The furthest along of the man-made crevasses is a project known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The diversion will be six hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep and lined with enough concrete and riprap to pave over Greenwich Village.
It will start on the west bank of the Mississippi, some thirty-five miles upriver of Buras, then, in evident defiance of hydrology, run in a perfectly straight line due west for two and a half miles, to Barataria Bay. When it’s operating at maximum capacity, some seventy-five thousand cubic feet of water will pass through it every second. In terms of flow, this will make it the twelfth-largest river in the United States. (For comparison’s sake, the Hudson River’s average flow is twenty thousand cubic feet per second.) Nothing quite like it has ever been attempted before.
