Book Description

Excerpt from Rates of Sediment Production in Midwestern United States Sediment is a major problem in flood control in the Midwestern States. Although the concentrations of solid matter carried by streams in this region are not so high as in the West, still, because runoff is so much greater and because there are so many more facilities to be damaged by sediment in the densely populated Midwest, sediment causes large annual damages. The sediment loads carried by Midwestern streams have or should have a very significant influence on the location, design, and mainte nance of storage reservoirs for power, irrigation, flood control, water supply, silt control, and recreation, Deposition of coarse sediment on agricultural bottomlands causes serious loss of soil fertility. Many drainage enterprises in the Midwest are severely damaged each year or are costly to maintain because of silting of drainage ditches. Agricultural lands and some urban areas are being flooded more fre quently because of channel filling. Some bottomlands are being ren dered too swampy for cultivation. Large amounts of sediment are settling each year in the navigable channels of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and must be removed by dredging. Other types of sediment damage in this region include the killing of growing plants and lowering of the carrying capacity of pastures by deposition on the foliage, destruction of desirable species of fish and other wildlife, recreational losses because of turbidity and silt ing of beaches, bulking of flood flows, and deposition of sediment in houses, streets, machinery, and wells. In order to plan adequate measures for reducing these costly sediment damages, it is necessary to have reliable information on the sediment loads carried by streams in this region. This publication summarizes available records for the Midwestern States (upper Mississippi, Ohio and Great lakes drainage basins) in a form similar to that previously used for the Southwestern States An attempt has been made to compile, evaluate and translate into com parable units all of the data that are considered usable in estimating quantities of sediment carried by streams in this region. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.