Soil gone forever

Butch(OH)

Well-known Member
Ground behind me belongs to a BTO. A tree fell across this small run last summer and nothing got done about it. Now the creek has rerouted and thousands of tons of soil is gone forever. Removing the tree would have been a smart move eh? Guess when A person has thousands to look after he cant properly look after all of it?? I dont have a stick in this fire but kinda sickening to look at every day.

The tree across the run
<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto12390.jpg"/>

Looking up stream 6' of dirt missing between me and the elkhound
<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto12391.jpg"/>

And looking downstream from the same spot
<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto12392.jpg"/>

The creek now run out in the field
<image src="http://forums.yesterdaystractors.com/photos/mvphoto12393.jpg"/>
 
I understand your quiet, from a distance, frustration.

On the other hand, some Ecco environmentalists would say we should not touch the trees, let nature dow hat it does. And be all up in arms if a fella tries to take some wood out of a stream.

This is one of those deals you can't win at, stacked deck against a person.

Paul
 
That's similar to what I was gonna say. Not defending what happened,but nature,left to its own devices,would have done the same thing.
 
Now if we get the corp to stop dumping your soil off the edge of the continental shelf it might not be a total loss.



a261310.jpg
 
It's not always the bto .My current renter is big time and previously i had small . It's in the little things this one cuts the waterways flat in the fall reason being water will flow on them versus going down the edge. Some of these farms around me have been disced flat over the years with new tillage and planters a rough surface is not bad. My place has less erosion then the amish neighbor he has ditches over two feet deep and mud slicks over a quarter mile long and onto the road. I believed as you did till i got proven wrong.
 
Unless it infringes on you I wouldn't worry about it. Assuming you are like me I have enough to worry about, don't need to be worrying about what the neighbors are doing too.
 
John, I was looking at that just the other day. Wondering how many EONs back your southern coast was even across E to W?
 
The Mississippi river as we know it is 7000 to 10000 years old.
The end of the last ice age.

Here is a picture of the delta.
Yes they are guessing because people were not here to see it.
But extensive studies have been done on the subject.
Also notice the delta has been building from 4000 to 1000 years ago.
Now for the last 1000 years it has been going backwards.


a261963.jpg
 
Thank you John for that bit of research. My take is that the shrinking is not really shrinking, but being covered up by the oceans-gulf rising due to the current earth's cycling as it has done for millions (I guess) of years. In that regard, I wonder how Miami, to name a waterfront city, is doing? Didn't mean to bring this into a politically correct debate thing but the land is still there, just getting covered up and somehow that happened.....I vote for evolution.
 
Mark this is a subject that while it may be boring to others I could talk about it for days.
Maybe if more people knew the facts they would understand the subject better.

While the oceans have been rising for the past 19,000 years that is a very slow process.
The coast line goes in and out as the ice ages pass due to water being trapped in ice.
The picture will show where the coast was 19,000 years ago.
It is covered by 120 meters (393 feet) of water now.


a262253.jpg



What I mostly show the picture for is so you can see how fast the sea floor goes from 60 meters to 120 meters to to 200 meters.
It also shows how close the present mouth of the Mississippi river is to this drop off.
Heck the deep water horizon drilling rig was 41 miles off the coast and in 5000 feet of water.

Now that we have established that lets go back to my original statement.
Stopping the corp of engineers from dumping the river off the continental shelf.

While we may be losing land from sea rise at a very slow rate we lose way more from subsidence and wave action from storms.
A few years ago Louisiana was losing a football field size piece of land every hour.
Today we have slowed that to a football field size piece of land every 100 minutes.
I am sure we can agree that the seas are not rising that fast.

While my last picture showed 1000 years lets narrow it down.
This was just 86 years ago.


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And another from 2 years ago.


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To make a long story short it all boils down to the Corp built a levee system to control the Mississippi 91 years ago in 1927.
Ever since then they have been fighting the river to stay on its present course and dumping all of the sediment that we use to build land off the continental shelf into very deep water where it does no good.

The "WHY" they do it is a highly debated subject in south Louisiana with many on each side.
It gets very political to debate the "WHY" so I will leave that for another day.

But the fact still stands we are losing land not because of sea rise but because of a levee.
 
Please excuse the spelling, done from memory of many 10's of years ago:

My aunt used to live on Elysian Fields Ave. in NOLA. She was very concerned about such in and around the city. I follow the Corps activities sometimes. Do remember the big bypass N. of NOLA into Ponchatrain and some problems with it. I agree the closeness and steepness of the C. shelf is interesting in itself.

Last 2 summers in high school I worked tugs and barges through the Plaquemine Locks. Reall the first summer, our tug had it's name all over the pilings on the Miss. side. Seems that sometime that spring, the pilot of the boat got up too much speed trying to fight the river and swing into the locks and missed horribly.

Today they seem to have converted it to a levee system and the locks are gone.
 
On "permission" and "forgiveness" I have lived a life of doing what needed to be done and if objections occurred, asking for forgiveness....which usually was a moot point. Asking for permission was a non-ending series of passing the buck as to why you shouldn't be doing what needed to be done.
 
Inlaws bought some lake front property. Some owners built bulkheads and some lay barren for years. Nature took a nasty toll on the undeveloped shoreline and all of it went into the lake and made what wasn't a very deep lake in the first place, much shallower.

Around here the Soil Conservation Service built a lot of dams on inlet streams to a water supply lake for the Dallas area (around me) to contain the silt from natural erosion and farming activities. They are maybe 50 years old and full of silt as designed.
 

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