99% Invisible - 221- America’s Last Top Model

Episode Date: July 20, 2016

In 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a scale model that could test flooding in all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi River. It would be a three-dimensional map of nearly half of the continental United … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1883, Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, published his memoir, Life on the Mississippi. In it, Twain describes his love for the Great River and how it captured his imagination from boyhood. In fact, the pen name Mark Twain is probably a reference to what a deckhand on a Mississippi riverboat would call out to indicate a depth of two vathos. These are recordings from a real steamboat worker from 1939. Twain. Twain would have heard this call many times. As a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. This was a job that required him to learn everything there is to know about the river.

That's Orion Kailoth. He's a reporter at New Orleans Public Radio. Working on steamboats, Twain would come to memorize every shawl, bend, rock, island, bluff-freef, wind-reaf, eddy, snag, sandbar, and he would learn how all those things changed when the river was high or when it was low, and calm breezes, high winds at night time and daytime. Twain wrote, The Face of the Water became a wonderful book. There never was a wonderful book written by a man. Mark Twain loved working on the river, but he found it came with a price.

As he gained knowledge about the workings of the Mississippi, he began to lose something too. His sense of wonder about the great river. Twain writes about this in his memoir. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river. But not everyone had such a complicated relationship with the river. For many people who lived near the Mississippi, it was simple.

The river was a force to be reckoned with. When you're talking about the Mississippi River, to me it's not something scenic. It's this great force of enormous power. This is John Barry, an expert on the river's history. He served on the levee board of New Orleans, and has written extensively about the Mississippi. And the thing to know about the river, especially back then, was that it flooded all the time. A river flood, or at least, on a flood like the Mississippi. You can see it coming for weeks.

You fight it for weeks. And in 1927, people knew the river was coming for them. For nine straight months, the middle of the country had been getting hit nearly non-stop with rain. And the previous winter, there had been tremendous snowfall upriver in Minnesota, which was now washing downstream. The levees were strained.

And in February of 1927, they started giving out. 27 flood was probably worse than Katrina. Roughly a million Americans, almost 1% of the entire population of the country at the time, were flooded out of their homes. That spring, 145 levees along the Lower River failed. 27,000 square miles across 10 states were put underwater. It's unclear how many people died, because for one thing, official counts didn't include black people.

But the death toll was likely upwards of a thousand. On April 30, 1927, then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover discussed the flood on a national radio broadcast. Everything humanly possible is being done by men of magnificent courage and skill. It is a battle against the oncoming rush. It is a great battle, which the engineers are directing. And you've got to remember, this was enormous news.

It dominated the front pages. Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic and the middle of the flood, that's the only thing that knocked it off the top of the news and after the flight, the flood was back on. In the wake of the flood, Congress essentially declared war on the Mississippi River by passing a law called the Flood Control Act of 1928. A part of the 28 act involves studying basically every major river basin. A river basin is all the land that water flows through on its way to a river. So for example, if it rains in South Dakota, anywhere in the whole state, that rain will eventually make its way to the Mississippi,

which means that South Dakota is part of the Mississippi River basin, even though it's actually pretty far from the Mississippi River. In 1928, Congress decided to study rivers and their basins, especially the Mississippi and its enormous basin, which includes more than 30 states. And not just study them, but also change them. The Flood Control Act charged the US Army Corps of Engineers with designing and executing a plan to corral and maneuver the Mississippi. To better manage its ebbs and flows so that future disasters could be averted. But the Army Corps of Engineers faced a dilemma. The river control system that they had been tasked with creating needed to be huge, much bigger than anything they'd ever built before, and they didn't want to just jump into building something until they

knew it would work. They started constructing scale models of different parts of the Mississippi River basin in order to understand the mechanics of the river. The earliest ones were just ditches cut into the dirt with water running through them. The models helped forecast flooding in St. Louis, the impact of a dam construction in Ohio, the workings of spillways in New Orleans and Florida. But the Army Corps of Engineers wanted a way to test the entire river system all at once, and so in 1941, they started building a model to represent all 1.25 million square

miles of the Mississippi River Basin. When you think of a scale model, you might be thinking of something you can peer into at a museum. Not so with this one. This would be bigger than anything that could ever fit into a display case. The Mississippi Basin model, located just outside of Jackson, Mississippi, is a scale replica of the entire basin region, an area that spans from Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains, nearly half of the continental United States.

I went out to see the model with a woman named Janey Vaughn. She used to work at the model as a technician before it was decommissioned in the early 90s. Janey showed me how to sneak in, right through a wall of poison ivy. And I just always assume that any snakes will, you know, kind of run off. We're also there with former project engineer Wayne O'Neill. I'm Wayne O'Neill, glad to meet you. Now that we've made it through the IV, we make our way to this enormous clearing. And this is the beautiful Mississippi River Basin, Mississippi Basin model. Wow.

In all its glory. Whoa. Ryan is looking down at a three-dimensional map, a completely man-made landscape pool of hills and ridges and a big winding riverbed. Every foot of the model represents 2,000 feet in the real world. If you take a good step, you step off a mile. It's hard to overstate how enormous this model is. It's about two and a half times the size of Disneyland, 125 city blocks.

I saw some pictures online, but this does not prepare you to see the thing. Yeah, it's awesome, isn't it? It's just awesome. You just can't take it all in at once. Janian Wayne tell me that you can really only see all the edges of it if you climb up this four-story observation tower. There's also a water tower looming above the model, with dozens of pipes shooting off in every direction into pump houses and spigots. These big hulking machines and strange looking instruments dot the landscape. And what they had envisioned when they built this, it was just fantastic.

Back when the model was operational, there were little signs for pretty much every town in the region. Mm-hmm. There would be one for Vicksburg and Rolling Fork and all along. every town in the region. The signs are gone now, but Jaini still knows the geography of this place by heart. We're around Baton Rouge, so you can go from Baton Rouge up to St. Louis in about 10 minutes. The Army Corps of Engineers started work on the Mississippi Basin Model in 1941, and at first they faced a massive labor shortage. The start of the model came by the Civil War II. No labor was available, everybody was off at war, there wasn't troops or people here to do it, so they built a build I became here to supply the labor.

German prisoners of war helped with every facet of the construction. And they did the groundwork and the topography layout and the drainage system for the model. By 1949 the model was ready. A staff of 600 engineers and technicians would calibrate the model by recreating past floods in the region. Then they'd forecast new floods. They would run thousands of gallons of water through the model, recording the water's height and movements.

After it was all done, they'd change a few variables and run it again. More standbags over. Here, open this spillway over there. They played around with the model, gathering data on how each piece of the river system affected the whole. Then, they could use that data to come up with better plans for the future, like they did in 1952, when council bluffs and su city Iowa were threatened with the flood. In 1952, the model predicted where the levees were going to overtop.

Over top as in where the water would spill over the levee. And so they ran the model night and day as they were fighting the flood. What they were doing is saying it's not going to overtop here. It'll overtop here, put your sandbags, put your work in this area. And it predicted stages within two tenths of a foot. Meaning the model mimicked the actual behavior

of the Mississippi to within inches. It was credited to save an over $50 million in damage in 52. That's about half a billion dollars in today's money. The Mississippi Basin model was amazingly accurate at dealing with these incredibly complex, hyper-specific problems. The model saved the government millions and millions of dollars while it was an operation and spared people from the kinds of disastrous flooding that had happened back in 1927. But 200 acres of pipes and pumps and machinery and earth movers and a staff of hundreds were expensive to maintain.

The cost got even harder to justify after the advent of the computer. In late 60s, early 70s, there was a big push to go into numerical models. And that means computers. Right. Math model. The numerical model, people and the core looked at the model, says, well, we don't need it anymore. Too expensive. Too expensive.

Gradually, the Mississippi Basin model lost its funding. We saw the handwriting on the wall and it was closing its down. The computer models weren't as good, but they were good enough and the Army Corps could not or would not pay for the gigantic river basin model anymore. The model was used in a diminished capacity until 1993 when it was closed for good. Today it's completely derelict. Damn this place is depressing. Didn't it?

Crap. Every time I come out here, it's worse. I know. There's a lot of labor. There's a lot of love and effort and went into this thing and it is just abandoned. I feel like if I was a teenager, this would be my number one come get high and get in trouble spot. Exactly.

Exactly. The pipes and the pump houses are all rotting and rusting away. And in the model, the earth and mud and water have all dried up. Now it's just a disheveled mess of concrete and wire mesh. I've seen the original design drawings of this place, those engineers were engineers. I would be doing good to sharpen their pencil. You know, the mines that came up with all those pieces of equipment,

with the knowledge they had in the 40s, and they're coming up with ways to protect people and make the stuff work. You just don't see engineering feats like that every day. Now, in a normal public radio story, this would be the part where we would be bonn the death of craftsmanship and remark on all the things we've lost by choosing virtual things over physical ones. But before you get too misty-eyed, you have to see where Jani von works now.

About two weeks after going to the Basin model, Ryan met Jani at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center. Erdick, for short, in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I keep forgetting that you actually work for the Army and like badge and the real deal. It's not a joke. Yeah. Walking around Erdick feels like being

on the back lot of a Hollywood studio. There's row after row of big hangers full of miniature landscapes. There's hangers over there, hangers over there, hangers with model and model and model and model and model just lined up. Engineers zip around in trucks and golf carts. They test all kinds of things here, including a few things that have nothing to do with water. In one hanger, I saw engineers developing a temporary airplane runway. They were driving over it with a modified dump truck on 14-foot tires to simulate the weight of a plane. But mostly, Erdick builds scale models of rivers and dams and water projects. I'll be at smaller, more manageable ones than the Mississippi model.

So we're looking at Bluestone Dam in Hinton, West Virginia. It's on the New River. A place that actually did flood recently. And the Army Corps' models helped to manage that flood. The Army Corps also uses the models as a public relations tool. The Corps invites people from local communities over to Erdick

so they can see how new projects like building new navigation channels or removing old dams will affect the area. Engineers at Erdick say they take community feedback and incorporate that into their designs. But here's the most surprising thing I learned about these physical models. The reason that engineers continue to rely on them is because today, in 2016, we still do not have the computers or the science to do all the things

that physical models can do. There's actually this realm of human knowledge and of physical behavior and how the earth works that we don't understand. This is Stanford Gibson, a senior hydraulic engineer for the Army Corps. This is a guy with a PhD and three masters degrees, and even the math he can do isn't sufficient to fully describe what happens in a river. I think that there needs to be a little bit of scientific humility to say, well, maybe

some of these processes are outside of our reach, or at least outside of the reach of our generation. Are we going to get there? Well, we'll get closer. Believe it or not, hydraulic engineering gets into some of the most complicated math there is. Allegedly, when Albert Einstein's son Hans that he wanted to study how sediment moves underwater, Einstein asked him why he wanted to work on something so complicated. The physics involved

happened on such a small scale that we still haven't built equations complex enough to capture them. And so Stanford Gibson, a world-class numerical modeler, is actually one of the most ardent supporters of physical modeling. Because a physical model doesn't require equations at all. The physical model will simulate the processes on its own. And even as Stanford Gibson develops new numerical models, the process is inherently tied to the natural world. When I started a new project, I go and I rent a kayak

and I float the river because there are too many processes that you don't understand that you can't represent in equations. For Stanford, the more time you spend on a river, the more you learn its secrets. Kind of like Mark Twain. And all those years he spent working on steamboats, learning to read the Mississippi, like a book. You know, did you ever read Mark Twain life on the Mississippi? I did. So you remember that whole, like, maybe a hundred pages near the beginning,

where he's talking about the Mississippi for him was, like this magical, mystical thing, imbued with mystery, and that once he learned the river, that was lost to him forever. I remember that moment exactly because that is exactly not my experience of science. The idea that science demystifies the world, I just don't understand that.

I feel like the kind of deeper down the scientific rabbit hole I go, the bigger and grander and more magical the world seems. And the same goes for going down the scientific rabbit hole I go, the bigger and grander and more magical the world seems. And the same goes for going down the rabbit holes of history, and engineering, and mathematics, and design. If there's one thing I believe more than anything, is that knowledge creates wonder. 99% invisible was produced this week by Ryan Kyl, Sam Greenspan, and Delaney Hall, Wissery Fusef, Katie Mingle, Kurt Kohlstedt, Average Truffleman, and me Roman Mars.

Mark Twain was played by Ken Toich and Herbert Hoover Wissery Fusef. Allow the music in this episode came from some of our favorite favorite musicians, including Lullatone, Melodium, and Okakumi. You can get a full list at 99pi.org. This episode is part of PRX's Stories in Science Project, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to enhance public understanding of science, technology, and economic performance.

We are a project of 91.7K ALW San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook. All of us are on Twitter, Instagram and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible. You must go to 99pi.org. Radio tapio.

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