The Disappearing River: Infrastructural Desire in New Orleans

1920, they saw a peculiar front page headline: “NEW ORLEANS BUILDS OWN UNDERGROUND RIVER: Great Siphon Under Industrial Canal Solves Drainage Problem” (see figure 2.1). Officials at the Port of New Orleans were eager to highlight the completion of their muchtouted but already problemplagued drainage siphon. After years of engineering setbacks, neighborhoods being flooded by raw sewage, and financial scandals surrounding the Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor project, the maritime elite mobilized the local press to trumpet the huge concrete tube that was supposedly poised to resolve a major infrastructural contradiction: the right of way for the port’s new shipping canal happened to cross precisely at the point where the city’s immense drainage volume reached its site of “final disposal” in a small tidal creek called Bayou Bienvenue. In the mercurial waterways and swampy soils of the continent’s largest river delta, port engineers poured concrete in the deepest open excavation in the history of human settlement in the Mississippi Delta— over eighteen meters below sea level. This would be a difficult endeavor even for contemporary engineers, as the soil at those depths is a mucky mix of quicksand, water, and highly rotresistant bald cypress forests buried by ancient floods. During the winter of 1919, dredging machines were shattered and costs soared as layer upon layer of ancient forests were dug, sucked, chopped, and dynamited out of the way by the labor gangs. Deeper still, engineers found layers of fine riverine sediments, hardened sand, and seashells where an ancient shoreline extended. One port official kept a pile of the primeval shells on his desk to illustrate the geologically epic scale of the project. A local journalist who often doubled as the port’s foremost advocate and mouthpiece explained to the public what was implied in the simultaneous completion of the 2 The Disappearing River: Infrastructural Desire in New Orleans