Riverspeak

The Mississippi is also linked to another, equally large body of language — one that only surfaces when the river overflows its natural boundaries and forces itself into places where it wasn’t expected before. This is the jargon of river control, which took a sudden, and unfortunate, leap into the spotlight recently.

The Mississippi is not just the river of “Huck Finn”: It’s a tremendously important and much-regulated commercial channel with an immense engineering apparatus to keep it under control. The failure — or potential failure — of some previously hidden complex technological system always reveals the language of that system to the general public: Remember the O-rings of the Challenger explosion? With the opening of the Morganza Spillway two weeks ago — for the first time since 1973 — these potamological (relating to the scientific study of rivers) words have spilled into our vocabularies, too.

The spillway (“a path designed to take away overflow safely”) was opened because the waters of the Mississippi are cresting at record highs, with a flow rate of 625,000 cubic feet per second, leading to worries that the river would overtop the levees that hold it back. The amount of water that the Army Corps of Engineers expects to flow past the barriers is the inundation estimate. Should the levees fail, especially on the west bank of the river, the Mississippi could leave the path it takes now — the one on which massive industries and the city of New Orleans both depend — and be captured by the Atchafalaya River, which offers it a faster, steeper shortcut to the Gulf of Mexico.

What’s stopping that from happening is the grandly named Old River Control Structure, a system of floodgates that has been keeping the Mississippi more or less in its place since 1963, despite Mark Twain’s assurance (in “Life on the Mississippi”) that “ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or define it, cannot say to it ‘Go here’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey.”