Why Engineers Can't Control Rivers

💧 The unintended consequences of trying to change the course of rivers 💡 Go to https://brilliant.org/PracticalEngineering to get a 30-day free trial + the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription. See Part 1 of this series here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBivwxBgdPQ Huge thanks to the entire team at @emriver for hosting us! Watch this video ad-free on Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/practical-engineering-why-engineers-cant-control-rivers Signed copies of my book (pl

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this is the Old River control structure a relatively innocuous complex of floodgates and levees off the Mississippi River in Central Louisiana it was built in the 1950s to solve a serious problem typically Rivers only converge tributaries combine and coalesce as they move Downstream but the Mississippi River is not a typical River it actually has one place where it diverges into a second Channel a distributary named the Atchafalaya and in the early 1950s more and more water from the Mississippi River was flowing not Downstream to New Orleans in the main Channel but instead cutting over and into this alternate champ the Army Corps of Engineers knew that if they didn't act fast a huge portion of America's most significant River might change its path entirely so they built the Old River control structure which is basically a dam between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers with Gates that control how much water flows into each channel on the way to the Gulf of M