Time could have changed the way engineering chore was handled

This is the final part of a series dealing with the 100-year anniversary of the completion of the dredging of the Yazoo Diversion Canal.

A century after dredging the Yazoo Diversion Canal was completed, engineers today say the project would still have been a giant one even if done again.

The only real difference would have been equipment, said Michael Logue, public affairs officer with the Vicksburg District Corps of Engineers.

From Vicksburg’s founding through the Civil War years, its Mississippi River frontage was its economic engine. That changed when Centennial Cutoff rerouted the river into its present course in 1876. In January 1903, the Corps completed the Yazoo Diversion Canal, returning water to the city’s commercial frontage and allowing development of the Vicksburg Harbor Industrial Park.

The project required a lot of planning, and a lot of work.

Interesting, Logue said, is that the Corps still has available cutterhead dredges similar to those used in the 1890s. They would, however, be augmented by modern draglines, bulldozers, scrapers, loaders and dump trucks.

The dredges of the 1890s were steam-driven, but it has been in only the last 15 or so years that some of the Corps’ dredges were converted from steam to diesel-electric power.

A large difference from the 1890s to the 1930s was how the Corps did the work. As it actually happened, the local engineer District hired labor instead of going to contractors in an effort to save time. If the work had been done later, Logue said, the District would likely have used contractors.

“I think that really pointed to the fact this was an emergency situation because we would only use hired labor in an emergency,” he said.

Another indicator of the emergency situation, Logue said, was that Maj. Joseph Willard, the District engineer from 1886 to 1899, had the authority to spend up to $400,000 a year on credit instead of having to wait for appropriations to come from Congress.

If the Centennial Cutoff, the natural phenomenon that moved the Mississippi River away from the front door of Vicksburg, had been delayed until the 1930s, there would have been a new political climate with which to deal.

The political and business leaders would have said, “Hey, if you are going to do this for the whole nation, what are you going to do to keep us from going down the tubes?” Logue said.

He said the Corps probably would have rerouted the Yazoo first and then made the cutoff, which was done by the Corps following the 1927 flood to speed water flowing down the river. This would have maintained a viable harbor at Vicksburg.

“I can see the leaders saying, We haven’t even gotten over the ’27 flood, and now we are in a depression and now you are going to come through here and cut our river off? I don’t think so,'” Logue said. “And who is even to say if that neck had been stabilized that might not have been a railroad route through there because there was no bridge.”

A delay to the 20th Century would have created even more complicated situations. In the 1890s, the environment probably was not considered at all and even by the 1930s, the environment would not have been given the attention it gets today.

As a result, Logue said, the next thing the Corps would have to do after drawing the plans and specifications would be to study what the impacts on the environment would be and write an environmental-impact statement. That would be followed by discussions and negotiations with conservation agencies and environmental groups on how any wildlife losses would be mitigated.

From start to finish, the project would probably take as long, he said. The actual work would probably take less time, but getting to that point would take longer because of the additional procedural steps.

The Flood Control Act of 1928 was passed in the wake of the devastating Flood of 1927. That disaster killed at least 250 people, cost the nation the equivalent of $ 5 billion in today’s money and covered the historic flood plain of the Mississippi on one side or the other of the river from Cairo, Ill., to the Gulf of Mexico. Part of what resulted from the act was a plan devised by Lt. Gen. Edgar Jadwin to increase the efficiency of the river’s channel to handle high water flows and to boost the speed at which those flows could be conducted to the Gulf. One of the features of Jadwin’s plan was to remove many of the sharp bends on the Mississippi River in order to shorten the river. Once all the cutoffs were made, the Mississippi was 152 miles shorter.

“When we got to the 1928 Flood Control Act and the Jadwin plan, the plan was to speed the runoff and part of that plan was … cutoffs,” Logue said. “If Vicksburg had not broken through at that point, it probably would have been part of the program.”

No matter when the diversion was done, Logue believed it would be routine excavation “Just digging dirt,” he said.

But whether the work took place in the late 19th Century, in the 20th Century or today, a canal to divert the Yazoo River to flow past Vicksburg would be a huge project, taking years of planning and construction.