The Mississippi River Is Hiding Something Nobody Talks About...

There is a 1,500-foot concrete structure in the middle of nowhere in central Louisiana that almost nobody in America has heard of. It is staffed 24 hours a day by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. It has gates the size of office buildings. And the only thing it does is stop a river from changing course. In 1973, during a flood, that structure nearly failed. The foundation was permanently damaged. The design tolerance dropped from 37 feet to 22 feet. The Corps will not say, on the record, that the structure is unsafe. They will also not say, on the record, that it is safe. If it fails, somewhere in the next few decades, 70 percent of the Mississippi River will leave its current channel and divert down a smaller river called the Atchafalaya. Forty million Americans across four states will lose their drinking water. The largest tonnage port in the Western Hemisphere will silt up. New Orleans will lose its drinking water, its port, and its reason to exist — and it will happen in days, not years. That is fact number one. There are 29 more. In this video we are counting down 30 facts about the Mississippi River — a body of water so enormous that 41 percent of the contiguous United States drains through it, including parts of 31 states and two Canadian provinces. On the night of December 16th, 1811, an earthquake so powerful it rang church bells in Boston caused the Mississippi to briefly flow backwards. The same earthquakes dropped a section of Tennessee 20 feet into the earth and created a new lake overnight, drowning cypress forests where they stood. In 1927, during the worst flood in American history, the city of New Orleans dynamited its own levee to save itself — and deliberately drowned two parishes of mostly poor, mostly Black neighbors who had been promised compensation that never came. There is a 30,000-square-mile sediment cone in the Gulf of Mexico that is the Mississippi's accumulated runoff. There is a 7,000-square-mile dead zone where almost nothing can live. And there is a geological clock, ticking down on a cycle the river has run for the last 6,000 years, that says the current channel is overdue. Plus the day Mark Twain piloted a riverboat. The 145 levees that broke in a single flood season. The 200-mile-long natural logjam that took seven years of dynamite to clear. And the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which is still active today. We are Unhinged Earth. We change how you see places on Earth. New videos every week. If you have ever stood on the levee in Baton Rouge or New Orleans, tell me whether — when you looked at the river — it felt like something that was being held in place. Because it is. 🔔 Subscribe for more #MississippiRiver #OldRiverControl #GeographyFacts