Environmental Enhancement of Infrastructure
Regulating Works Middle Mississippi River, Missouri and Illinois, United States
Designing innovative river-training structures to achieve multiple benefits. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)–St. Louis District has a congressional mandate to maintain a safe and dependable navigation channel 2.7 meters deep and 91.4 meters wide, with more provided in bends, between the Mississippi River’s confluence with the Missouri River north of St. Louis, Missouri, and its confluence with the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois. The district achieves this mandate through a combination of rivertraining structures, revetments, and removing rock obstructions from the bottom of the channel. By combining stakeholder feedback with numerical and physical modeling in an iterative design development framework, the St. Louis District has designed and constructed many innovative dike and revetment projects that ensure a sustainable navigation channel while maximizing social and economic benefits and creating diverse natural habitat. They successfully collaborated with local stakeholders for their project designs, ensuring understanding and agreement in the surrounding community, a process for which the physical models proved especially effective. The end result is a navigation channel sustained by river-training structures that provide additional value beyond conventional structures.
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