Review by Booklist Review
Discussions of America's crumbling infrastructure don't often consider the country's waterways.This book looks at the Mississippi Basin, an area that stretches from Montana to New York covering the Midwest and the mid-South. Journalist and documentary filmmaker Kelley talks to farmers who have been flooded out on the Missouri River, and to workers trying to maintain old Mississippi River lock and dam systems that are failing. America's great rivers are still important roadways for trade; if locks and dams fail, the economy suffers. Kelley continues to the Mississippi Delta, and discovers that increased rainfall is not the sole cause of more flooding; old levees are too narrow and cannot accommodate changes in higher flood stages. In fact, levee systems have been shown to exacerbate flooding. Those who know these rivers understand that holding back the water is an exercise in hubris. Nature always wins in the end. Kelley's book ends with a nod to Dutch "pragmatic and holistic" water management. A sweeping examination of geology, geography, social history, and economics, delivered in readable fashion.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Kelley debuts with an illuminating look at the people and policies working to tame America's rivers. Kelley's focus is on the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers, and the challenges facing the Army Corps of Engineers as the rivers change and as the dams, dikes, and levees designed to keep them in place become obsolete. "A long line of American leaders from both parties have lacked the will, power, or imagination to build what the country needs," Kelley writes, and traces policies from an 1824 bill that expanded the Corps' authority to Trump's unrealized promise to spend billions on infrastructure. Kelley introduces such players as Luther Helland, the master of the "most decrepit" lock and dam in the U.S., built on the Ohio River in 1929; Lester Goodin, a fifth-generation farmer who made use of a breached levee to grow trees along the Mississippi; and Mitch Jurisich, an oysterman in Louisiana who worries he'll lose his business if the Mississippi is diverted to prevent coastal erosion. Along with the meticulous reporting and insightful analysis, Kelley considers a series of remedies, including some drawn from successful flood control programs in the Netherlands. Anyone concerned with the myriad issues surrounding the manipulation of waterways will want to take a look. Renee Zuckerbrot, Massie & McQuilkin. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Kelley examines navigation along the Mississippi River and its tributaries (primarily the Missouri and Ohio Rivers) in the central United States. His book is a sobering tour of aging infrastructure built under different circumstances in the first half of the 20th century. Outdated levees, dams, and locks are a tragedy waiting to happen, he predicts. Kelley speaks with people invested in the success of these structures, from farmers to barge masters to civil engineers. The author also tells how Indigenous peoples are disproportionally affected by natural and infrastructure disasters. The interviews with the book's subjects bring to life the problems they face and the balancing acts they engage in. Farmers need the rich soil that is deposited during controlled floods, but the volume of these floods has dramatically increased with climate change. Cities along these rivers are partly built on flood plains, which makes residents in those areas extremely vulnerable. The commerce along the rivers is essential to the U.S. economy, so civil engineers juggle limited funding and changing dynamics as they struggle to keep rivers controlled and navigable. Cities in the Mississippi Delta in Louisiana illustrate the inexorable changes wrought by nature. Kelley also compares water management in the U.S. and the Netherlands. VERDICT Kelley's engaging work will draw in those interested in personal stories of the effects of climate change, and use of natural resources.--Caren Nichter, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A gimlet-eyed look at America's rapidly deteriorating riparian infrastructure. In the days of Lewis and Clark, writes freelance journalist Kelley, the sight of the Missouri River in seasonal flood, overspilling its banks and "spreading out to fill its floodplain," would have seemed entirely natural. Their successors in the Army Corps of Engineers took a dim view of rivers doing their own thing, though, and over time the nation has invested trillions of dollars in efforts to control them, from huge dams to the extensive levee system along the lower Mississippi. These structures are now crumbling, and although the Trump administration talked a big game about investing in infrastructure, it was consistently sidetracked by diversions of the president's own making--the testimony of James Comey on Russian involvement in the 2016 election, for instance, overshadowing a promise to ease regulations on coal and boost the barge industry. The professional organization of civil engineers rates the nation's dams at a D, identifying more than 15,500 as being of "high-hazard potential"--i.e., likely to cause deaths if they failed. Of a critically important lock on the Ohio River, its manager sighs, "The lock is kept going with all the bubble gum and duct tape we've got left." Meanwhile, even as the Corps of Engineers negotiates new spillways and scrambles to keep up with existing structures, nature works to thwart their efforts. For example, a projected plan to divert the Mississippi to Louisiana's Barataria Bay would kill some of the state's most lucrative oyster beds and a resident dolphin population--all in service of trying to keep New Orleans from going underwater, which seems destined to happen anyway, with a "new shoreline…around the latitude of Baton Rouge and the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain." Kelley concludes with an exhortation to develop "a basin-based approach" to river management while there's still a little time left. Solid journalism on a pressing problem that is likely to get far worse, and soon. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
