The Mississippi floods

The Mississippi river basin had two parts to it the upper basin and the lower basin. These two areas are located on the map shown above but Flooding was confined to the Upper Mississippi because the river channel widens considerably south of Thebes, and the Lower Mississippi received lower than average inflow from tributaries.

The floods were caused by a weather system coming in from the Gulf of Mexico. This front is shown in this diagram.

The Effects of The Floods were:

It was excellent for the farmers on the Mississippi flood plain. The floodwater made the soils again rich and fertile. However there were a variety of problems. In the Short term crop production dropped by up to 10%, A Quarter of a million people were left without clean water and 25,000 were actually evacuated. The floods also had economic effects as The river could not be used by Ships, So power stations which used the channel for transporting coal, had to plough into reserve supplies, across Illinois and Iowa isolated building went without power. |The transport problem cost almost $1 million per day and lasted 2 months.

Flood Prevention

The Floods could have been prevented using a number of schemes.

* They could use low cost easily implementable schemes of improving flood predications and warning schemes.

* There are also high cost schemes such as damming a river. This would hold back a large volume of water, making evaporation easy as well as controlling river flow.

* Creating Floodways, which would divert water away from large cities such as St. Louis.

* Increase the height of the Levees they already have on the Mississippi or dredge the current Levees to lower the height at which the river flows.

This graph shows the amount of water discharged at St Louis, Illinois(located on my map) during the Flood. The average for the year 2000 was 100,000. You can see on this graph that on the 8th it was 1 million!