Forensic Engineering - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 187

earthen redoubts around Breed's Hill and Bunker Hill, which helped to repel a British
attack. As the Revolutionary War intensified, the engineers played crucial roles in build-
ing defenses and bridges during some of the most closely fought battles, including the
pivotal Battle of Saratoga in 1777, and the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the last major
battle of the war.
In 1802, Congress officially designated the US Army Corps of Engineers, which was
directed to build a new military academy at West Point, on the banks of the Hudson, a
few miles upriver from New York City. The Corps literally laid the foundations for the
Academy there, and for the next sixty-two years the West Point superintendent was al-
ways an engineering officer.
From the start, politicians demanded that the Corps contribute to both military pro-
jects and works “of a civil nature.” Although the Corps built roads, buildings, and parks,
many of its projects have been focused on waterways. The Corps built lighthouses, jet-
ties, harbors, navigational channels, bridges, and coastal fortifications—most notably
the naval bases at Norfolk, Virginia, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Leading up to the War
of 1812, the Corps fortified New York Harbor and constructed the eleven-pointed fort
that now serves as the base of the Statue of Liberty, which helped to convince the British
navy not to attack the city.
Congress expanded the Corps's portfolio in 1826 with new legislation that author-
ized engineering officers to survey, clean up, and deepen rivers and to make improve-
ments to American harbors. Corps engineers developed innovative methods to remove
fallen trees and hazardous sandbars from the Ohio River; in the 1870s, the Corps com-
missioned the nation's first hydraulic dredges and built a system of dams and locks on
the Ohio. During the nineteenth century, the Corps undertook the first significant sur-
veys of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Delta.
The Corps first addressed the risks of flooding in 1850, when a group of Southern
congressmen lobbied for federal assistance to defend their states after severe flooding in
1849 and 1850 by the Mississippi River. Ever since then, the Corps has been bound in a
love-hate relationship with the Big Muddy.
he Mississippi has the third-largest drainage basin in the world (after the Amazon
and the Congo Rivers), which encompasses 1.245 million square miles. The basin draws
water from an area stretching from Montana to New York, and funnels it down to a
spout that empties into the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans.
In 1850, the Corps undertook a survey of the Mississippi Delta near New Orleans.
Two engineers—Captain Andrew Humphreys and Second Lieutenant Henry Ab-
bot—produced the “Report Upon the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River”
(known as “the Humphreys-Abbot report”) in 1861, which, despite a few technical mis-
takes, was a crucial document in the development of river engineering as a discipline.