouth of the St. Francis. There is a gap in there [indicating] coming on down to the mouth of the White River. Then, here [indicating] is the Arkansas River, and here the levees appear on both sides—that is, below Memphis all the way along. They continue on to Vicksburg and then, on the west side of the river [indicating], they extend all the way down except at and near the mouth of the Red River. The dark green shading that you see here [indicating] indicates water that is really back water which flowed from the main river, and which, under the present plan, we do not propose to reduce appreciably. This back water area [indicating] is in the vicinity of the mouth of the St. Francis, and this green area up here [indicating] is between the river and the bluffs in Tennessee and Kentucky. It is uneconomical, we think, to build levees on this side [indicating] in order to save the narrow strip of land between the river and the bluffs. That work could not be justified. When you get down to the Arkansas, the flood waters used to break over the south bank of the Arkansas, between Pine Bluff and the mouth, and flood all of this country to the south [indicating]. So, under the project, we increase the size of these levees here on the south bank of the Arkansas. We increase their size and strengthen them, making them secure all the way to Pine Bluff, along the south bank of the Arkansas River, but with no levees on the north bank. Just below the mouth of the Arkansas, the plan provides a place for escape, at a point called Cypress Creek. There has been no levee there until very recent years. The Mississippi River Commission was prevailed |